Yang Liping Contemporary Dance. Brisbane Festival, September 27. Melbourne Festival until October 8. Yang Liping’s exquisite Under Siege is like the richest of sauces, distilled and reduced until only the essentials remain. The setting is China about 2000 years ago as one dynasty, the Han, bloodily replaces another. Yang’s episodic, impressionistic work strips away the immensely…
Category: Dance
Together Live 2017
Sydney City Youth Ballet with the SYO Philharmonic. The Concourse, Chatswood, Sydney. September 23. The room is always full of hope and desire when student performers take to the stage, particularly if they are dancers or classical musicians. Some will have started as young as four or five and certainly by eight or nine. In…
The Great Gatsby, West Australian Ballet
His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, September 14. Northern Ballet’s artistic director David Nixon is an old and highly successful hand at creating narrative ballets but he gave himself a tough assignment with this one. His 2013 dance translation of The Great Gatsby is entirely faithful to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best novel while at the same time…
Swan Lake/Loch na hEala
Teac Damsa, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, August 30. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Swan Lake is unsparingly black in so many ways, starting with its indelible image of a near-naked, bleating man tethered to a block of concrete. The people in this midlands Irish community are damaged, the humour plentiful but grim and the prospects grimmer. “Nature…
New era at RNZB
The question had to be asked. Is Patricia Barker at Royal New Zealand Ballet for the long haul? Her predecessor but one as artistic director, fellow American Ethan Stiefel, saw out his three-year contract but decided not to renew. Barker’s immediate predecessor, Francesco Ventriglia, announced his resignation last November only two years into his tenure…
Romeo and Juliet, RNZB
St James Theatre, Wellington, August 16. Francesco Ventriglia was artistic director of Royal New Zealand Ballet when he proposed making a new Romeo and Juliet to replace Christopher Hampson’s highly regarded version, made in 2003 to mark RNZB’s 50th anniversary and revived for four more seasons. Ventriglia’s tenure didn’t quite work out as planned and…
Jacqueline Dark: Pinning Clouds
Anyone expecting a conventional crossover disc from mezzo Jacqueline Dark hasn’t been paying attention. In recent years Dark’s career has ranged far and wide. Few singers, one ventures, would have followed a year as the Abbess in The Sound of Music with Fricka in Opera Australia’s Melbourne Ring cycle and then, just to mix things…
The Winter’s Tale, The Royal Ballet
Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, July 5. The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s wondrously strange, knotty late works. The pitfalls are many but so are the rewards. Compassion, contrition, forgiveness for great wrongs and reconciliation are its towering themes. Dance gives direct access to such heart-stirring emotions, or does at its best….
Bennelong, Bangarra Dance Theatre
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, July 1. In Mathinna (2008) and Patyegarang (2014), Bangarra Dance Theatre’s artistic director, Stephen Page, shone a light on individual First Nations stories that may otherwise have stayed hidden from general view and certainly been seen only from a colonial perspective. Bennelong adds another important work to this growing body…
Woolf Works, The Royal Ballet
Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, June 29. Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works is a monumental act of artistic daring, claiming for dance the right, and the ability, to bring one of the great voices in English literature to the stage. The translation from printed word to wordless movement is of necessity very free but…
