Queensland Ballet, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, April 1. The second act of Liam Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins with deliciously controlled chaos. At the behest of Oberon, lord of the forest and fairies, Puck has got busy with magic love dust. The result is instantaneous passion for whoever is first seen, complicated by…
About last week … March 26-April 1
A CLASH of ballet opening nights saw Queensland Ballet’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake go head to head – well, from my perspective. They were in different cities at the time. For reasons both artistic and logistical, I went to the first performance of Dream in Brisbane on April 1…
About last week … March 18-25
British director Matthew Warchus had two musicals open within about four months of one another. One was Matilda the Musical, the Royal Shakespeare Company production that premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon in November 2010 before opening in the West End in October the following year; and Ghost the Musical, based on the popular 1990 film, which started…
About last week … March 10-17
I STARTED this blog in January 2013, not long after retiring from a 25-year career at The Australian spent largely in the arts, writing, editing and reviewing. I’d been writing and reviewing for quite a while before that, and while the work wasn’t quite so intensive in the early days, I did see a lot…
Liam Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream arrives in Brisbane
There wouldn’t be too many 29-year-old men who know exactly where they are going to be in five years. Not in a general sense, as in being pretty sure about being promoted, or settling down with a partner and children, but precisely, literally. As in a date, a place, a specific task. Liam Scarlett does. We…
Daniel Gaudiello exits The Australian Ballet
When The Australian Ballet stages Stephen Baynes’s traditional Swan Lake in Sydney from April 1 for 21 performances it will field six couples in the leading roles of Odette-Odile and Siegfried. One of those couples was to have been senior artist Natasha Kusch with principal Daniel Gaudiello, a partnership that promised a great deal. Kusch,…
HUANG YI & KUKA
Seymour Centre, Sydney, March 16. CAN a robot dance? It can move, of course, doing whatever its programmer has decided upon and is able to achieve technically, but is that movement dancing? And do we express the title of the work as Huang Yi & Kuka or HUANG YI & KUKA? The first implies a…
80 Minutes No Interval, Swansong
Old Fitzroy Theatre, March 15 “A SHORT show’s a good show,” critics carol to one another, pleased to discover that what we’re about to see will all be over in 60 minutes, 70 minutes, 80 or perhaps 90, straight through. One hundred minutes is usually as long as it gets without an interval, although at…
Vitesse
The Australian Ballet, State Theatre, Melbourne, March 11. VITESSE presents three certified hits from three of the biggest names in contemporary ballet and turns the dial up as the evening progresses. It starts with one of Jiří Kylián’s mysterious appeals to the heart, takes a charge through the cerebral and physical complexities of William Forsythe…
Nelken
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Adelaide Festival, March 9. Peter Pabst’s set for Nelken is one of the most beautiful created for any theatrical event. A dense field of thousands of silk carnations in several shades of pink covers the stage, ravishing in its simplicity and effect. It is absolutely lovely, but disconcerting too. A dance…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 