Matrix, Expressions Dance Company and Beijing Dance/LTDX

Works by Stephanie Lake and Ma Bo. Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, NSW, November 7. New works by Australia’s Stephanie Lake and China’s Ma Bo make up a double bill where similarities are much more obvious than differences. It’s not that the pieces look particularly alike (apart from an aspect of their endings) or have a…

New Breed, Sydney Dance Company

Carriageworks, Sydney, November 29. Who knew gloom could come in so many shades? This year’s New Breed program must have tested the ingenuity of Benjamin Cisterne, Sydney Dance Company’s go-to man for lighting design, but he came up trumps, magnificently meeting the challenge of finding four different ways of illuminating darkness. The program is curated…

Untamed: Sydney Dance Company

Wildebeest and Anima. Roslyn Packer Theatre Walsh Bay, Sydney, October 20. In the double bill Untamed, Gabrielle Nankivell’s Wildebeest and Rafael Bonachela’s Anima come at the same question – what is our true, essential nature? – from quite different perspectives. Nankivell sets humankind’s most primal impulses against the slick, guarded sophistications of modern life. The…

Triptych

Sydney Dance Company with ACO2 and Katie Noonan. Roslyn Packer Theatre Walsh Bay, Sydney, September 29. BENJAMIN Britten was in his 20s when he wrote the three works to which Rafael Bonachela responds so ardently in Triptych. Innocence, desire, joy, playfulness and sensuality all have their role in the music and the evocation of the…

Quintett, Frame of Mind

Sydney Theatre, March 9 and 10. IT was a great coup for Rafael Bonachela to secure William Forsythe’s Quintett for Sydney Dance Company. It is a jewel of the contemporary repertoire with so many facets and colours it could be seen again and again without exhausting its possibilities. And to see it danced as was…

Kusch joins the AB; Cubans come to Brisbane

AS I foreshadowed on December 15 on my Diary page, Queensland Ballet has lost one of its principal artists, Natasha Kusch, to The Australian Ballet. Kusch was with QB for less than 18 months after leaving the Vienna State Opera Ballet. She joins the AB as a senior artist. In a press statement released today…