For the Sydney Festival, Seymour Centre, Sydney, January 11. The flick of a long rope sends energy snaking through it. It passes a man standing uneasily in the centre of the stage and his head recoils in response. Later, all seven performers in Spectra link arms and undulate them as if possessed of a single…
Tag: Sydney Festival
Nude Live at the Sydney Festival
Sydney Dance Company in association with the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, January 7. There are a few housekeeping rules to absorb before going downstairs to view the dance work Nude Live among the Picassos, Bacons, J.M.W. Turners and Cindy Shermans that are part of the Nude: Art from the Tate collection show at the…
Meow Meow’s Little Mermaid
Sydney Festival, January 8. The Hans Christian Andersen tale on which Meow Meow has based her new show is typically gruesome: an innocent young creature gladly endures unspeakable agonies in order to be close to Prince Right, only to see him promptly marry someone else. In an interview in November 2011, with Steve Dow, she…
Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich
Sydney Opera House, January 9. In 1999 Jack Anderson reviewed Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich for The New York Times, reporting that Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker had “recently announced her wish to retire it from her repertory”. Fortunately she changed her mind. Fase has not only continued to be…
The festive season
THE last crumbs of Christmas cake have scarcely been brushed from the lips, the last Champagne bottles are not yet in the recycling bin and New Year’s resolutions are still full of shiny potential. ‘Tis the season for rest, recreation, family and friends. Or, for those of us whose calendars are ruled not by the…
Thrills and spills: the year in dance
We’ll get to the year’s most interesting work and dancers shortly but 2015 was also notable for offstage developments, particularly at Australia’s three leading classical companies, The Australian Ballet, Queensland Ballet and West Australian Ballet. So let’s begin there. OFFSTAGE The national company At The Australian Ballet, David McAllister became the company’s longest-serving artistic director, surpassing…
In which I fail to stop my list at 10
THIS year I saw more than 200 performances and, over the past week or so, have written about the people, plays, operas, dance works and musicals that spoke to me most strongly. Now I cull the list to 14 – just because that’s how it turned out – and a supplementary, the last being something…
Top 10 in dance for 2014
DANCE is my great passion but this year there wasn’t a huge amount to bowl me over.Certainly I saw plenty of fine dancing – when does one not? – but in classical ballet there were few new works of substance. Well, none actually. There were pleasing new versions of existing ballets, although they didn’t quite…
Dance at the Sydney Festival
Am I, Shaun Parker & Company, January 9; Dido & Aeneas, Sasha Waltz & Guests, January 16; Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku, January 17; Forklift, KAGE, January 18 THE Sydney Festival’s dance program was relatively low-key but had an interesting range, from the large-scale centrepiece Dido & Aeneas from Sasha Waltz & Guests to the intimacy and…
Oedipus Schmoedipus
Belvoir, January 15 FOR each performance of the utterly baffling theatre work that is Oedipus Schmoedipus, two dozen volunteers are recruited to perform in the piece. As it turns out they are responsible for a good half of the action, so that was a pretty good wheeze on the part of creators Zoe Coombs Marr,…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 