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Dance Creation 2002
National Theatre, St Kilda, Victoria
Saturday, 28 September, 7:30pm
Reviewed by BLAZENKA BRYSHA • www.bbdance.com.au
It must have been daunting to be an entrant in Dance Creation 2002. First of all
there was the prize money of $5,000 (the Peggy van Praagh Award for non-professional
choreographers) and $10,000 (the Robert Helpmann Award for professional choreographers)
respectively, but that's only for the winner of each category.
Then there was the panel of adjudicators, which this time around could more accurately
be described as a pantheon of dance powerbrokers: Jenny Kinder, Head of the School
of Dance at the VCA; Marilyn Rowe OBE, Head of The Australian Ballet School; Francois
Klaus, Artistic Director of the Queensland Ballet; Danny Radojevic, Assistant Director
of The Australian Ballet; Robert Ray and Jonathan Taylor, choreographers; Garth Welch
AM, President of the National Board of the AICD; and Lee Christofis, Melbourne dance
critic for The Australian. The audience included a good dose of notables including
David McAllister, Artistic Director of The Australian Ballet, Hilary Crampton, dance
critic for The Age, Patricia Laughlin and Irina Kuzminsky from Dance Australia.
If ever you were to put your best foot forward, this was the night.
But the theatre is a fantastic place, a plane of transcended existence and once those
lights go down, it's show time! And what a fine show it turned out to be.
The entries in the Peggy van Praagh Award were featured first. Kristy Biggs'
Sam Sara (music Hans Zimmer The Gladiators -; The Battle) opened
the program. This was a neatly crafted, athletic work that progressed through various
phases signaled by lighting changes. The clear, bright lighting of the opening gave
way to intense red, which worked extremely well with the angular and flying moves
of the dancers as the score erupted in volcanic explosions of strings.
The elegiac final section with its deep blue lighting and literally up-lifting conclusion
was most impressive. A very high standard had been set. I couldn't help appreciating
the contribution of dancers Katy McCaw, Laura Matheson, Tessa Spowart, Jemma Cerlass-Brown,
Ayumi Kimura, Teagan Lowe, Chelsy Meiss, Chihiro Uchida, Erin Wheelan, April-Rose
Ferris, Rudy Hawkes, Brendan Bradshaw, and Cass Mortimereipper. Dressed in simple
leotards, they abandoned themselves to give a first class performance.
Lighting was integral to the over all quality achieved on the night and the work
of Sydney-based lighting designer Angus Denton deserves acknowledgement, as does
that of the rest of the production team: Charles Heathcote, production and stage
manager, and Tim Storey, audio technician and compare of the event. Their professional
input is invaluable.
The second item Amniosis, by Wendy Erickson, belonged more to
the cross-form theatre genre than dance as such. While it was definitely a movement
piece, it relied heavily on Sebastian Harris and Miles Mumford's electronic score
with its narrative voice-overs. One male in street dress and five figures in sheer,
puffy costumes covering their torsos, took us on an exploration of states and ideas.
Were the puffy things ideas, or were they part of an organism? Certainly, there was
a sense of organic interaction in the sequencing of their movements, both isolated
individual ones and their group mergings.
Their relationship with the lone man was also enigmatic. Pronouncements from the
voice- overs such as "In space there is nothingness and nothing is there"
and "You stand on stilts above a tiny saucer of desert" added to the provocative
dynamic of this creation, which I found refreshingly original. The featured dancers
were Lisa Shen, Daina Djekne, Nicholas Summerville, Andrew Watson, Jill Lister, and
Wendy Erickson. It would be good to know who designed those amazing costumes.
Tim O'Donnell's Reverberate was a riveting work, supposedly
about child abuse. This wasn't overtly apparent although the notion of an abusive
relationship between a man and a girl was strongly established at the start. The
girl's youth was highlighted by the recurring ensemble sequences in which she has
fun with her young, exuberant friends. The score (from Yahn Tiersen's Amélie)
also shifts from menacingly dramatic to the frivolity of that charming mix of fairground
music and piano accordion that traditionally evokes a Parisian sound.
This was an outstanding work and it didn't matter what you made of its narrative
because the fundamental message came through: that life can be good and that the
girl wasn't going to take the abuse any more. The performers were: Dana Stephensen,
Gabriella Raetz, Kristin Williams, Naomi Davies, Jessica Lewis, Tiffany Chiang, Rudy
Hawkes, Matthew Lehman, Reed Luplaw, Zac McAliece, Richard Porter, Nathan Sickluna,
Glyn Scott and Cass Mortimereipper. Encore.
Wet Sand by Elen David delighted with its inventiveness and
vitality. The dancers in this piece were: Jacqui Ison, Anthea Doropoulos, Danielle
Canaran, Adam Wheeler, Tom Lambert, Adelaide Williams, Kylie Fermor, Inge Gnatt,
Jacienta Hinton and Abbie Sherwood.
Apart from mucking about, quite literally, with wet sand, they were required to interpret
a gamut of demanding movements, especially of the miniature variety. There were a
lot of tiny steps and unusual gestures, such at the hands held pointing outwards
form the small of the back. Were these references to sylphs, or willis? The shrouding
of figures at one point suggested the latter. Carl Vine's Piano Concerto (2nd
movement) and Amon Tobin's Supermodified provided a rich score.
The work featured a bathtub as a prop and for me the highlight of the whole night
occurred when the dancer in the tub popped her head up as if emerging from water
and then delicately shook off invisible droplets with an exquisite tiny flick. Venus
emerging from the waves could not evoke a more moving moment of genesis. I liked
that.
The adjudicators must judge each work in its totality and Reverberate received
the Peggy van Praagh Award of $5,000.
But before any prizes were announced, the second leg of the heat had to be run.
Timothy Liam Brown, winner of the Peggy van Praagh Award in 2000, entered
Zenith in this year's competition. Using a seamlessly interwoven score
from three sources (Kodo, Kodo; Richard Horowitz, Three Seasons; Pan
Dun Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), Brown developed a beautifully crafted,
elegant dance piece. Deft groupings, lyrical gesture and carefully measured momentum
amounted to a pleasing totality. The white loose costumes, borrowing their line from
traditional Chinese two-piece outfits of shirt and pants, added a poetic lilt to
some of the more inventive poses sprinkled through the work. Clearly Brown has some
affinity with the subtleties of Asian aesthetics and that is an area that he should
draw on further.
His dancers on this occasion were: Nicole Ashby, Melissa Tattam, Amelia Walker, Phillip
Ambrose, Zachary Chant, Chantelle Kerr, Daniel Shepherd and Renee von Stein.
Brown is a choreographer of promise and Zenith deserves a place in the repertoire
of a professional company.
Marc Bogaert's Framing shared some strange parallels with Amniosis.
It used an ensemble (Daniel Convery, Nana Betchaku, Eleanor Campbell, Charlotte Curtin,
Kim McEachern, Eliza Mitchell, Tessa Morley, Emi Nakayama, Saya Kayabuta and Yuko
Yamamoto) featuring a central figure, who also happens to be male. The relationship
between the individual and ensemble is not one between people but rather ideas/concepts.
And, except for the giant empty picture frame used as a backdrop to this work, I
couldn't understand why it was called Framing. So, there was a sense of enigma
here, too.
But that's where the similarities stopped. Framing was strongly balletic in
the contemporary sense and connected powerfully with its score (Praga Kahn, FreaKezoids).
The conclusion, with the individual abandoning the ensemble and stepping up into
the frame, his naked back exposed, was a potent moment.
Matthew Thompson's Journey's End was the most structurally sophisticated
offering of the night. It made excellent use of its score (Steve Reich Triple
Quartet), particularly as it evoked the notion of journeying, which was largely
done in a literal way by dancers moving directionally across space.
It is a credit to both the work and its performers (Brett Smith, Elen David, Abbie
Sherwood, Tim Podesta, Haylee Gulliver and Nicole Malloy) that there was a much greater
sense of magnitude than you would normally achieve with only six dancers. No doubt
the work could be rearranged to accommodate the larger ensemble available to professional
companies.
The adjudicators selected Journey's End for the Robert Helpmann Award.
Although I am a member of the Dance Creation Committee and fully support any effort
to enhance opportunities for our dance artists, I don't particularly like the idea
of competitions.
So, sitting up the back of the National Theatre, enjoying the program, I couldn't
help noting the enthusiastic audience support given to every item. The event may
have been a competition, carrying hefty prizes, but here the spirit was one of warm
camaraderie.
When Tim Storey introduced the competing choreographers to the audience at the end
of the show, the cheering -; augmented by all the performers who had joined the audience
after finishing on stage -; was universal and ubiquitous. Earlier in the day, only
kilometers up the road, the Brisbane Lions and the Collingwood Magpies had fought
a fiercely close contest for that holiest of sporting grails, the AFL Grand Final
Cup. Dance Creation was also a close contest but here everyone was playing for the
same team -; Dance as a performing art. For that to exist, we need dancers, choreographers,
audiences, theatres and the funds to make it possible.
In announcing the adjudicators' verdicts, Danny Radojevic congratulated all participants,
extolling them to "Keep working, keep creating." David McAllister presented
the Robert Helpmann Award and the Peggy van Praagh Award was presented by Dame Margaret
Scott DBE (Chair, Dance Creation Committee and Victorian President, AICD).
Since its inception in 1996 as a bi-annual choreographic competition, Dance Creation
has given many choreographers the chance to show their work to a discerning audience
in optimal theatre surroundings. The event is organised by the Australian Institute
of Classical Dance, founded by Marilyn Jones OBE in 1991 following her receipt of
a Creative Artists Fellowship from the Australian Government. While the fellowships
were intended to recognize (with a cash endowment of $50,000) the contribution of
major established artists to our culture, Marilyn saw fit to use the opportunity
to extend her contribution even further, so she set up the AICD. Dance Creation is
just one of the AICD's many efforts in nurturing the development of dance.
The AICD runs on boundless generosity and that spirit characterizes Dance Creation.
The entire event is made possible by everyone donating their services: the dancers,
the choreographers, the Board and Committee members, the adjudicators and the production
staff. Every cent of all expenses, including the prizes, is raised by donation. The
National Theatre gives a rent discount and even the event's emblem - a pen and ink
drawing of a dancer bending backwards to leap up -; is a gift from the artist, Kelvin
Templeton. No government assistance of any kind is received. ENDS
Reviewed by BLAZENKA BRYSHA • www.bbdance.com.au
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