In Jerome Robbins’s “Glass Pieces,” performed for the first time by the Australian Ballet, principal couple Robyn Hendricks and Maxim Zenin captivate. As they roll their upper bodies over their legs in a wide, deep fourth position plié, they fold their arms around their torsos. Together, their upper bodies bob up and down, as if in exaggerated, synchronised breath or in water, their bodies responding to the currents around them. Behind them, against a blue backdrop, a line of dancers in silhouette appear as a moving frieze. My eyes leap between Hendricks and Zenin’s pas de deux and the thread of dancers. In profile, knees bent as they progress across the stage, the effect of these two distinct visuals is breathtaking. As every second dancer peels off and moves down the line, resuming their place in the sequence, I am aware that to see it all, similar to Blake’s kestrel, is an impossibility. For though things are pared back in all three works, this rarely means that everything can be seen all at once. 

Which is where I land, as I leave the theatre. Yearning to have been able to pause long enough to have seen it all, but aware that this layered and refracted view is also its strength and beauty. Ever changing, ever reinventing itself, a diversity of viewpoints.