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Graeme Murphy's Swan Lake
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Of a Feather

If this work were a postcard I found whilst searching for collage material, I would see no room left in foreground, middle ground or background for me to play with. The scene is set, rendered perfect. Move on, it would say—for what can you add to what is already complete? What is already done? If you wanted to learn more of “Swan Lake,” is there more to glean here that you cannot already learn in reading about the ballet, or listening to the choreographer Graeme Murphy and creative associate Janet Vernon speak about their work in interview? Or better still,...

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Bella Figura
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Bella Figura

I read ballet through the prism of art, my background training. And it is by holding this prism before your eyes that I will take you with me, beginning with George Balanchine.

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Finding Your Inner Monster
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Finding Your Inner Monster

Monstrous is misshapen. It is disgusting and ghastly. It is hideous and grotesque. The opposite of lovely—any thesaurus can give you a list longer than a fiend’s tale of words to describe a creature ugly, malformed, repulsive, repellent and horrifying.

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Soo Yeun You
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Ritual & Dance

On a warm March evening, myself and a handful of other curious souls climbed the narrow steps of the aptly named Tower Theatre. The space is dark, and we are quiet as we enter, cloaked by the hush darkened spaces require. The theatre seats 100, but it feels smaller. It feels close and intimate. We negotiate the darkness and find a seat, production notes in hand. There is the feeling of having entered someplace else. We’ve left the theatre, as it were, and we are seeing what normally we would not be able to see: “[Gu:t] 굿 ”, conceived and...

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Chunky Move
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Dance, for the time being

Organs, teeth, flesh, bone. Part indestructible, part fallible. That the body is a marvellous tool none would deny. All this and more one knows and during a thirteen-day festival expects to see in someway put to the test. The body and its limits. The body and its brilliant workings. It can bend. It can turn into liquid silk. It can roll and it can convulse. It can operate as if possessed. Faces can be blank. They can be expressive. Fun can be poked, and the mirror proves always a fascination. Literally, in the sense of Anouk van Dijk’s new work...

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Ashley Dyer
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Where There's Smoke . . .

There are some nights when the weather plays its role as if part of the performance. This was the case one very hot eve, when I went to see Ashley Dyer’s “Life Support” at Dancehouse in Carlton North, on the first day of Dance Massive 2013. The idea of being trapped within a room that slowly grows airless as smoke fills and chokes, on such a close night seemed to work hand in glove. Waiting in the foyer, already a claustrophobic air. People fanned themselves with their Dance Massive programmes or whatever came to hand in futile bid to cool...

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Pierrot Lunaire
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

The Shock of the New

The history of art, music, ballet, opera, and literature is one dotted with the curious, bewildered, shocked receptions of the audience when faced with the new and the challenges this in turn presents. Springing to mind in a flash, the famous response “The Rite of Spring” received at its premiere on a warm spring evening in Paris in the year 1913. Igor Stravinsky’s rejection of conventional melody coupled with the abstract and convulsive dance movements of Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography presented the audience with a ‘prehistoric vision, confused, awe-inspiring, but true.’[note]Prince Peter Lieven, The Birth of the Ballet-Russes, trans. L. Zarine...

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Swan Lake
REVIEWS | Par Gracia Haby

Becoming Odette

It is circles I see, and always have, whenever I listen, and often I do, to Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” For me, one stimulates the other, and the composition upon every visit sets to the business of drawing its familiar beloved circles, from the large and sweeping to the tightly coiled. Melodic circles that anyone can hum or whistle, or with finger tap out on the table; such a union of the senses is what “Swan Lake” is for me. That is what I hear in the music, and see in the choreography, a melody and a romanticism impossible...

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Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard
Starry Nights

Beneath blue California skies, manicured trees, and the occasional hum of an overhead airplane, Tamara Rojo took the Frost Amphitheater stage at Stanford University to introduce herself as the new artistic director of San Francisco Ballet.

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