Kitty McNamee, Shining a Light
It’s not every contemporary choreographer who is able to cross over into directing large-scale opera. But that’s precisely what Kitty McNamee has done.
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Just as the iconic 1973 film transferred stage designs to film, and the choreography “from a stage setting to a film setting [to] let the camera tell the story,”[1] The Australian Ballet have transferred the energy and humour of the film to the stage once more. As befits a company’s 60th anniversary, transplanting Rudolf Nureyev and Robert Helpmann’s “Don Quixote” from screen to stage 50 years later, called, of course, for a repolish of colour, as all tributes to legacy should. And so, to do justice to both anniversaries, as artistic director David Hallberg introduced, this rendition connects Nureyev’s “original stage choreography with the sets and costumes Barry Kay created for the film,”[2] working from Kay’s unfinished sketches from the 1980s for a redesign to archival footage, and the original film set model.
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Ako Kondo in “Don Quixote.” Photograph by Rainee Lantry
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It’s not every contemporary choreographer who is able to cross over into directing large-scale opera. But that’s precisely what Kitty McNamee has done.
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