Melbourne International Arts Festival
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Reader Reviews: Batsheva Dance Company, The Schoenberg Ensemble, an oak tree & The Navigator
Photo: Gadi Dagon
Batsheva Dance Company
Three
Review by Erin Hutching
Batsheva Dance Company's Three demonstrates the dancers' skill with finesse and humour. When the show begins, extremely bright lights come up suddenly to reveal a stark grey courtyard-like set and the audience is confronted with about twenty five pairs of eyes. The dancers stand in formation across the stage, body positions neutral, eyes staring out. They remain standing this way for several moments and then suddenly disperse. This is an unexpected, attention-grabbing beginning to a piece in which the choreographer uses stillness and contrast as powerful weapons.
The work is divided into three parts. The first part is accompanied by Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations. The dancers return to the stage in turn alone or in pairs. Their movements are angular, jerky and at times awkward and are juxtaposed with the soft, fluid music. The audience is not allowed to just lose themselves in the dance, but we are jarred into paying attention to the interesting and at times amusing movements. The choreographer and the dancers clearly have a sense of humour about their work but at the same time you can see how serious and passionate they are about it. The dancers are charismatic and make all the moves look very easy although they clearly are not. They work best when they are dancing in pairs and can feed off each other's energy. When there is more than one place to look on the stage the audience is torn, not wanting to miss anything. But the choreography is considerate of this, and knows how many things can be happening at once before it becomes too many.
The three parts are broken up with an interlude where one dancer returns to the stage holding an old television screen on its side. He stands there emotionless, while on the screen is his face, which cuts in and out with deliberate bad editing. He tells us (on screen) about what is to come next. These bits are the perfect way to break up the dances and they give the audience some laughs as well as keeping them informed about what is coming. The face on the screen goes over the smallest details in an earnest way. The audience finds this hilarious. "The costumes in this part will be the same as in the last two parts, ‘Bellus' and ‘Humus'. Pay attention. There will be blackouts. The stage will be dark. Very dark ..."
I enjoy every part of the piece although I find that the middle section where the girls dance in a group goes on perhaps a little too long. However their timing and control as they move in unison is amazing to watch. Throughout the whole piece, every dancer knows exactly what every part of his or her body is doing at any given time, right down to their little toe.
The piece cumulates in ‘Secus', where all the dancers return to the stage once again individually or in pairs. The norms of traditional dance are subverted here, for example when two male dancers perform a very sexy ballroom dance which comments on the traditional male-female dynamic of dance. All the dancers return to the stage for the finale and they stand in three lines. At the head of each line, the dancer performs a move which is then copied by the two behind him or her as they come to the front in turn. After their move, the dancers go to the back of the line. Then the next dancer in each line performs another move, which is then copied, and so on. This goes on and we see dance moves that are skilful, creative, funny and just plain ridiculous. The dancers are at once confident and vulnerable.
It was an honour to see Batsheva Dance Company perform. Once you get used to their quirky, original movement style, your eyes are opened to all the things that dance can be - inspiring, humorous, exciting and original. They train in the movement language ‘Gaga' which was developed by their artistic director Ohad Naharin as a way to communicate with his dancers after he suffered a back injury and could not show them the choreography. This training is clearly developing in his dancers a trust and an enhanced sense of awareness of their bodies. If you are lucky enough to get the chance to see Batsheva Dance Company, don't miss it.
The Schönberg Ensemble
Review by Jez Hunghanfoo
Friday's concert by The Schönberg Ensemble was a surprising offering, showcasing the extraordinary technique, control and sense of adventure from this premier European group.
Under the baton of founding conductor Reinbert de Leeuw, The Schönberg Ensemble has played halls and festivals across the globe for over 30 years, branching out beyond their eponymous Arnold Schönberg to a broad repertoire of non-symphonic works.
Friday's program at Hamer Hall featured Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan in Uma Só Divina Linha and Mysteries of the Macabre. Hannigan's masterful and pure voice aligns superbly with the similar technical and aesthetic confidence of the Ensemble, and generated the highlight of the concert with the highly performative and mischievous Mysteries.
The evening opened with Australian composer Michael Smetanin's Micrographia, a dense, structural and measured exploration along chromatic lines, with a remarkable twin solo performance from percussionists Ger de Zeuuw and Joey Marijs, jointly attacking their marimba bare handed in a blend of surgical precision and martial energy.
The Ensemble was then joined by Hannigan for the first of her two solos in Jan van de Putte's Uma Só Divina Linha. Putte's piece showcases the remarkable control and restraint of the Ensemble and Hannigan as it builds from silence, through hushed breathed tones, generating palpable anticipation which transforms Hannigan's first, immaculately placed note into a cathartic and evocative moment. It is during this piece that the Ensemble and de Leeuw truly showcase their talent for imagery and performance, with a truly interactive partnership between soloist, conductor and Ensemble.
The second half of the evening further explored these strengths of the Ensemble, performing pieces by György Ligeti, a long time collaborator with the Ensemble. Although sharing a composer, these two pieces presented polar stylistic extremes. Kammerkonzert strode with a nervous and unsettled pace, with jittery strings and anxious woodwinds. The sound of the Ensemble can be described as cinematic in feel, with particularly vivid and bold dynamics and a sense of imagery not bound by traditional expectations of musical structure.
After the disciplined Kammerkonzert, the remarkable Hannigan appeared again, sneaking onto stage donned in a full-length leather coat and a dominatrix outfit (replete with ink-black wig) - a costume not easily imagined on an accomplished soprano, but pulled off with such attitude and performative ease. Hannigan strode around the stage, challenging the audience with physical presence and the sheer power and quality of her voice. Mysteries of the Macabre's score illustrated the scope of Hannigan's skills dragging her from guttural lows through to piercing, clarion highs. The Ensemble similarly raced through the score with vigour and an adroit playfulness - the disjointed and energetic sound punctuated with orchestra vocalisations (a hallmark of the evening) and a crowd favourite moment of the normally sombre de Leeuw having the conductor's score usurped by Hannigan, and de Leeuw later offering a deadpan comic exasperation.
The evening was a superb demonstration of The Schönberg Ensemble's deft musical skill and bold and imaginative approach to performance. De Leeuw's leadership of the Ensemble is marked by a ferocious attention to detail and precision, and a desire to explore the boundaries of contemporary musical expression. The Schönberg Ensemble's program at Melbourne Festival is an exciting and edgy one, and Friday's audience demonstrated their enthusiastic approval with ovation after ovation after ovation for these superb musicians.
Photo: Gadi Dagon
Batsheva Dance Company
Max
Review by Bron Batten
The dancers of the Batsheva Dance Company are like finely tuned instruments. Perfectly in sync with each other and their surroundings, they slice through space with pin point precision. But it isn't just technical proficiency that makes Batsheva so extraordinary. Artistic Director Ohad Naharin has introduced a form of training to the company called Gaga. Devised and developed by Naharin himself, Gaga is a method that informs the internal impulses of each performer. As a practice, it promotes new ways of perceiving and initiating movement, using awareness, sensation and experience as the primary motivators for expression.
This method makes Batsheva's Melbourne Festival performance Max a richly textured work. Choreographed by Naharin, Max is an exploration of pain and happiness. Fluid, agile movement is juxtaposed with inventive, frenetic, idiosyncratic gesture and the tension between these opposing points creates a fascinating movement dynamic.
The work begins with a stunning ensemble section, the dancers are perfectly in tune and collectively kinaesthetically aware. They don't so much perform the movement as sense it, and as a company they are an amazingly coherent whole. Highly physical and extremely challenging movement is effortlessly performed as every cell of their bodies is alive and aware. They are practically bursting with restrained passion and possess a deeply focused presence that places them in complete control of the material. The piece contains nothing superfluous as each movement is pared back to its essence, performed in immaculate unison. The refined, efficient movement reflects the appearance of the dancers themselves. Streamlined and strong but never forceful, they possess the stage and are mesmerising in their masterful display of physicality.
The dancers seemed to be using the Gaga method to navigate an internal score, letting sensation and imagination create tactile, external movement. While of course being performative, the dance isn't merely demonstrative as each gesture is imbued with inherent meaning.
The choreography is extremely articulate and precise. Each dancer is obviously immaculately trained, and balletic virtuosity is portrayed with the same impact as the slightest shift of weight or the smallest subtle nuance. A simple inclination of the head or the physical distance between each performer speaks volumes in terms of their relationship to each other and the space around them.
The performers seem to be searching for something, whether it is within themselves, from their surroundings or from each other. The piece displayed attempts at human connection, figures at odds with themselves and their environment.
The dancers break out into solos from group sections, creating dynamic opposition and while they dance beautifully as a company, each performer appeared inherently alone, on a solo journey within a collective experience.
Throughout the presentation of duets and solos, the performance remained egalitarian. No one dancer emerged as the star soloist or lead, making Max a truly ensemble piece.
Max contained a kind of distanced sensuality, as if Naharin has removed sections of the movement, leaving us only with the key moments. In this way it seemed as if the piece progressed in a series of snapshots. The dancers created space and stillness amongst the almost violent athleticism, allowing the images to breathe and expand through the use of tableau. This method reflected the structure of the piece itself, as sections were divided by blackouts, creating an episodic, almost filmic quality to the work.
Max is ambiguous enough to allow the audience space and time to reach their own conclusions and interpret the physical language through the filter of their own experience. It is an exciting contemporary work that explores the subjective realm of imagination and harnesses the power of some truly extraordinary dancers.
For more information about tonight's final performance of Max, visit the Festival's webpage.
Tim Crouch
an oak tree
Review by Rachel Purchase
In 2005 British actor and writer Tim Crouch first performed his piece an oak tree in the Edinburgh Festival. Since then, it has been performed all around the world and has finally made its way to Melbourne.
Although there are many unique and exciting things about this play, the most compelling is that each time it is performed a new actor steps in to play the role of Crouch's co-star. Furthermore, they have never laid eyes upon the script prior to the moment they are performing if before an audience. For its Melbourne International Arts Festival debut, the courageous actor who offered themself up for this scrutiny was Jane Turner, of televisions Kath and Kim fame.
The play's narrative centres on a stage hypnotist (Crouch) who has accidently killed a twelve year old girl in a road accident, and the girls father (in this case Turner). Their respective experiences of transformation through loss are hashed out, but what emerges as the strongest theme in this play is the power of suggestion. Crouch explores suggestion as a potent force in the lives of both protagonists, whilst simultaneously emphasising its importance as a theatrical convention.
As an audience member in the theatre, so much of what we use to discern and follow narrative is suggested rather than made real to us, and Crouch is pushing this idea to its boundaries. He does this in a myriad of ways, most obviously by asking us to believe that the guest actor is a six foot tall man, with a beard and blood shot eyes who has lost his daughter. While Jane Turner is none of these things, to the audience she becomes them through Crouch's suggestion, and of course, her own suggestion in the form of acting. He also uses a sparse set, assumedly to further the notion that pure suggestion, in theatrical terms text and performance, rather than demonstration, or indeed reality, is the stuff that imagery, drama and belief are made of. A call perhaps to examine the influence of suggestion in our own lives?
Let's forget reading between the lines for a moment, and focus on the lines themselves. The script. Fantastic! An original and harrowing tale told successfully in multiple voices, across various locations within space and time. an oak tree is a moving tale, made all the more so by watching the actor discover the sad story for the first time, with you. On more than one occasion, Turner was brought to tears as she read the words of her character, struggling with his fate. Turner was open and generous, at times bewildered, bringing a very real vulnerability and fear parallel with that of the character she was playing.
During its Festival run, an oak tree has guest starred Geoffrey Rush and Julia Zemiro and tonight's final performance features Kim Gyngell. Although one gets the sense that this is like watching a gladiator match, where one individual is thrown in the deep end and the drama is whether they live or die, in this instance freeze or flow, it is a guilty pleasure worth indulging in.
For more information about tonight's performance of an oak tree, visit the Festival webpage.
Photo: Justin Nicholas
Liza Lim
The Navigator
Review by Erin Hutching
The Navigator is a new opera directed by renowned Australian-born director Barrie Kosky. This work is visually sumptuous with a striking set that is brought to life by skilful lighting, particularly the use of bright contrasting red and yellow. It opens with a haunting, discordant flute played by one of two characters sitting on a bench, evoking a Waiting For Godot-like surreal ‘waiting place'. As the flute song goes on, you feel that perhaps these characters have been locked in this scene forever.
I must admit I am not a frequent opera attendee and I was not sure what to expect from this work at all. The marketing is convincing, combining attention-grabbing images with strongly worded descriptions like ‘Dripping with sensuality, The Navigator is a highly charged, confrontational work about desire, connection and transformation.' I was sold.
Unfortunately, The Navigator was not at all what I was expecting. It certainly combines incredible costumes with lighting to convey another world, a purgatory-like place where strange and unusual creatures reside. Patricia Skye's libretto is beautiful and haunting. However, the experimental vocal style is very hard to listen to, and the words lose their effect because of this. The performers imbue their delivery with passion but, to be perfectly frank, their drawn-out, discordant singing just sounds awful most of the time. There are interesting, powerful moments, but because the delivery is not broken up by moments of contrast it becomes very repetitive. To my admittedly uninitiated ears, it sounds like a vocal exercise where the class is told to explore their voice and take it to extremes, making it sound as strange and terrible as possible. Now imagine that going for 90 minutes.
The piece is much too static overall. Beautiful tableaux are created but then the performers remain in them for far too long. The audience is not given anything to hold onto as they are taken through this surreal journey. Not only is the singing (if it can be called that) very hard to listen to, there is no obvious narrative and the relationship between the five characters The Navigator, The Beloved, The Fool, The Angel of History and The Crone is not clear at all. Any of these would be fine on their own but all together they make the piece feel directionless. The work makes interesting references to mythology and literature, but it really needs something more to sustain the audience's interest and to provide them with an anchor as they are taken through this unchartered territory.
There was a full house and I am sure that the audience members who were clear on what to expect and who enjoy this kind of experimental opera would have found the work powerful and engaging. However, the three rows in front of me clearly did not, as evidenced when they left after half an hour. A word of warning if you are considering attending The Navigator - if you know what you are getting yourself in for then go for it, but if not then think you may wish to think twice before buying a ticket.