Piano ballet to hit NZ stage
Film planted seed for Czech dancer’s dream project
When Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or winning film The Piano premiered in 1993, a teen Czech dancer watching it in Europe was so swept away by it he decided to one day make it into a ballet.
Now, around 25 years later, Jiri Bubenicek is a world-renowned dancer and choreographer whose The Piano: The Ballet has its world premiere at the 2018 New Zealand Festival in Wellington and the Auckland Arts Festival. It will also be the first production staged by the Royal NZ Ballet in 2018, the company’s 65th anniversary year.
Bubenicek told the Herald imagery he saw in The Piano as a 19-year-old never left him: “I was almost crying with the intensity of the story and the incredible landscapes in the film.”
After successfully choreographing The Soldiers Tale, Bubenicek was asked by German Theatre Dortmund to make a new ballet. Feeling older and wiser, he turned to his dream of bringing The Piano to stage even though he had never visited New Zealand.
In 2014, it was staged as a one- act ballet and went so well Bubenicek decided to turn it into a full-length production and speak with fellow European dancer Francisco Vertinglia, then artistic director at the Royal NZ Ballet, about bringing it home to NZ.
Accompanied by his twin brother and fellow dancer, Otto, Bubenicek visited NZ in 2015 for 10 days, including visits to Karekare Beach where chunks of the film were shot.
“It was incredible! The sky was grey; the sea was stormy so it was as it had been in the film.”
The Piano: The Ballet features music from Michael Nyman’s awardwinning film score as well as video to create the feeling of being outside and in nature, says Bubenicek. It opens the RNZB’s 2018 season which also includes Dancing with Mozart, Strength and Grace: Women and The Nutcracker.
Strength and Grace: Women marks the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage in NZ and will feature new commissions from female choreographers curated by the company’s new artistic director Patricia Barker.
Just the second female AD in its history, Barker wants the RNZB to be celebrated for commissioning work by the brightest young choreographers around: “We are . . . an important artistic export, sharing the spirit and creativity of our country at home and beyond our borders.”