Ballet’s Bold Moves go deep
It is more than 40 years since the Royal New Zealand Ballet first performed George Balanchine’s Serenade, the opening work in their current programme.
First performed in 1934 by the students of his School of American Ballet, it is one of the foundational works of American dance. For New Zealand audiences this is a welcome opportunity to experience a 20th century classic.
Balanchine refused to ascribe a narrative to the work but the combination of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings and the elegiac mood of the choreography suggests a deeper meaning; recent research has suggested links to the mysterious death by drowning of one of Balanchine’s fellow dancers in St Petersburg in 1924, just before he left for the West.
Serenade receives a strong performance although its mood is occasionally disrupted by dancers who smile broadly when the music suggests very different emotions.
Serenade is followed by a work that is the antithesis of Balanchine’s aesthetic, a Soviet era bravura war-horse, Vainonen’s pas de deux from his 1932 ballet, The Flames of Paris.
It is given a virtuoso performance by Mayu Tanigaito and Laurynas Vejalis, the work’s technical challenges surmounted with casual ease.
Having given a standout performance in the testing neo-classical idiom of Serenade, Tanigaito demonstrates remarkable versatility in switching effortlessly to the extroversion of Vainonen’s choreography.
Stand to Reason, commissioned for the RNZB’s 2018 programme to mark the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage, receives its Christchurch premier.
Choreographer Andrea Schermoly draws inspiration from the 1888 pamphlet, Ten Reasons Why the Women of New Zealand Should Vote, the text of which is projected on the backdrop.
Schermoly’s distinctive choreography for eight black-clad women is by turns assertive, imploring and occasionally desperate, culminating in a frenzied solo for Kirby Selchow that embodies the frustrations of generations of women.
The programme closes with William Forsythe’s Artefact II from 1984, inspired by the Chaconne from Bach’s D minor partita for solo violin.
Forsythe’s steely, hyper-extended moves push beyond the works of his predecessors, Balanchine included, the dance ruthlessly interrupted by abrupt curtain falls that Forsythe claims (unconvincingly) are responses to caesuras in the music.
Forsythe frames two pairs of soloists with a corps de ballet performing a kind of balletic semaphore at the margins of the bare stage, the patterns switching with each fall and rise of the curtain, until they eventually converge to sweep the stage clear to the dying notes of the solo violin.
Artefact II receives an energetic and committed performance but in a programme that strongly favours the company’s women, a work that gave greater opportunities to a wider range of dancers would have made a more fitting conclusion.
Bold Moves, performed by the Royal New Zealand Ballet, Theatre Royal, Christchurch. Further performance tonight at 7.30pm.