Be now, in the present, remember me.
Kunstkamer
The Australian Ballet
Friday 3rd June, 2022
Tuesday 7th June, 2022
Thursday 9th June, 2022
(With livestream on Friday 9th June, 2022)
State Theatre
Choreography: Sol León, Paul Lightfoot, Crystal Pite, Marco Goecke
Composers: Ólafur Arnalds, Béla Bartók, Ludwig van Beethoven, Benjamin Britten, Christoph W Gluck, Lorenz Hart, Janis Joplin, Arvo Pärt, Henry Purcell, Richard Rodgers, Jose Sandoval, Franz Schubert, Johann Strauss Jr., Joby Talbot, Willie Mae Thornton
Original lighting design: Tom Bevoort, Udo Haberland, Tom Visser
Costume design: Joke Visser, Hermien Hollander
Set design: Sol León and Paul Lightfoot
Film: Concept, direction and choreography Sol León, Filmed and edited by Rahi Rezvani
With Opera Australia Orchestra and Orchestra Victoria
Conductor: Nicolette Fraillon AM
Concertmaster: Sulki Yu
With Orchestra Victoria
Serious Play, my response to The Australian Ballet’s Kunstkamer, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
Remember me. Remember me. The comfort that floats behind the heartache of Henry Purcell’s Lament from Dido and Aeneas, When I am laid in the earth: remember me. Be now, in the present, remember me. So begins Kunstkamer, originally commissioned in 2019 for the 60th anniversary of Netherlands Dans Theater (NDT), and presented now for the first time outside of the Netherlands by The Australian Ballet.[i]
Against the darkness, four memory-figures appear from the archives as larger-than-life projections before metamorphosing into the image of a single-horned rhinoceros. A rare Javan rhinoceros for a collector stockpiling splendid specimens from the four corners of the earth? Or a tribute to Miss Clara, a Greater one-horned rhinoceros whose public exhibition inspired poems, tapestries, and fashionable horned hairstyles? Clara, then, was immortalised in bronze[ii], marble, porcelain, and oil, was she now being remembered in film by Sol León and Rahi Rezvani?
The screen rises and the scene nods, for me, to a memory of Pietro Longhi’s painting, Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice (1751)[iii]. A sombre, sorry scene of ‘amusement’ in which Clara no longer has her horn. Her power and threat removed, it is now a trophy in the hands of the man bearing the whip. Behind her, a wall. At her feet, some hay. That is the canvas. What of the stage? Behind a tall, dark figure, a wall. He makes a series of low muffled grunts. He snorts. Walks backwards, in a measured pace indicating his familiarity with the space. His feet stamp at the ground, agitated by his confinement. If Kunstkamer asks one thing of its audience it would perhaps be: what do you feel? Amass what you know, cast it to one side, and allow yourself to feel what it is you are experiencing.
An owl hoots. David Hallberg in his role of the “spirit, or the Kunstkamer house ‘keeper’”[iv] slides to the floor, rhinoceros no longer. He shapeshifts. His character, on stage, not as artistic director, but as a dancer once more, is, as choreographer Sol León describes, “the essence, the knowledge, the love”. A magnetic ghost of many things. A spirit at one end of their journey, accompanied by their earlier shadow, corps de ballet’s Adam Elmes (on the Tuesday and Thursday performances and livestream event), and guest artist Jorge Nozal (“the original spirit in NDT’s Kunstkamer”[v] in 2019, on the opening night in Melbourne), guiding me through a world within a world. Cue: Beethoven.
Kunstkamer meshes seamlessly the choreography of León, Paul Lightfoot, Crystal Pite, and Marco Goecke, and proves to be exactly what belongs inside a kunstkamer, a “room” of “art”. And however you choose to organise your own chamber of art, one guiding principle, that is true of this work, remains: the objects, in this case, dancers, within the room must transgress the borders between the different categories of the collection and in doing so defy fixed interpretation. Give voice to the “antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals”[v]. Be coral. Be crustacean, folded over with your pointed elbows in the air, scuttling, furiously. Be a singular musical note and a succession of notes within Lightfoot’s ‘Bartók’. Or a moonlit scene, like corphée, Lucien Xu.
Divided into two parts, Kunstkamer pushes boundaries, speaks in a new language (for the company), plays with tension, while crowing like a cockerel with a nautilus shell for a rotund body supported by fine gilt legs[vi]. Kunstkamer is a fantastical and fast juxtaposition of science and art; natural and artificial illusion; order and disarray; domestic (cockerels) and exotic (rhinoceros); monstrous and wee; light and Dutch-picture-frame dark; a microcosm and the wider view; life and death; contained and free; the public façade and the private face; a piece and a whole. Held within an ingeniously ‘simple’, ever-alternating, three-panelled set, designed by León and Lightfoot, that is both an imposing building and an intimate chamber, such is the nature of metamorphosis.
Juxtapose a peep of Jose Sandoval with the butterfly wings and insect limbs traced to Arvo Pärt’s Fratres for violin, string orchestra and percussion in ‘Forever a Second Déjà Vu’. Make the most of the invitation to draw the leaf-chewed, buffeted blooms of naturalist, entomologist, and botanical illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian. Make connections, as Merian did, between all things, between the insects and the plants they ate and pollinated[vii]. These things belong on the same page, on the same stage. In doing so, a multitude of readings grows. A kunstkamer, after all, is defined by its “heightened sense of interaction — of play — both within and among the items, and most of all with the viewer.”[viii] Each of the many black ebonised doors and windows opening onto a different possibility, as typified by the glorious cascade of intertwined energy in Lightfoot and Pite’s ‘Beethoven’ to Symphony no. 9 in D minor. At every gentle fall and assemble of a pas de quatre in Lightfoot’s ‘Poland’ to Ôlafur Arnalds, to the warm golden glow of Pite’s ‘Schubert Memory’, the opportunity to reorder your collection[ix].
Roll Hallberg’s condensed, heartbreaking ‘Near Light’ solo, choreographed by León, into ‘Janis’, choreographed by Goecke, with its mesmerisingly rubbery and languid movements one moment, rendered jerky, anguished, carnivalesque the next. Mechanical marvels, like senior artist, Marcus Morelli, So Sad to Be Alone, Janis ain’t wrong, and so for every raw solo, there is a pas de deux, pas de trois, ensemble, explosion.
For me, where Kunstkamer differs to the historical understanding of a kunstkamer and what it should hold is in its joyous inclusivity and creative sense of community. This work is not for the collector, singular, but for all. For the dancers, from corps de ballet alongside principals, like Lilla Harvey sparking alongside the life-cast specimen of Callum Linnane. For revealing and revelling in their role within the collection, as found in the delicious, claw-handed vortex of Goecke’s ‘Johann’, gobbled up by senior artist, Dana Stephenson, alongside corphée, Timothy Coleman, and soloist Nathan Brook. For the individual and varied group ensembles, giving everyone the chance to be their own Brown four-eyed possum or Turret shell or the checkerboard wings of the Walking stick insect from the C18th illustrations within the four-volume catalogue of Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. An exquisite, rare generosity. Re-allocate! With everyone celebrating their own transformation from egg to caterpillar to the splitting of the chrysalis and the slow unfolding of wings, it seems wrong not to mention every single soul sharing the intensity that comes with a compressed timespan. For the orchestra playing music not typically associated with ballet, and squeezing in some favourites. As a photograph of the company in 1965, before their first European tour[x], materialises on the far wall, this is a celebration of the collective diversity of a ballet company, of the then ‘growing’ into the now, ‘Past and Present’.
The door to this Kunstkamer closes too soon. Remember me? Always.
[i] The World Première of Kunstkamer at Zuiderstrand Theater, The Hague, the Netherlands, was on the 3rd of October, 2019. The Australian Ballet premiered Kunstkamer in Australia at the Sydney Opera House, Sydney on the 29th of April, 2022, and The State Theatre, Melbourne on the 3rd of June, 2022.
[ii] Pieter-Anton von Verschaffelt’s bronze cast model, A Rhinoceros called ‘Miss Clara’ (1738–1758), is one of many artworks inspired by Clara, https://barber.org.uk/german-school/, accessed 6th June, 2022.
[iii] Pietro Longhi’s painting, Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice (1751) is in the collection of the National Gallery in London, UK, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/pietro-longhi-exhibition-of-a-rhinoceros-at-venice, accessed 6th June, 2022.
[iv] Alexia Petsinis, ‘Master Cast’, Kunstkamer Melbourne programme, The Australian Ballet, 2022, p. 45.
[v] “Jorge is fiery and sensual, and I’ve watched how he inspires the dancers in the studio. Having him [also] dance the [spirit] role on stage is the perfect opportunity to feed the dancers and the audience an experience of a truly great and deep artist.” — David Hallberg, quoted by Alexia Petsinis, ‘Master Cast’, Kunstkamer programme, The Australian Ballet, 2022, p. 49.
[vi] Barbara Gutfleish and Joachim Menzhausen, ‘How a Kunstkammer should be formed’, Journal of the History of Collections, 1989 Vol I: p. 11.
[vii] A Drinking Vessel in the Shape of a Cockerel/Hen from a kunstkamer now in the collection of what evolved into a giant modern-day kunstkamer, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, https://www.khm.at/objektdb/detail/87259/, accessed 12th June, 2022.
[viii] “Before Merian, information on plants was confined to botanical books with no connection to the insects that ate and pollinated them. Books about insects often showed the different life stages on separate pages. Each plant or insect specimen was confined to its own space, interacting with nothing but the eye of the viewer.” ‘Maria Sibylla Merian’s Artistic Entomology’, Art Herstory, January, 2021, https://artherstory.net/curiosity-and-the-caterpillar/, accessed 10th June, 2022.
[ix] Cherry Xie, ‘The Kunstkamer: An Art of Serious Play’, Washington University Digital Gateway Image Collections and Exhibitions, http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/seriousplay, accessed 7th June, 2022.
[x] ‘Trust News’, The Australian Elizabeth Theatre Trust, September 1965, pp. 6–7, https://www.thetrust.org.au/pdf/trust-news/TN_1965_09_010.pdf, accessed 13th June, 2022.
Image credit: David Hallberg in The Australian Ballet’s Kunstkamer, by Daniel Boud
