IDENTITY

The Australian Ballet
Tuesday 20th June, 2023
Friday 23rd June, 2023
State Theatre

THE HUM
Daniel Riley
Concept and Director: Daniel Riley
Associate Director: Sarah-Jayne Howard
Choreography: Daniel Riley, in collaboration with cast
Music: Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO
Costume design: Annette Sax, Tuangurung
Adornments: Priscilla Reid-Loynes and Sarah Loynes Gamilaroi Ularoi
Set and lighting design: Matthew Adey from House of Vnholy

Paragon
Alice Topp
Choreography: Alice Topp
Creative Assistant: Jayden Hicks
Composer: Christoper Gordon
Costume design: Aleisa Jelbart
Set and lighting design: Jon Buswell
Audio Visual Editor: Arlo Dean Cook

Conductor: Nicolette Fraillon
Concertmaster: Sulki Yu

Paragon, my response to The Australian Ballet’s Identity, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.

From out of retirement came 12 dancers of The Australian Ballet. Julie de Costa[i], Simon Dow, Lucinda Dunn, Madeleine Eastoe, Steven Heathcote, Paul Knobloch, Kirsty Martin, David McAllister, Sarah Peace, Leanne Stojmenov, Jessica Thompson, and Fiona Tonkin. 12 dancers to usher, in a sense, Adam Bull into his retirement at the close of the Melbourne season of Identity, in Alice Topp’s Paragon.

The piece, while created to celebrate in 60 fast minutes 60 years of The Australian Ballet, a diamond anniversary, naturally included a selection of beautiful moments to coincide with Bull’s own retirement from the stage after more than two decades[ii] with the company; from the Seasons couple pas de deux, a love letter to the onstage partnership of Bull and Amber Scott[iii], in particular, and the opening scene where Bull held in his arms a swathe of tulle onto which still and moving images from the company’s 60 years flickered. As tangible as threads of memory are, these familiar scenes of kinetic knowledge from the archives spoke to the identity of the company and all those who have shaped it and continue to mould its form. As Bull unfastened this rippled screen and wrapped it close to his chest, Heathcote and Adam Elmes, the Past (in the nicest sense), and Future met. It was hard not to see this as a literal changing of the guard, as each one handed over to the other and exited the stage, for this artform is not fixed but ever growing. And while in this instance, in June, 2023, it is Bull who is retiring, perhaps this role, when this work is next performed, will be filled by another dancer bidding farewell to their life on the stage, encircled by their peers and esteemed alumni.

But before I get too tangled up in farewells and retirements, this new work by Resident Choreographer, Topp, commissioned by The Australian Ballet, is also about how one never really retires. You might exit the stage, but does dance ever really leave your body? The answer, Topp presents, is a resounding ‘no’. Dance is a part of a dancer, of us all, by extension, at a cellular level; whether it is bathed in limelight or not. The next branches might look radically different, on an individual level, but they have grown from what proceeded them.

The body is an archive.

And it is this vein of perpetuity which, for me, links Topp’s Paragon with Daniel Riley’s THE HUM. A timeless thread within us all, on an individual level, and one that connects us all to what was, what is, and what will be. The time span can be a single dancer’s career, in this instance, Bull’s; a company’s life, The Australian Ballet’s 60 years’ strong[iv]; or, as THE HUM vibrates, thousands of years, stretching back in search of “cultural perpetuity… which aims to connect rather than divide”[v], as Riley explains.

Memory is knowledge.

THE HUM, commissioned by The Australian Ballet, and choreographed by Australian Dance Theatre’s (ADT) Artistic Director, in association with ADT, Riley, removed the ‘once’ from ‘once a dancer’ in exploration of the continuous dancing body in perpetual transformation as being an internal, ‘felt’ energy. As such, ADT dancers, Brianna Kell, Karra Nam, Zoe Wizniak, Zachary Lopez, Patrick O’Luanaigh, and Sebastian Geilings became sound waves bunched together and spreading out, conveying that “all knowledge, no matter where you store it, is based on memory”[vi]. They were joined by 11 dancers of The Australian Ballet, Coco Mathieson, Jill Ogai, Katherine Sonnekus, Evie Ferris, Lilla Harvey, Callum Linnane, Nathan Brook, Timothy Coleman, Rohan Furnell, Joseph Romancewicz, and Drew Hedditch, but this was a divide by company name only. Within the work, all the dancers moved as a collective sedimentation of knowledge as they sliced through sound relays and buzzed.

As Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s score built, just as “birds and frogs that live near rushing waterways vocalise with loud and high-frequency calls, vaulting over the masking rush of water”[vii], the dancers blazed with a sonic avidity that lingered on my skin. And for a moment in the theatre I understood the nuance of hearing with the whole body the way a cricket or a grasshopper might[viii].

Both THE HUM, with Riley’s coaxing of “tangible yet invisible creative connections”[ix], and Paragon, with Topp’s “rich palette of intergenerational voices”[x], drew lines of connection between individuals and place, in honour of collaboration, and the practice of reciprocity that extends beyond the constructed walls of any studio or theatre. In collaboration with the cast, composers, musicians, and all the many hands who shape a work, as the tiny hairs on cells tell, as I experienced the transmission. Paragon, alone, featured 285 projections in its hat tip to costume, set and lighting design, and those in the biodiversity of backstage.

From Topp’s evocative longing in the aptly titled Saudade pas de deux especially for former Principal Artist Tonkin (1980–1993), with Bull (on the Tuesday evening), to the all-too-quick, golden sweep-rustle that was Glow, sensory perception and a deep knowledge of their performing bodies were at the fore and magnificent.

Each dancer, all, performed variations, distinguished by their own buzz, but they share the same pattern of knowledge and it was beautiful to behold. The unique ecosystem, it thrummed.

[i] Julie de Costa (1969–1984) for the Melbourne season only; Rachel Rawlins (2002–2012) for the Sydney season only.

[ii] Adam Bull joined The Australian Ballet in 2002, and he was promoted to Principal Artist in 2008.

[iii] ‘In the studio: Principal artists rehearse their final pas de deux together’, The Australian Ballet You Tube channel, https://youtu.be/CcHdtNFk2Ik, accessed 16th June, 2023. The Seasons pas de deux was performed by Benedicte Bemet and Jarryd Madden on the two nights I attended Identity.

[iv] Australian Dance Theatre itself turns 60 in 2025.

[v] Daniel Riley, quoted by Ben McKeown, Ancestral Energies: An invisible connection between sight and sound, The Australian Ballet’s Identity programme (Melbourne and Sydney), p. 18.

[vi] “All knowledge, no matter where you store it, is based on memory. It is as if Aboriginal cultures read modern neuroscience and created a knowledge system to match. In truth, the system evolved over thousands of years, constantly being tested and perfected with use. Songlines optimise the way memory works.” Margo Neale & Lynne Kelly, Songlines: The Power and Promise (Port Melbourne, Victoria: Thames & Hudson Australia, 2020), p. 86.

[vii] David George Haskell, Sounds Wild & Broken (Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc., 2022), p. 86.

[viii] “Crickets have drumlike hearing organs in their front legs, but grasshoppers hear through membranes on their abdomens. … We humans can feel vibrations on our skin and in our flesh as well as in our ears, but these are crude and blurry sensations compared with the nuanced whole-body hearing experience of other beings.” David George Haskell, Sounds Wild & Broken, p. 17.

[ix] THE HUM synopsis, The Australian Ballet Identity programme, p. 10.

[x] Alice Topp, Choreographer’s Note, Paragon, The Australian Ballet Identity programme, p. 22.

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Image credit: The Australian Ballet’s Samara Merrick and Jake Mangakahia in Alice Topp’s Identity by Daniel Boud