LIGHT AND SHADE

DANCE

9 July

Recently landed: Light and Shade

Gracia’s written response to LAC presented by The Australian Ballet, for Fjord Review.

A bevy of black swans circled our car parked near to the lake’s edge. It was my first encounter with a black swan, nose to beak, separated only by a wind-up wind-down window pane. I would have been no taller than one of the swans, had I’ve been out of the car. I remember feeling awestruck by their scale, their very presence. And yet as I was four-years-of-age, or thereabouts, is this a later addition stitched to a memory derived from family folklore? My Mum recalled one of the swans hopped up on the car’s bonnet, but wonders now if such a spectacle is likely. A small car buried beneath a mountain of feathered bodies, it is almost a cartoon image — better yet, a cinematic one — when viewed from a human perspective. In territorial union to our intrusion, the swans rallied, and looped for me a definitive impression of swans, lakes, and Tchaikovsky.

The swans of my memory and family folklore were not so unlike the hissing, awe-inspiring Chimeras within Jean-Christophe Maillot’s LAC, a modern telling of Swan Lake, performed with attack by the renowned Ballets de Monte-Carlo. Imposing, glorious, memorable.

In LAC, Maillot, together with writer Jean Rouaud, resurrected “these buried experiences”, albeit against a more “Machiavellian, family backdrop …. to present a ballet of contrasts. The change from animal into human being infuse[d] the entire work and question[ed] our own nature. We believe that we differ from animals because of our ability to make choices. But is this all we are capable of? …. Perhaps our humanity ultimately lies in this unsophisticated insatiability that defines us from our first cry — We want everything!”