A LIVING FUTURE
Recently landed: A Living Future
Gracia’s written response to DanceX, Part One, presented by The Australian Ballet, especially for Fjord Review.
The night begins with a homophone. With a playful swap of the knowing word ‘knew’ for a word that sounds the same when you speak or read it, but which now conjures up things shiny and in the present: ‘new.’ Johan Inger’s high-spirited, wistful memory, I New Then premiered in 2012, but it looks back further still, to what we now know was a ‘new’ time, one “that was both pure and simple but with the distinct challenges of becoming an adult.”[i] With an invitation to “walk and talk in gardens all misty and wet with rain,” plucked from Van Morrison’s Sweet Things, this seems the best place to begin The Australian Ballet’s three-part festival DanceX. With honesty. With new explorations that can only be expressed through understanding and expertise. In the moment, before it passes.
DanceX brings together nine dance companies, in a celebration of unity in community, at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne. Part One, which begins with the Australian premiere of I New Then, is accompanied by an excerpt from Sydney Dance Company’s ab[intra]; Lucy Guerin’s How to Be Us, a new site-specific, dancer-specific work commissioned by the Australian Ballet; and an excerpt from Bangarra Dance Theatre’s salt lake exploration, Terrain. Like Guerin’s Pendulum, recently experienced in its new location, wharf-side, DanceX, take two, is ready. And while it has waited in the wings, it has also taken the opportunity to grow, and so DanceX now includes Karul Projects (in Part Two), and Marrugeku (Part Three).
On the heels of Romeo and Juliet, with only one night between the close of the Melbourne 2022 season, the Australian Ballet makes a cheeky return with all the swagger and young love fumbles of “And I shall drive my chariot/ Down your streets and cry/ ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m dynamite/ And I don’t know why’” (Van Morrison, Sweet Things) as it stumbles upon transcendence, typified by Callum Linnane and Nathan Brook. Set to music from Van Morrison’s 1968 jazz-doused album, Astral Weeks, spanning Madame George to The Way Young Lovers Do, Dimity Azoury and Corey Herbert’s every euphoric leap with hands high in the air carries the lament “never, never, never/ Grow so old again” upon landing.
[i] Johan Inger, I New Then choreographer’s statement, https://www.johaninger.com/#/i-new-then, accessed 21st October, 2022.
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27th of October, 2022
The Australian Ballet’s Coco Mathieson in Johan Inger’s I New Then (image credit: Kate Longley)
