DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

DANCE

27 Mar

Recently landed: Down the Rabbit Hole

Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, especially for Fjord Review.

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It is a kaleidoscope of references, a whirligig of Alices, I carry with me to the third Melbourne season of Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, presented by The Australian Ballet, at the State Theatre in Melbourne. They mingle in the ether with the Alice conjured direct from my own reading of the Lewis Carroll classic, and the memory of that encounter. From Lauren Cuthbertson in 2017 to Ako Kondo and Amber Scott in 2019, in 2024, my Alice guides are Sharni Spencer and Benedicte Bemet, on the Tuesday and the Wednesday nights, respectively. Each Alice within the tale shapes the role accordingly, and so Spencer’s gentle and trusting of the “wildest impossibilities” Alice, and Bemet’s joyful and “wildly curious” Alice form a magical gallery of Alices who I follow about the stage as they in turn follow a twitching, scurrying, quick-changing White Rabbit.[i]

Leaning upon a dodo for support, who finds the best way to explain a caucus race “is to do it”, so, too, a means to make a book of wordplay into a ballet: just do it, and in the doing, the story unfurls, for both are read, and both can spark imagination. Running about in a circle to dry off, the dodo soon proclaims: “EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes”, which is essentially how I feel about the perfectly ridiculous Alice where movements, like words, to borrow now from Carroll himself, mean more than we mean to express when we use them. Coincidentally, this race-over Alice is the last performance to grace the stage at the State Theatre, before it closes for a three-year refurbishment. But we’re not over yet.[ii] No, we’ve only just begun.

[i] Lewis Carroll’s descriptions of the qualities of Alice, written in reaction to a stage play, Alice created from his book, and published as ‘‘Alice’ on the Stage’, in The Theatre, edited by Clement Scott, London: Carson and Comerford, April 1887.
[ii] ‘Reimaging’ Arts Centre Melbourne, https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/about-us/reimagining, accessed 18th March, 2024.