HARLEQUIN AND CLOWN

DANCE

2 July

Recently landed: Harlequin and Clown

Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Harlequinade, especially for Fjord Review.

In Alexei Ratmansky’s revival of Marius Petipa’s lost classic Harlequinade, we have the familiar characters Pierrot and Pierette, Harlequin and Columbine. Known from paintings, figurines, pantomimes, other ballets, sweets, and from the commedia dell’arte. With a chorus of characters, young and old, coloured by collective, ever-changing memory over the centuries, the Australian Ballet presents “Harlequinade” a co-production with American Ballet Theatre. This merry romp, a light-hearted play, a confection for the senses. True to history, Harlequinade’s appeal lies in its quick-change movements of the familiar, stock characters and the quick-change movements of the story. In his pre-curtain address, on opening night, Artistic Director David Hallberg offered forth a tumbling “sugar rush” to tuck into.

The stage, like a moveable flap book (also known as turn-ups, metamorphoses, or harlequinades) is both a toy and story book, just as a commedia dell’arte is “not an idea or a meaning, but a collection of images with many meanings.”[i] True to an interactive book set apart by how they can be read, lift the flap, and a balcony can slide down to the ground, in Act I. Spin the wheel, and a Good Fairy can materialise where previously stood a statue in the village square. Turn the page, Act II, and Harlequin as a hunter can pop up from behind a spinning umbrella in pursuit of his lark, Columbine. Through engagement, a delicious puzzle!

The pretty paper platform itself is based on the original sets from 1900, rounded out by Riccardo Drigo’s cheerful score. Working from “notations written out in the Stepanov system, made by the director of the Mariinsky Theater Nikolai Sergeyev and his assistants” Ratmansky, proceeding from the “idea that these records reflect the choreography of Marius Petipa as it was seen onstage during his life,” has created a “sincere homage to Petipa.”[ii] The pleasure lies in the charming choreography brought to life on opening night (and the livestream that followed) by Benedicte Bemet as Columbine and Brett Chynoweth as quick-witted, quick-footed Harlequin; and by Jill Ogai and masked Marcus Morelli on Tuesday night.

[i] Martin Green and John Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot (New York: Macmillan, 1986), xiii; cited by James Fisher, ‘Harlequinade: Commedia dell’Arte on the Early Twentieth-Century British Stage’ Theatre Journal Vol. 41, No. 1 (March, 1989), p. 30

[ii] Alexei Ratmansky, Choreographer’s Note, The Australian Ballet Harlequinade programme, 2022, p. 20.