FORGED IN DANCE

DANCE

2 Oct

Recently landed: Forged in Dance

Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s triple bill, Instruments of Dance, especially for Fjord Review.

Miles underground, in the Earth’s mantle, Obsidian rock and Wayne McGregor’s Obsidian Tear begins. Originally commissioned by the Royal Ballet and Boston Ballet, premiering at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 2016, it is now time for the volcano to erupt for its Australian premiere season at the State Theatre in Melbourne. Six years deep, all that heat and pressure, it has melted to form magma. Slowly rising from the cracks underground in the Earth’s crust, it collects in a holding chamber, but it can only do so for so long.

And it is in one such magma chamber that Tuesday’s performance takes place with Adam Elmes and Callum Linnane in a caress. As the pressure builds, the heat rises, and their bodies become liquescent. In the harmonic repeat of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Lachen verlernt, the top layer changes. The magma reaches the surface. It becomes lava, thanks to Sulki Yu’s violin solo.

As Elmes and Linnane curve and ripple around one another: is the story’s title in reference to a tear drop or the action of tearing something apart? Feeling for kinaesthetic cues: it is both. To be torn to pieces. Tear away, tear down, tear into. And tender, in a flash. A burst of movement: burst into tears. This is both intimate and explosive. As McGregor describes, “it is deliberately ambiguous. It is both seething and it is tearful. It is tearing through space and giving an emotional temperature.”[i]

[i] Wayne McGregor and Esa-Pekka Salonen in conversation with Clemency Burton-Hill (transcribed from video), ‘Wayne McGregor rehearses Obsidian Tear (The Royal Ballet)’, Royal Opera House YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTz94o5-CR4, recorded May 12, 2016, accessed 28th September, 2022