SPARKLING CELEBRATION

DANCE

8 July

Recently landed: Sparkling Celebration

Gracia’s written response to George Balanchine’s Jewels, especially for Fjord Review.

I descend the stairs of the State Theatre, for that is where the emeralds are, beneath the Earth’s surface. Follow the sounds of Gabriel Fauré’s ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ and ‘Shylock’, for when entwined these musical elements chime the properties of emeralds as they refract the light. This is the Romantic era, they herald. A nineteenth-century reverie, in long green tunics. A memory of France. This is the opening night of the Melbourne season of The Australian Ballet’s performance of George Balanchine’s Jewels.[i]

Of course, equally, I could be in the soft green of the Fontainebleau Forest, beneath the dappled light of the oak trees of a Camille Corot painting. Or nose-to-glass peering at the jewellery on display in the Fifth Avenue windows of Van Cleef & Arpels. This is, after all, Balanchine’s “plotless” ballet upon which many images are encouraged to sparkle. For Violette Verdy, Emeralds was a silky, subaqueous affair “all those girls, like algae, or mermaids.”[ii] And now, in the continuation of Verdy, and all those who have shone in Emeralds since its premiere in 1967 at the Lincoln Centre, New York, Sharni Spencer and Callum Linnane (first principal couple) softly come into focus together with the elongated lines of Imogen Chapman and Maxim Zenin (second principal couple), and Larissa Kiyoto-Ward, Katherine Sonnekus, and Drew Hedditch (pas de trois) and the lyrical ebb and flow of the cast as a whole. The premiere of Jewels in the company’s 60th year is fitting, as the Australian Ballet’s artistic director, David Hallberg, describes, “some ballets, over the course of their time, create an aura of elegance and myth that holds up to our expectation of it. That is true with one of George Balanchine’s greatest masterpieces, Jewels.”

[i] At the close of the Melbourne season, The Australian Ballet will take Jewels, together with a 60th Anniversary Celebration, on tour to the Royal Opera House, UK, instead of Kunstkammer. As David Hallberg explains, “I think everybody would agree that Goecke’s behaviour wasn’t acceptable and unfortunately has consequences, so we made the decision to change the repertoire for London. I wanted to show the company in the most positive and celebratory light and if there is something celebratory and sparkling, it’s Jewels.”

[ii] Violette Verdy quoted by Rose Mulready, ‘Light through a prism’, The Australian Ballet Jewels Melbourne and Sydney programme, p.25. The principal roles in Emeralds were performed by Violette Verdy, Conrad Ludlow, Mimi Paul, and Francisco Moncion; Patrica McBride, Edward Villella, and Patricia Neary in Rubies, and Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d’Amboise in Diamonds.