SERIOUS PLAY

DANCE

30 June

Recently landed: Serious Play

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

Remember me. Remember me. The comfort that floats behind the heartache of Henry Purcell’s Lament from Dido and Aeneas, When I am laid in the earth: remember me. Be now, in the present, remember me. So begins Kunstkamer, originally commissioned in 2019 for the 60th anniversary of Netherlands Dans Theater, and presented for the first time outside of the Netherlands by the Australian Ballet.

Against the darkness, four memory-figures appear from the archives as larger-than-life projections before metamorphosing into the image of a single-horned rhinoceros. A rare Javan rhinoceros for a collector stockpiling splendid specimens from the four corners of the earth? Or a tribute to Miss Clara, a Greater one-horned rhinoceros whose public exhibition inspired poems, tapestries, and fashionable horned hairstyles? Clara, then, was immortalised in bronze[i], marble, porcelain, and oil, was she now being remembered in film by Sol León and Rahi Rezvani?

The screen rises and the scene nods, for me, to a memory of Pietro Longhi’s painting, Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice (1751)[ii]. A sombre, sorry scene of ‘amusement’ in which Clara no longer has her horn. Her power and threat removed, it is now a trophy in the hands of the man bearing the whip. Behind her, a wall. At her feet, some hay. That is the canvas. What of the stage? Behind a tall, dark figure, a wall. He makes a series of low muffled grunts. He snorts. Walks backwards, in a measured pace indicating his familiarity with the space. His feet stamp at the ground, agitated by his confinement. If Kunstkamer asks one thing of its audience it would perhaps be: what do you feel? Amass what you know, cast it to one side, and allow yourself to feel what it is you are experiencing.

[i] Pieter-Anton von Verschaffelt’s bronze cast model, A Rhinoceros called ‘Miss Clara’ (1738–1758), is one of many artworks inspired by Clara, https://barber.org.uk/german-school/, accessed 6th June, 2022.

[ii] Pietro Longhi’s painting, Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice (1751) is in the collection of the National Gallery in London, UK, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/pietro-longhi-exhibition-of-a-rhinoceros-at-venice, accessed 6th June, 2022.