ENDURING MAGIC

DANCE

30 Nov

Recently landed: Enduring Magic

Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Marguerite & Armand / The Dream, especially for Fjord Review.

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To Sir Frederick Ashton’s fast footwork and musicality belongs the Australian Ballet’s double bill The Dream and Marguerite & Armand. To the charming misadventure distillation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream bubbles The Dream. To the legend of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, dovetails Amy Harris’s Marguerite, in Harris’s last stage role before her retirement. After 22-years with the company, Harris bids farewell in a delicious camellia-bloom, echoing Marguerite’s own departure (thankfully for altogether different reasons; Harris is retiring from the stage, whereas her character Marguerite is dying of tuberculous).

Principal Artist Harris joined the Australian Ballet in 2002, and Friday night will be her final performance, but until then, we have the livestream, filmed in the Joan Sutherland Theatre of the Sydney Opera House, in which Harris is a bright spark of pixels on my laptop’s screen. As Nathan Brook, as Armand, comments to camera, “Amy makes it very easy because she is an extremely experienced and amazing storyteller, and so it is very easy to react to her, and so once I am out there with Amy, I sort of forget about Nureyev, and the rest of it, and I just have to dance.”

To paraphrase Harris and Brook, together they seek to make the roles their own, whilst staying true to the famed original. As Harris describes, it is not solely natural chemistry I am watching unfold: “We have so much trust in each other and, ultimately, I think that is what a partnership comes down to: the trust that then brings spontaneity. You can then add layers to the story. I know I am in the capable hands of Nathan, so I just go for it.” Which is precisely how it feels as Harris forlornly falters as if wounded emotionally as well as physically en pointe as she retreats to her deathbed, an elegant chaise longue, befitting Cecil Beaton’s set design. Harris always seems to throw herself wholeheartedly into a role, and it is this full emotion that I have always responded to, as I am drawn into the world of Marguerite & Armand. Transposed from the semi-autobiographical novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, The Lady of the Camellias, Harris brings the immediacy to “Marguerite and Armand”; with her “long enameled eyes . . . sparkling and alert,” and true to text, she makes herself look “like a little figure made of Dresden china.”