Seeing red - From www.stuff.co.nz
Two men. Two very different modern ballets. CHRISTOPHER MOORE looks at the Royal New Zealand Ballet's first offering for 2008.
Jorma Elo and Adrian Burnett are currently seeing red, but in a perfectly balanced choreographic sense. Elo -- currently one of the golden boys of international dance -- and Christchurch-born Burnett have created two contemporary ballets for the Royal New Zealand Ballet's first season of 2008.
Red is the name of this Terpsichorean game of sharp contrasts, one that begins with the twirls and tutus of a very classical ballet (Paquita) before evolving into Elo and Burnett's edgy-contemporary fusions of music and movement.
First performed in 2004, Burnett's Abhisheka absorbs the intensity and power of music by New Zealand composer John Psathas and delivers a complex, hieratic 25-minute work fusing Byzantine and Hindu rites into a hypnotic whole, where dancers appear to interweave their bodies into Tracy Grant Lord's shimmering golden designs.
Choreographed to the Baroque sonorities of Heinrich Biber's 17th-century violin sonatas, Elo's Plan to A can be seen as a joyously contrapuntal celebration of movement and life. Underpinning the work's blithesome high spirits is Elo's rapid-fire dynamics and relentlessly tight discipline. Here's choreography that demands everything from the dancers -- utter precision and an acute awareness of classical ballet's vocabulary. Its secret ingredient is that everything must appear totally effortless. The resulting piece is not so much a flow of movement as an exuberant torrent.
The personalities of the men who ceated these works adds another intriguing dimension to the story. Abhishenka, mysterious and enigmatic, is the creation of a fiercely eloquent New Zealander, while, despite the good-natured animal spirits of Plan To A, Jorma Elo admits that by nature he's not a social animal, instead preferring to let the choreography speak for him. "The music usually sparks a work in my mind," says Elo, "but there's no specific way that I begin to choreograph a piece. The dancers often become the first inspiration. For Plan to A, I returned to Biber's music. It's Baroque but sounds strangely contemporary. It's open to a wide range of interpretations. I was drawn into it and excited by what I heard. I also like to see the different ways in which dancers move -- to have a physical conversation with them to create good things."
Elo has established his international reputation in what seems to be an extraordinarily brief time. After training with the Finnish National Ballet School and the Kirov Ballet School, he was 16 years old when he launched a career as a professional dancer, joining the Finnish National Ballet from 1978 to 1984 and Sweden's Cullborg Ballet until 1990, when he joined the Nederlands Dans Theater. As a dancer, he worked with some of the leading contemporary choreographers, notably Jan Kylian, whose style influenced Elo's own choreographic career. Today, he is based in the Netherlands, from where he leads a life in perpetual motion, following his career as resident choreographer for the Boston Ballet and a sought-after creator of dance works for many of the world's leading ballet companies.
Plan to A followed an earlier work, appropriately named Plan to B, created shortly after Elo decided to take on a full-time career as choreographer. "I was 43 and facing major questions in my professional life and somehow the ballet reflected these feelings. A dancer's life is extremely condensed and filled with joy, but at the same time, it's over-the-top. Such a short time. Terrifying. You start so young that you forget why you became a dancer. You're in it and it's frightening when you stop."
He feels most at home when he's working with the dancers in the studio. "That's where I feel most comfortable. I lack social skills. Somebody once told me that I'm somewhat handicapped in that area. Perhaps it is true -- I'm not very good at after-performance parties, where I have to talk about my work."
Once ensconced in a familiar environment, Elo works at a fast pace. It took a mere five weeks to complete the choreographic framework for Plan to A before coming to New Zealand to join the company for the first time. The dancers play a vital role in shaping a new work, and Elo likes what he sees in New Zealand. "Choreography is basically problem-solving," he says. "It never stops for me. I am constantly looking at areas in which a work can be improved. My mind is always attuned to making something better. Whether I succeed, I don't know, but I never feel that anything is complete. "
What drew Elo into the world of dance? "As a teenager, I loved sport, especially ice hockey. I tried dance class to improve my movements. I ended up in a studio with music, and discovered an environment where I could create something. I fell totally in love with the theatre from the moment I stepped into the Helsinki Opera House. "At the Nederlands Dans Theater, everything was about making something new ... trying a new angle. Kylian looked at every aspect of dance. He fed dancers' minds. There was an overflow of creativity which, at first, can be a daunting experience. You question whether you can be part of it, but you learn to flow with the stream." At the NDT, he "learnt about making dance". After joining the Boston Ballet as resident choreographer in 2005, the process continued. "The basic elements are there, but American dance is even more condensed. This dynamic cooking pot excites me, despite having a certain Scandinavian calm. You learn to live and work on the edge. My life is strange -- I only spend a month a year in Holland. It's a mobile life, but there has to be a moment when I want to travel less. At this present moment, however, it's a great ride."
New Zealand-born Adrian Burnett graduated from The Australian Ballet School in 1987, joining The Australian Ballet a year later. Four years later he was appointed as company soloist, leaving the company the following year to join the Basel Ballet. Returning to the Australian Ballet, he was promoted to senior artist. He choreographed his first work, Pitch n'Sway, for the Australian Ballet in 1995, launching a career as a choreographer for, among others, Houston Ballet, Dutch National Ballet and the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Four years ago, after being invited to choreograph a work for the RNZB, Burnett "discovered" the music of John Psathas. It was a defining moment. "I hadn't lived here for some time and his compositions began the work. It's not only the music first. I can think of a look, a feel or an idea, then I search for music which suits this. Psathas's music Abhisheka inspired me initially, but it wasn't long enough for a 20-minute work. I then discovered his piano quintet. John agreed to placing the two works together. Together they inspired the images of what is basically an abstract work but one underscored with symbolism. It's a contemporary ballet using a classical vocabulary, the same template John has used in his music."
Burnett also describes the arc of the work, requiring the choreographer to create "levels" in a 25-minute piece. "You ask what the audience will get from it. Drawing them in and taking them on a journey." The choreographer's relationship with a company will hopefully result in something unique through a questioning procedure -- involving them, working with them before taking the raw material and creating the final work which tweaks and reshapes the classical vocabulary into something unique. Burnett uses video to trace the development of a piece, reworking it where necessary. "This isn't choreography by committee. It is absolutely driven by me throughout and I need to know what I'm after. Otherwise there's no point -- and I need a clear end-point." He sees his first choreographed work as "a start". "That first attempt was an investigation by a dancer. I'd reached a point in my career where I had moved into a different skill-set. This was an act of creation rather than recreation. It was a nice springboard."
The Royal New Zealand Ballet: Red, Isaac Theatre Royal, March 12 to 15.