Counterpointe

Kicking off as the new artistic director of the Australian Ballet, David Hallberg follows his recent debut with New York Dialects with another artful triple bill spanning decades in classical ballet. As Counterpointe leaps from Petipa to Balanchine to William Forsythe, the echoes are compelling. 

Raymonda was Petipa’s last great success in Tsarist Russia; the wedding scene of the last act is here reworked but still in suitable regal style with chandelier and gold curtaining, the dancers immaculately matched in costuming (Hugh Coleman).  Their courtly precision, beauty and controlled athleticism is affecting, even if after each divertissement the action pauses for the dancers to bow and milk our applause. Amber Scott as Raymonda, opposite Ty King-Wall as her groom, is remarkable.

Then to 1960 and Balanchine’s short ten-minute pas de deux set to a score which Tchaikovsky had left over from Swan Lake. This too is a skills showpiece interrupted by bows, but clap we do for the airy ebullience Ako Kondo and Chengwu Guo bring to their coupling, across a sunny blue design.  Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux is classical ballet but with a modernist humanity to many gestures, without Raymonda’s stiff formality. 

Best of all is William Forsythe’s Artifact Suite (2004), drawing on the first works he created at the start of his famed directorship of the Frankfurt Ballet in 1984.  To the strings of Bach, two couples emerge from shifting lines of dancers through the shadows, all in other worldly green.  Each couple matches Bach’s counterpoint by dancing to their own.

Forsythe too interrupts the action, by dropping and raising the curtain, but here to reset our focus. His delight in geometric patterning and group surges of hieroglyphic arm movement really takes flight later, to Eve Crossman-Hecht’s driving piano score (pianist Kylie Foster).  While Artifact doesn’t employ Forsythe’s familiar super kinetic movement, there’s palpable tension as classical groups turn military in precision, even fascist.  It’s a stunning end.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Daniel Boud