New Romantics. By The Australian Ballet

The Sunday Age

Sunday July 8, 2007

John Bailey

New Romantics. By the Australian Ballet, the Arts Centre.

Season ended. 4/5

The Australian Ballet's most recent triple bill was a bouquet of decidedly modern aromas - airs that complemented one another while remaining utterly distinct. George Balanchine's 1929 Apollo, arguably the first truly modern ballet, offers a strange combination of classical imagery and mime served up with an irreverent challenging of traditional forms. Stiff limbs and unexpected torsions give way to more reassuringly familiar poses, before surprise takes over once more - the central figure of Apollo's famous rock-god lute-playing, arm windmilling as he strums his lute, being only the most obvious example. The mythic story of the sun god and his ascent might not carry much gravity today, and much of the choreography is so entrenched in contemporary practice as to seem old, rather than new, but the work makes for a rewarding introduction to the evening.

Stephen Baynes' Constant Variations is a new work in every sense, and leaping forward nearly a century we can see how ballet has evolved. Dense, even at times opaque, it is a ballet of pure formal excellence that weighs up the challenge of the modernist call to "make it new" with the difficulty in finding forms of movement that haven't already been explored. Married to Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme, it is a cerebral and provocative work that should have a long shelf life.

Rounding out the bill is New York choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's stunning After the Rain. It's an overtly sentimental work in two parts - the first a succession of pas de deux that emphasise muscularity and poise. The second, however, is an unashamedly emotive number that, while lacking formal innovation, plucks the heartstrings with that apollonian sweep. Kirsty Martin and Steven Heathcote evoke the sense of two lovers in an intimate moment besieged with the successive waves of emotion available only to long-term partners - regret, loss, pleading and hope seem to shimmer in the space between them as they circle and part.

After the Rain might be indulgent in parts, but it's a fitting end for the 24-year career of Heathcote, and the flood of cheering with which it was received suggests he couldn't have gone out on a better note.

© 2007 The Sunday Age

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