Putting The Music Into Design

The Age

Saturday September 1, 2007

Philippa Hawker

For Tatyana van Walsum music is the main inspiration in her work as a set and costume designer. It was no different for the Australian Ballet's new production of Symphonie Fantastique, writes Philippa Hawker.

IT BEGINS WITH LISTENING, then opens out in all directions. Designing for a new ballet, Tatyana van Walsum started with the score, Berlioz's Symphonic Variations - the work that Leonard Bernstein called "the first psychedelic musical trip" - and then began to make connections. First, with the emotional content of the work, and then with the research she carries out and responds to, taking in everything from symbolist paintings to an essay by Baudelaire, from video images of the natural world to a piece of fabric that looks like molten sky.

And always, with dance, she returns to the possibilities of the human body, to the movement and fluidity of dancers.

Van Walsum and choreographer Krzysztof Pastor were commissioned by the Australian Ballet to create a new interpretation of Leonide Massine's 1936 Symphonie Fantastique, first performed by the legendary Ballets Russes, the company whose legacy and influence the Australian Ballet has been celebrating in an extended program. The world premiere season of this new work has just begun in Melbourne: it is the first time the Australian Ballet has performed Symphonie Fantastique.

The pair have worked together on many projects: van Walsum is based in Amsterdam, Pastor is resident choreographer for the Dutch National Ballet.

"For me," van Walsum says, "the music is my main inspiration; when I design I listen to it over and over again, to get the essence of the emotion." Symphonie Fantastique was a radical work in its time, a pioneering "programmatic symphony". At its first performance in 1830, the composer provided program notes for the audience. "I take as my subject an artist blest with sensibility and a lively imagination . . . who meets a woman who awakens in him for the first time his heart's desire," he wrote. And he described a narrative, a trajectory that begins in reverie and ends in destruction: the pursuit of his ideal woman, his "idee fixe", takes the artist character through a daydream, a ball, a pastoral scene, and hallucinations of a scaffold and witches' sabbath.

Behind the narrative is another narrative, a tale of obsession: Berlioz's fixation on a young Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, whom he first saw as Ophelia in Garrick's production of Hamlet, and whom he bombarded with letters and pursued insistently. A few years later, she heard the symphony, and the story of its inspiration, and his tireless pursuit entered a new stage. Smithson and Berlioz married, and had a child, but their relationship was fragile, and they separated seven years later.

Van Walsum was aware of, but not specifically inspired by, the biographical background: "It meant more to Krzysztof, I think." Reflecting on the music and its visual possibilities, she threw herself into period-based research. "I also try to think of the music in the context of the other arts," she says. She was intrigued by an essay by Baudelaire, in which he wrote about the double nature of the artist, utterly engaged in his work, yet at the same time distant from it. She looked at Symbolist paintings, above all, the way they depicted nature. She collected images and ideas. And then, having done the research, she says, the next step is "to let it all go", to begin again in the present, with the new work.

She took the notion of the four elements, earth, air, fire, water, linking them to the different movements of the symphonie. She started to look at colours in the range that this suggested, and to think about images from nature that embodied them.

Van Walsum has used video footage in her work from the very first: she stopped, for a while, when it became all the rage. In her first collaboration with Pastor, the ballet Do Not Go Gentle, which drew on the music of Stravinsky and the poetry of Dylan Thomas, she used projections of images from the natural world, an idea she returned to, in a less abstract form, for Symphonie Fantastique.

In this ballet, the artist's daydreams are linked to air and lightness, conveyed by cloud images; the ball, showing "the tumult of life", is represented by water; earth is suggested by the pastoral scenes, scenes of wheatfields. Slowing down the footage changes the feeling: it can give a heightened sense of a trance or a dream. And then we are plunged into the phase of the artist's drug overdose and hallucination, to images of poppies which dissolve into the flames of hell, when the artist imagines he has killed the object of his desire, is condemned to death for it, and attends his own funeral, a witches' sabbath.

And amid the movement, there is a still image of a woman's face - stark, threateningly beautiful, distilled into high contrast black-and-white - a photograph of dancer Kirsty Martin that stands for the artist's "idee fixe", the image of beauty that haunts, inspires and overwhelms him. Pastor responded immediately to the idea of using the elements. Throughout the creative process, there's always to-and-fro with the choreographer. Familiarity helps: after several collaborations, van Walsum says, she knows Pastor's vocabulary, she understands how he likes to work. He makes many of his creative decisions early, and this helps her too: some choreographers don't begin in earnest, she says, until they're actually working with dancers in the studio, and she must have her designs established a year to six months in advance of the production.

The images from the natural world look elegant and precise, seen on van Walsum's Mac laptop, where she first starts to work with them: on stage, projected onto panels nine metres high, they're magnified, recognisable yet transformed by scale. Projections give her flexibility, the ability to change and fine-tune, up to the last minute, that she would never have had if the sets had to be built and painted. She has even been able to incorporate some fire images that she shot a matter of weeks ago, during a trip to Uluru that she took just before she returned to Melbourne for the final stages of the design process.

The costumes are linked to the images she is working with: "they are not literal, they're not period-based or illustrative", and the most important thing, always, is that they highlight the expressiveness of the body. There is a theme, running through the ballet, that mixes fluidity and straight lines, and it is expressed, in the subtlest of ways, in the construction of the costumes.

All the dresses, for example, are made from rectangles of material: she insisted on that. Yet the effect is utterly fluid, and the straight lines cannot be seen: the skirts fall into waves and the costume makers have risen to the challenge of making bodices from single pieces of material. These tiny, almost imperceptible details, she says, are part of a style that infused the ballet: it's a vision that's both large and small, minute and magnified, where every aspect contributes to the whole.

The Destiny double incorporating the ballets Les Presages and Symphonie Fantastique, is at the Arts Centre until September 10.

© 2007 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home