Dancers Entrance With Paris Passion
The Age
Wednesday October 1, 2008
NINE decades after it was booed off the stage, the ballet The Rite of Spring returned to Paris on Monday night.
Instead of the jeers and catcalls which greeted Diaghilev's Ballets Russes dancers of 1913, the audience at the Chatelet du Paris warmly applauded the Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre, dancing together in Stephen Page's Rites, inspired by Aboriginal stories of earth, fire, wind and water.The ballet began with one back-shivering moment when music director, Nicolette Fraillon, lifted the baton and the full house saw Patrick Thaiday emerge from a cluster of dancers curled on the floor.Fraillon was conducting the French orchestra, Orchestre Pasdeloup, in the same theatre that has seen the premieres of Stravinsky's Petrouska and Cocteau's Parade, and appearances of Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Richard Strauss.At a reception after the show, hosted by the Australian ambassador, David Ritchie, Fraillon sat while others mingled. For her, a Ballets Russes devotee, it was a particularly significant evening.Guests included a large entourage of Australian Ballet patrons, among them Ros Packer and lawyer Zeke Solomon, who mingled in the theatre's reception rooms, including the Nijinsky Room.The Australian Ballet's artistic director, David McAllister, spoke on behalf of Bangarra, telling the guests that Stephen Page's choreography for Rites was not traditional Aboriginal dance but expressed its spirit.After the show, the influential French ballet critic, Rosita Boisseau, said that Rites was "very strange. It left me a bit confused. All the dancers suddenly appearing covered head to toe in mud."But we don't see Australian companies very often. It's a completely different approach, and we have to be very curious and open-minded towards this kind of composition."
© 2008 The Age