Ballet Contest Lures Tomorrow's Stars
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday August 4, 2008
Student finalists find that what wows an audience does not always impress the judges, writes Valerie Lawson.
A German prince, an Indian princess, a peasant girl, a pirate's slave, a lovesick village lad, and a wood nymph. Not a quaint line-up at a fancy-dress party but a roll-call of characters whose solo dances represent some of the biggest challenges in the ballet repertoire.Usually danced by professionals at the peak of their ability, the solos in Swan Lake, La Bayadere, Giselle, Le Corsaire, Coppelia and Don Quixote are designed to showcase virtuosity. But last night at the Sydney Opera House, they were tackled by eight talented student dancers in a bid to win one of two scholarships in the richest ballet prize in Australia.The finalists were chosen from 140 competitors in the annual McDonald's Ballet Scholarship staged by the Sydney Eisteddfod. Each dancer shows two solos, known as "variations", one from the 19th century ballet repertoire.The choice involves much hand-wringing on the part of the dancers and teachers as they debate which one best suits the performer. "It is horses for courses," said Maina Gielgud, a veteran competition judge and former artistic director of the Australian Ballet. "Look at what you have and how best to show it off."Rachel Rawlins, a principal of the Australian Ballet, danced the role of the Indian princess, Gamzatti, in La Bayadere, when she won the scholarship at the age of 15 in 1989. Rawlins's teacher, Ann Jenner, picked the solo "because of its big jumps and its turns", Rawlins said. "I've always been a good turner. It showed off what she felt I was good at. It has a Russian style to it and I had that sort of look." "Some people hate, really hate, competitions," Gielgud said, "but personally I don't. I think they are great things as long as they're participated in for the right reasons - not necessarily to win but for the whole experience. "You never know what the judges are looking for. When I sit on a panel I look at the artistic side and potential as much as technique and virtuosity, but obviously ... that [virtuosity] is the most striking thing."Dance is not a sport, so there is an element of subjectivity in the judging. Good technique is a given when it comes to the dancers chosen for the finals, but that aside, the judges take note of more elusive qualities such as stagecraft, while the audience cheers for party tricks such as multiple turns and fancy jumps. The boy's solo from Le Corsaire will usually have the audience roaring, while the quality of a more classically pure solo is recognised only by the cognoscenti.This year, a new ingredient entered the competition mix with one finalist showing the kind of chutzpah familiar to audiences of television dance competitions. He is Aaron Smyth, 16, also a finalist in this year's Australia's Got Talent program on Channel Seven in which he danced a high-kicking, high-jumping solo to Canned Heat, sung by the band Jamiroquai.For this year's ballet scholarship, he danced the much more sedate solo of Prince Siegfried from Swan Lake, finishing with a split jump that startled purists accustomed to a more conventional ending.As a judge - though not in this competition - Gielgud looks for a Siegfried with "high jumps and elegance, and for me, something of a prince in love. That's difficult, especially when you haven't got the [story] build-up to it."As for a few other solos, "I would say it's dangerous to choose Albrecht's solo from act two of Giselle unless the dancer has extraordinary artistic quality at a young age. "To be able to portray the style and feeling of something like that, which is not in-your-face virtuosity, you really have to have extraordinary qualities of that kind."If you've got wonderful beats, a really engaging personality and a love of dancing, you might be able to bring off the role of James" in La Sylphide, while Le Corsaire was "obviously a crowd pleaser" for a boy.The dancers in this compet-ition range from 15 to 19 years. The youngest are wise to choose solos that do not involve ballet's royal roles.Gina Brescianini, a soloist with the Australian Ballet, was 15 when she was runner-up in the 1997 scholarship. She rehearsed the swan queen's solo from Swan Lake until the last minute when her teachers, Allan Cross and Josephine Jason, suggested she change to Aurora's act one solo from The Sleeping Beauty, in which the heroine is celebrating her 16th birthday. "The swan variation needed so much maturity," said Brescianini. Sydney-born Alexander Campbell, now a soloist with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, won a McDonald's scholarship in 2002 when he danced the solo of the carefree character, Basilio, in Don Quixote. "It suited me well," Campbell said, "not only technically but my personality."His teacher, Nicholina Kuner, chose the solo to suit Campbell's masculinity, his age - then just 16 - and his jumping ability.Steven McRae, also from Sydney, and now a first soloist with the Royal Ballet in London, was a finalist in Sydney in the same year with a technically very demanding solo from Sleeping Beauty. A few months later he won the gold medal at the international ballet competition, the Prix de Lausanne, with the more showy solo from Le Corsaire. Did he and his teacher, Hilary Kaplan, choose that for its winning quality? "Not really," McRae said. "I relaxed a lot more doing Corsaire. You can let go a fraction more."McRae's advice for a young dancer is to "try to do something that will challenge you".Brescianini believes each of the 35 set solos for the Sydney competition "is challenging in its own right". But as Rawlins adds, "there's always somebody who can pull them off", even at the age of 15 or 16. Finalists in the McDonald's Ballet Scholarship are Jack Bertinshaw, Jenna Carroll, Jarrad Cramp, Claudia Dean, Lucy Green, Emma Hession, Lachlan Monaghan and Aaron Smyth. The name of the outright winner, who receives $18,000, and the second scholarship winner, receiving $12,000, will be published in the arts page of the Herald tomorrow.
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