First-time choreographer Robert Curran was inspired by coincidence, Promenading Robert Curran with Madeleine Eastoe.
Photo: Natalie Boog
IN 12 minutes you can eat a very quick meal, travel five city blocks on a good traffic day, or balance the cheque book, check your emails and maybe feed the dog at the same time.
just as little.
audience, let them see your meaning and purpose, and express something that thousands haven't done before.
That's when those minutes can stretch into eternity.
of rehearsal, months of research, and at least a year of listening to one piece of music.
He is the novice choreographer Robert Curran, who, as a principal with the Australian Ballet, knows that dancers reveal their personality each time they step on stage.
But this is different, says Curran. To choreograph for the first time is "a very confronting prospect.
It made me very nervous. This is quite a vulnerable position."
yet this week Curran and Stephen Baynes, a former dancer and now the Australian Ballet's resident choreographer, were particularly eloquent in describing the evolution of their works, season opening tonight.
Curran asked the ballet's artistic director, David McAllister, developed from a chain of coincidences that was too hard to ignore, "As I kept hearing this one track, choreographic shapes kept coming into my mind. I found out the album was called Music for which made me look for his paintings.
"When I saw them, they were so similar to the shapes that I had visualised.
I read that trains were so prevalent in his life [his and journeys."
Promenade's dancers, in period costumes, are at a train station, in limbo, not knowing what will happen at the end of the journey.
One dancer, Laura Tong, who coincidentally looks like the red-haired woman in a well-known Schiele painting, is listening to her thoughts as she waits for the train.
Curran, 31, says he is "getting on now" - for a dancer - which is why he is doing both a business degree and, at the Australian Ballet School, a new certificate course in teaching elite ballet dancers. "Along with the choreographic work they could all merge to do something very exciting for me," he says, though he hopes to dance for many more years.
Like Curran, Baynes was a dancer at the Australian Ballet, making his choreographic debut in a workshop 21 years ago.
But, despite that long career, "every piece that I do is just like I've started and I think, 'Now I'm on the right track; now I As always with Baynes, the idea comes from the music, in the Violin and Piano, with its one plaintive movement and another, "like this battle", Baynes says.
easily."
Within the music, he envisaged a man and a woman who can't live Woolf?
.
Their argumentativeness, he says, "was almost ritualistic". The female dancer had to show both maturity and vulnerability.
"It's a womanly role, not like [that of] a ballet dancer."
Unspoken Dialogues has evolved over 12 years, emerging Rhodes and Kip Gamblin. Seven years later, and after many principals and soloists had left the company, Unspoken two of the most charismatic principals of the ballet, Steven Heathcote and Justine Summers.
London as part of the Royal Ballet's 75th birthday celebrations. As Summers had retired, the female role was danced by the tall and slender Annabel Bronner-Reid, also now retired, although she is back in her pointe shoes this week for a return season.
coolly beautiful actress Uma Thurman.
to explore emotional feelings," says Baynes.
Baynes says, "to a great extent they are choreographing for themselves, to their style of movement.
because for the last few years, really right from the beginning, I movement would be as different as the music would be.
What I enjoy is finding a piece of music and making up a text to it. It can be very ephemeral but nevertheless there is a narrative. I always think when someone's dancing on stage, there is a conversation going on, something is said.
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