Ballet celebrates youthful energy

The Royal New Zealand Ballet rework McMillan’s Concerto in the Million Kisses programme.

When the Royal New Zealand Ballet Company's triple bill A Million Kisses to My Skin was just a twinkle in the eye of artistic director Gary Harris, he allowed himself a moment away from practical considerations to ask himself what he would really like to have in the programme.

And up it popped: Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Concerto. "It is such a beautiful, youthful piece, an ideal ballet for a young, fresh company. And the music [Shostakovich's 2nd Piano Concerto] is stunning," he says.

MacMillan was a force in British ballet from the 1950s until his sudden death, at 63, in 1992.

His works contain some of the most spectacular pas de deux ever made. And it was MacMillan who brought the nit and grit of real life to the ballet stage in works with such under-belly themes as rape, incest and drug addiction.

But Concerto comes from an earlier stage in his career. Created in 1966, it is an abstract piece inspired by his observation of his muse, Canadian dancer Lynn Seymour, taking class, and reflecting the effervescent mood of the music.

MacMillan has not previously featured in the RNZB repertoire. "Every dancer should experience MacMillan's choreography," says Harris, who worked as his assistant in the 1990s. "And the company is now of a standard to do the work."

When a great choreographer dies, his work is preserved with enormous accuracy, not just by the notating of steps and by video recordings, but by a careful licensing system, which vets applicants, and supervision of all productions. Sir Kenneth's widow, Deborah, heads the MacMillan Trust and is a close friend of Harris.

When he approached her, with his request for Concerto, she not only readily agreed but offered him the opportunity of updating its design.

Originally Concerto's main colours were 60s orange, yellow and brown. "I wanted to retain something of the original," says Harris. So the bright yellow remains, and so do the tunic dresses, though Harris has given them a Celtic kick with some jaunty pleats.

The orange and brown tones have been replaced by lavender, purple and plum. "Iris colours, to match the exuberance and freshness of the dance."

Julie Lincoln, a former Royal Ballet dancer and ballet mistress of the Royal Ballet School, travels the world restaging predominantly MacMillan ballets for the MacMillan Trust. She has put the RNZB company through its paces for this production, and counts Concerto as one of MacMillan's significant short works.

"It has stood the test of time without dating at all."

She also describes it as technically challenging. "If you have never experienced MacMillan choreography before, it looks quite simple," she says. "But everything is extremely difficult from the dancers' point of view.

"He will take the dancers through a series of steps in a particular direction but then they have to go in the reverse direction to get out.

"It is that lightning change in direction, basically, that creates the MacMillan style. Along with his gorgeous pas de deux, of course."

Lincoln has been involved in a majority of MacMillan's works and relies heavily on "muscle memory", the imprint the works have left in her body through repeated performances. "Notation can give you the bones of the work but then there are all the other aspects, the emotion, the essence. You need that personal vision, for right or for wrong. The smell of it has got to be right."

The work of 33-year-old choreographer David Dawson gives the triple bill its intriguing title. Dawson's choreographic career has been dazzling since he gave up his dancing career in 2002.

Among a battery of prizes and awards is his achievement this year of being the first Englishman and only the third foreigner to be invited to create a work for Russia's legendary Mariinsky Ballet Company.

Harris describes Dawson's work as "with the classical ballet vocabulary which he then tweaks and stretches and ekes into something else to create a totally 21st-century work".

Dawson says he is looking for passion and the emotional side in his dance, and for a sense of physical freedom. "I say to my dancers, 'Be big, enjoy your bones, draw huge things with your limbs and leave behind a three-dimensional piece of art on stage when you are through'."

His A Million Kisses to My Skin, to Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto No 1 in D minor, evokes the feeling of complete bliss a dancer sometimes experiences in their work.

"I had it a couple of times on stage," he says. "And it feels just like that - a million simultaneous kisses to your skin."

Milagros, choreographed by Javier De Frutos, is the "pickle in the triple bill sandwich", says Harris.

First performed by the RNZB in 2003 and the work that impressed critics during the recent tour of Britain, Milagros was nominated for Best New Dance Production in this year's Laurence Olivier Awards.

Dark and powerful, it is performed to a piano roll version of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

On stage

*What: A Million Kisses to My Skin, with the Royal New Zealand Ballet
*Where and when: Aotea Centre, May 18-21, 7.30pm, 2.30pm matinee Sat