Happy 70th birthday, Royal New Zealand Ballet. Our grande dame of dance, who became a septuagenarian in June, is feeling frisky and flexing her muscles, ready to leap into the challenges of the future.
She had a humble start in life when Danish dancer Poul Gnatt launched the small “New Zealand Ballet” troupe on June 30, 1953 with a showcase of dance in the Playhouse Theatre, central Auckland. Since then, the company has steadily matured and grown in stature, adding a “Royal” to its name, settling in Wellington and working hard to earn its status as a champion of excellence, at home and on the international stage.
This year, the RNZB has good cause to celebrate. “She’s looking very agile, very creative, very experienced,” says acting artistic director David McAllister. “It’s a wonderful age because you hit that time where you know where you are going and you can also take a few risks.”
McAllister has been here for the year of the birthday party. As the former artistic director of Australian Ballet for 20 years until stepping down in 2020, he’s been a high-end, kind of temp worker, caretaking the RNZB after Patricia Barker quit as artistic director in March. A replacement announcement is expected at the end of August. McAllister’s contract ends in November, and at 59, he considers himself too old to take up the job permanently.
“The organisation needs someone who has got that potential to be here for up to 10 years … the company needs stability and longevity. In 10 years, I am going to be 70. You need that incredible energy to take on a position like that.”
That incredible energy will soon be unleashed by the dancers in Lightscapes, a mid-year, four-dance programme put together by Barker.
The first work, Te Ao Mārama, is new, made for the RNZB by Moss Te Ururangi Patterson (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngāti Rāhiri), a veteran choreographer recently appointed artistic director of the NZ Dance Company.
Te Ao Mārama features an all-male cast, fusing elements of haka and live music by rock chameleon Shayne Carter on one side of the stage, and singer/taonga pūoro artist Ariana Tikao (Kāi Tahu) on the other.
“Moss’s work highlights the strength and physicality of the men in the company,” says McAllister. “Obviously, this work reflects the uniqueness of the Māori culture, something the company has looked at and grappled with over the years.”
The masculinity of Te Ao Mārama is balanced by Serenade, created for female dancers in 1934 by ballet legend George Balanchine.
“It’s a heritage piece,” says McAllister. “It was staged by the company in 1975 by Una Kai, the first female director of the RNZB. Una was a former Balanchine dancer. It’s a nod to the best of the classic works in the repertoire and a tribute to Una.”
The second half of the programme reflects the RNZB’s engagement with contemporary international repertoire, with New Zealand premieres of two works by choreographers who are in Wellington to rehearse the dancers.
Requiem for a Rose, by Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, is an ode to romance first created in 2009 for the Pennsylvania Ballet.
“It was very successful,” says McAllister. “It is based on the idea of the romance of the gift of a rose as a sign of love, and yet it is often a fleeting gesture. One character has a rose in her mouth and the other dancers represent the roses. It is very poetic, with beautiful pas de deux and duets that reflect a lot of different emotions.”
Logos, the fourth and final work, reunites McAllister with Melbourne-based choreographer Alice Topp, one of his protégés from the Australian Ballet and an early dance alumni of the RNZB.
They recently joined forces when McAllister returned to the stage in Melbourne in June to dance in a poignant Topp work called Paragon, part of a season to honour the Australian Ballet’s 60th birthday.
“Alice made us look a lot more athletic than we actually were,” says McAllister, laughing. “I felt very honoured to be a part of it.”
Paragon featured veteran dancers performing famous solos and pas de deux against a backdrop of images from their original productions. It was hailed as “a love letter to ballet”.
Topp’s professional career began in 2003 when she moved from Melbourne to Wellington at the age of 19 to dance with the RNZB. Her tenure ended abruptly two years later when she broke her foot and her contract wasn’t renewed because the injury was too slow to heal.
“I loved every second in this company and I made friends for life,” says Topp. “For me, it was a real shock [when it ended]. I felt invincible when I was 21. The company couldn’t carry injured dancers and I was devastated. I went back to Melbourne and worked in a pub.”
Topp’s career got back on track when “beautiful David” gave her a contract as a dancer with the Australian Ballet in 2007, then as a resident choreographer in 2018. “Thanks to David,” she says, “I fell in love with choreography.”
The New Zealand season of Logos is virtually its world premiere. Its debut, in the State Theatre in Melbourne, opened on Friday, March 13, 2020, the day it was announced Victoria would lock down from the following Monday because of Covid.
“It was a very odd feeling going on stage for opening night,” recalls Topp. “We went out there and gave it everything, as though we might never dance again. The next day, we had two performances with greatly diminished audiences and the orchestra refused to play. We did the two shows to a recording and then it closed.”
Logos is all about weathering the storms of life, with its nine dancers encouraged to go on stage as themselves, undisguised by ballet’s usual guise of “makeup and tight hair” and free to express their emotions.
With a simple, reflective foil-screen set, Logos’ soundtrack by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi matches the sense of building pressure when his sad Elegy for the Arctic washes over the audience, and rain falls on the dancers.
Logos is a gesture of survival, says Topp. “The RNZB has demonstrated such extraordinary tenacity and courage. This production … is basically brand new, it’s like clay, ready to be moulded on each dancer, and I want them to insert their own experiences.
“It takes a lot of grit to have survived the past few years and still be in the dance industry. The dancers come out and say, ‘We have weathered this storm, we are made of tough stuff.’”
Lightscapes: St James, Wellington, July 27-29; Isaac Theatre Royal, Christchurch, August 5-6; Aotea Centre, Auckland, August 10-12.
