Although dance is by nature a collaborative form, Sydney Dance Company’s Triptych has more than the usual number of cooks in the kitchen, most of name-dropping notoriety. There is the music of English composer Benjamin Britten, the singing of Katie Noonan, costumes by fashion designer Toni Maticevski and the playing of Australian Chamber Orchestra’s string ensemble, ACO2.
Then there is the Triptych’s centrepiece, Les Illuminations, based on poems by Arthur Rimbaud that are sung in French by Noonan in immaculate soprano mode. Both the poems (written by Rimbaud in the 1870s) and the song cycle (composed by Britten in 1940) owe their inspiration to the two men’s lovers: poet Paul Verlaine and tenor Peter Pears, respectively.
Into this century-spanning saga steps Helpmann award-winning choreographer Rafael Bonachela, who based Les Illuminations and Tuesday’s opening piece, Simple Symphony, on a series of duets to reflect the “joy, betrayal and affection” of intimate relationships. And the final piece to the puzzle? The idea to set dance to Britten’s work was Noonan’s, not Bonachela’s. “I could see [the dance] in my head,” she told Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM.
In Simple Symphony the dancers wear the lustrous pale pink of a ballerina’s pointe shoes, their costumes barely distinguishable from their skin. When one’s focus settles on the black-clad orchestra behind them, the dancers’ bodies blur into a vision of flesh seized by wind, with all the incidental poeticism of the plastic bag in American Beauty. And when dancer Bernhard Knauer steps briefly though the fourth wall to mince and simper, the audience melts like butter. The piece is naive though, and fragmentary, which makes sense given it’s based on music Britten wrote as teen.
Two aspects of Les Illuminations work beautifully. First, when the dance more explicitly – though still not explicitly enough – addresses the eroticism that ripples through Rimbaud’s poems. Second, in the same-sex duets. From the moment dancers Charmene Yap and Juliette Barton circle at arm’s length, eying each other before entangling in a flurry of parallel moves, it is electrifying.
Wearing feminine black leotards, gauze stretched over their stomachs, the duet between Richard Cilli and Cass Mortimer Eipper is better still. They twirl, arch and lift each other, mirroring moves you’d usually see between a man and a woman, rather than two men who are tall, strong and delectably matched, rippled and sinewy as a topographical map come to life. More boldness like this – in the spirit of Rimbaud’s original work – would have been wonderful to see. It is 2015 and this is Sydney, so why hold back?
Maticevski’s shimmering grey costumes for Variation 10 are minimalist yet arresting. The men sprout deconstructed tutus from their backs – some, like juvenile birds, with just a few ruffles; others in full plumage. Bonachela was solely inspired by Britten’s music for this work, music that he said seems “almost as if it were made to be danced”. A duet between Jesse Scales and David Mack is the closest to classical ballet of the night and breathtaking in its weightlessness. It surpasses the energetic ensemble pieces that fall short of transcendent.
It is touching that Bonachela was so driven by Britten’s music that he placed the orchestra onstage – enhanced by Noonan’s queenly presence for Les Illuminations. But spectacle-wise, an orchestra is a dowdy poor cousin to a dance ensemble and having 17 players dominate the breadth of the stage is a distraction. Orchestras are untidy affairs: all mismatched symphony blacks and spindly music stands. Worse, it steals from us the chance to see the dancers’ silhouettes. To appreciate their form and poise, we need to see their individual outline, not the frenzied forearms of violinists sawing away at their strings.
Rimbaud wrote in Les Illuminations: “I alone hold the key to this savage parade.” This line is quoted in the program by Britten’s biographer Paul Kildea who says it suggests “their significance and connection [remain] in Britten’s head alone”. That is no longer the case. Three works now bear the name Les Illuminations: a book of poetry, a song cycle and a dance. Yet were Rimbaud to reincarnate holding a key, what would he unlock from Triptych? A parade, yes, but nothing approaching a “savage” one, to its detriment.
For a while during Triptych one does feel eddied along by a cascade of admiration from one artist to the next, through the generations. But the current slows. With little of thematic heft to hang on to and no single exalted moment to lift us up and out of what could uncharitably be called artistic back-slapping, it is Noonan who best summarises Triptych as a “feast of sound and movement”. A feast that is enjoyable while you’re at the table but leaves little to chew on afterwards.
- Triptych is showing at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney until 10 October
