This was published 3 months ago
Cameraman and a random seagull are the stars of this love letter to the Opera House
By Chantal Nguyen, Bernard Zuel and Peter McCallum
DANCE
Romeo & Juliet Suite
Sydney Opera House Joan Sutherland Theatre, June 5
Until June 9
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
????
The star of Benjamin Millepied’s dance, Romeo & Juliet Suite, is not a dancer but the cameraman (Sebastien Marcovici, also Millepied’s associate artistic director). Featuring Millepied’s company L.A. Dance Project, Romeo & Juliet Suite involves staged dance, filmed live on and offstage with the footage projected onto huge screens.
A live camera feed is hardly new on theatre stages (Katie Mitchell and Neil Armfield have done it for years) but, as Millepied points out, it is rare for dance. His camerawork is particularly gripping because it’s so intentional – behind every move there’s a thoughtfulness to cinematographic detail and a keen eye to complementing the dance.
David Adrian Freeland, Jr and Mario Gonzalez performed the two leading roles on opening night.Credit: Janie Barrett
The preferred Millepied technique is to treat the camera like a principal dancer, choreographing it into the human movement and blocking its steps during rehearsal. The result is captivating, with the camera creating its own movement and rhythm, and visually carving up the space to enhance the motion of bodies around it.
Millepied is increasingly choreographing for the camera. Following his work on the film Black Swan and marriage to Natalie Portman (the pair made public their divorce in March), he directed seven shorts, four music videos, and a feature film starring Paul Mescal, bringing an intriguing dance-film intersectionality to the ballet world.
The Opera House is also used by Millepied as venue and set. The camera follows the dancers down darkened backstage stairwells (where Romeo murders Tybalt), behind the crossover (the Capulet nightclub and crypt) and onto the forecourt, which becomes Juliet’s famous balcony (where, on opening night, a nonplussed Sydney seagull stole the show). It’s shot gorgeously, like a love letter to the Opera House.
Romeo & Juliet is a canny choice for filmed dance because Sergei Prokofiev’s score is extraordinarily cinematic. Prokofiev’s music can make a wordless, danced Romeo & Juliet compelling no matter what choreography you stick on it: his score is painted with notes more vivid than words.
This is lucky for Millepied because Romeo & Juliet Suite is slightly emotionally muted. Admittedly, it’s pared back – there is no Friar Lawrence, Paris, nor even the warring families – so it’s difficult to know who are this Romeo and Juliet and why they’ve suddenly decided to die. Mercutio and Tybalt (Shu Kinouchi and Lorrin Brubaker) are exceptions, more full-blooded in their violent tension than the lovers. It’s not a distracting problem, though, because Millepied’s style has never been about heavy realistic drama but a chic, abstract and discerning tastefulness – like an elegant glass of sparkling.
This ballet also substitutes heterosexual and same-sex couples on different nights. Opening night featured David Adrian Freeland, Jr and Mario Gonzalez. Like the rest of the cast, they are solid performers with a distinctly American movement style.
Go for the dance, but stay for the camerawork.
MUSIC
Marlon Williams
City Recital Hall, June 6
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
????
Well, it is what it said on the tin.
The loosely aligned City Recital Hall series that takes in Marlon Williams’ shows (this being the first of two in the venue) is called Singular Voices. In the main, the term is applied broadly: off-centre songwriters and adventurous experimenters, quality mainstream figures and the attractively niche. Their voices are sometimes conventional and sometimes imperfect, sometimes pretty and sometimes an acquired taste. But generally within bounds.
Williams, though, is the exception and the rule.
His voice is so many things: a blend of high Pacific tenderness and art pop’s embrace of pretension, a pre-rock crooner and country vulnerable, and, under it all, the separated-at-birth twins of warbling Elvis-ness and the traditions of Maori singing.
It can swoop like it is reaching for God, and it can hover; hanging like the thick fug of incense, he let it run through a Roy Orbison-like ballad such as Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore, and when he briefly messed with it with on-stage treatments and layering, it fluttered wildly.
Williams had entered to a percussive click track and foot-stamping, singing a compelling Maori song in dim light and under a hoodie, the only movement his hands. Then at the piano came one that sounded like Tim Buckley singing Tim Rose, all cursive folk shaped by soul. And a third song that was more Carole King meeting Neil Young, melodic pop soaked in low temper. All possibilities and not a word said.
When he reshaped The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face into a hymn that spoke of the islands and the blue hills in equal measure, it drew the air out of the room, as if we didn’t want to risk interfering with this message. When he followed it with a song in language, we sighed at the quiet frankness of that tone.
“It’s nobody’s fault I was born this way,” he sings. And it is both explanation and dismissal of any explanation that boxes him in, as when he finally pushed back the hoodie and the light rose to show him smiling.
This first set was his “lonely boy” one, he told us, but he couldn’t hold the position the whole time, a stray nervous giggle occasionally betraying him. Yet when he pulled the hoodie back up and sang unaccompanied a song that seemed to capture a path between prayer, lament and farewell, it closed the set with singular grace. Too soon, really; a night of this fare alone would be stunning.
After the interval, Williams emerged in an outfit part Mao suit, part pyjamas, dancing out from the bony hips to the backing tape, singing the languidly oriental, groovy My Boy. “This is karaoke hour,” he grinned. “I’m the star!” And in charm as much as litheness, he was.
In these odd little elegantly funky pop songs – another is Don’t Go Back – and a grand, augmented-on-tape, choral ballad, his Bryan Ferry emerged to join the cavalcade, though Ferry never danced like this, equally affected and unfettered. But then, Ferry never wrote a song about his favourite New Zealand bird (the hoiho, if you’re wondering), either, so Christchurch 2, Durham 0.
The second set eventually relocated to a small table with red tablecloth and wooden chairs under a bordello lampshade. Knick-knacks, a tumbler and a crystal decanter of whisky (“It is real,” he assured as he imbibed), a globe and a couple of guitars – including a $150 pawnshop score – surrounded him.
It was some classy/shabby chic already promising a more varied emotional tone for the next hour, and it delivered, with the blues (a Lonnie Johnson cover) and blues adjacent (his own Devil’s Daughter, which starts “Woke up this morning”, so you know it must be the real thing), an almost hymnal song in language about being quite sanguine adrift on the ocean with death approaching (Aua atu ra) and the slow-burn torch song (Love Is a Terrible Thing) working their magic.
So much so that Williams got a standing ovation, one that had been brewing, you suspect, since that stunning first half hour. What a singular experience that had been.
Marlon Williams plays Anita’s Theatre, Thirroul, June 8; the Tivoli, Brisbane, June 12-13; Odeon Theatre, Hobart, June 16; Melbourne Recital Centre, June 20-21; the Sound Doctor, Anglesea, June 22-23; Astor Theatre, Perth, June 25; and the Gov, Adelaide, June 27-28.
Sydney Symphony Orchestra with the Australian String Quartet
Sydney Opera House
June 8
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
????
In Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra John Adams and Beethoven share a few jokes, trading distinctive stylistic hallmarks like celebrities on a talk-show jousting in amiable repartee. The first joke is the timpani rhythm from the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (which so amused the audience at its first performance that they cheered without waiting for the end).
The cellos contribute a subtle jab from the scherzo from Beethoven’s String Quartet Opus 131, and references to Beethoven’s symphonic scherzos emerge like sly winks and wry smiles. Eventually, the music settles down to vigorous debate about the Scherzo from his last String Quartet, Opus 135.
Conductor Anja Bihlmaier held the frenetic mood of Adams’ work tightly.Credit: Nikolaj Lund
Members of the Australian String Quartet press the point, going over and over the climactic moment of the central section while the orchestra keeps poking away at the repetitive bass pattern. The sternest disagreement comes in shuddering trills from Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge.
Adams has his come back, not just in the sections from which Beethoven is apparently excluded but in the extra twists, remeasured phrases and irrational cross accents that he gives to Beethoven’s already syncopated rhythms.
Although based on playful allusions to Beethoven’s scherzos, Adams’ attitude is hugely reverential, particularly the skill of his orchestration, the clarity of his combinations and the sophisticated deftness with which he manages the difficult combination of string quartet and orchestra.
The Australian String Quartet held their ground with tenacious diligence and, barring minor drifting apart, conductor Anja Bihlmaier held the frenetic mood tightly. The work is driven and intense but ends with a deflating shrug of cow bells, as though to say “just joking”.
In fact, the whole program was built on respectful homages to past composers, beginning with Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, which lovingly recreates the Baroque dance suite in Ravel’s gorgeously piquant colours, and ending with Schoenberg’s skilfully idiosyncratic orchestration of Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor, Opus 25.
Bihlmaier led the first movement of Ravel’s work with steady tempo to allow balanced burbling from the wind, the second with coyness, while the third had beguiling grace. Bihlmaier’s pace in the first movement of Schoenberg’s Brahms arrangement was also judiciously unhurried.
In the second, wind and muted strings allowed Brahms’ phrases to overlap with warmth and caressing gentleness while highlighting highly distinctive timbres. Although using an enormous orchestra, Schoenberg subverts expectations by cutting back to solos in which the SSO players provided some of the most interesting moments.
The orchestra’s full clamour was unleashed in blazing brilliance in the unnervingly militarist march of the third movement and the raucously unbuttoned boisterousness of the last.