Vanguard is a hand-picked triple bill featuring pieces that stuck it to The Man and shook up the system for ballet in the last century.
“Classical ballet underwent dramatic developments in the 20th century and continues to evolve,” said The Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director Alistair McAllister. “Vanguard is a program that will shift people’s expectations of what classical movement can express.” Leading the pack, George Balanchine’s 1946 work The Four Temperaments put classical technique through the wash. Jiří Kylián’s 1995 Bella Figura pushed dancer bodies to new contorted limits and pulverised any restriction on staged possibilities. Then, under a decade ago, Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1929 wrote a new vocabulary for modern dance. These three outside-the-boxers reinvented traditional ballet and splashed icy water on the faces of jaded ballet-goers. The works push movement to the forefront, politely asking epic narrative and fancy costuming to take a breather. The choreography is laid bare, the dancers themselves made the main focus.
Incidentally, perhaps the biggest headliner in the Vanguard bill is the one making all the moves, with the shiny new Principal Artist for The Australian Ballet, Ty King Wall, making his debut performance wearing the top spot title. New Zealand-born King Wall, who has been a Senior Artist with the company since 2006, found his years of hard work rewarded onstage with a big ol’ bunch of flowers and a promotion to Principal Artist.
“It was a couple of weeks ago now, it happened on stage, we’d just finished a show Don Quixote and our Artistic Director Alistair McAllister came out on stage,” he says. “Usually when he does that it only means one thing: somebody’s getting promoted. I’ve seen that happen before a few times and I was just lucky enough that it was me this time.”
Now joining The Australian Ballet’s top tier of talent, King Wall is about to front up the goods in all three of the Vanguard pieces. The choreography this time around is quite different to King Wall’s main repertoire; he’s ticked off numerous classical characters from The Nutcracker Prince to Don Quixote’s Basilio. But the 26-year-old is keen to get his nose out of the history books for a change.
“These are three abstract ballets…they’re all very testing and quite removed from what we usually do. All three are, in their own way, very challenging and rewarding works to perform.”
Kicking off the triad for Vanguard is Russian-born New York ballet legend George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments. Created in the ‘40s, the piece studies the four Ancient Greek “humours”: melancholic, choleric, sanguinic and phlegmatic. Balanchine’s signature staccato style developed during a close working friendship back in the day with his ol’ bud Igor Stravinsky, so expect an aggravated, experimental jaunt of a performance for the opening act.
Fifty years after Balanchine, Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián decided to create new parameters for a ballet dancer’s technique, creating the second featured Vanguard piece, Bella Figura, a psychological study which fluctuates between consciousness and dreaming. The second Vanguard chapter is genuinely stunning, with dynamic choreography, brave costuming and surreal staging from The Australian Ballet. Kylián described Bella Figura as a piece created to make the audience feel like they’re “standing on the edge of a dream.”
Closest to home of the three is Dyad 1929, created in 2009 for The Australian Ballet by UK-born Wayne McGregor, founder of Random Dance and resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet. McGregor created twin works Dyad 1909 and Dyad 1929 as an homage to the Ballet Russes.
“Dyad is a whole other kettle of fish,” says King Wall. “When that was choreographed about ten years ago in the company none of us had ever encountered anything like that before. It was almost like being slapped in the face really, in a good way. It really tested us, pushed us to our limits.”
King Wall acknowledges the Dyad cast, having been taught initially McGregor himself, feel a little more ownership over the piece. “It’s mainly made up of the original cast with a few people changed here and there, so I think the essence of the work is still intact.” McGregor’s finger remains well on the trigger of Dyad, with his stylised, minimalist staging and costuming making their return along with his bold vocabulary of movement.
Vanguard is a three-headed beast of invigorating modern ballet, a triple bill that promises to please those in the know but also offer up a generous sample plate for ballet newbies. King Wall is excited to bring the works to both a seasoned ballet audience and enthusiastic newcomers to the art.
“It’s a fantastic triple bill that [The Australian Ballet] has put together. I know the dancers really enjoy performing it and I’m sure the audience can read that and feel that,” he says. “I think we will change people’s perceptions that are coming to ballet.”
BY SHANNON CONNELLAN
