Dance

The Australian Ballet’s latest production, Prism, is a triple bill that brings moments of austere beauty and pure joy. By Alison Croggon.

The Australian Ballet’s Prism has moments of pure joy

Samara Merrick performs William Forsythe’s Blake Works V (The Barre Project).

Credit: Kate Longley

Something about watching American postmodern dance can make me feel purely happy. Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces (1983) is one such work. It’s the opening for Prism, a program of three contemporary works by Robbins, Stephanie Lake and William Forsythe presented by The Australian Ballet, that demonstrates how artistic director David Hallberg is vitalising the company.

Working from the 1960s to the 1980s, choreographers such as Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk and Trisha Brown revolutionised the vocabulary of contemporary dance, moving from the modernist focus on individual virtuosity towards a more collective and democratic idea of what dance might be. It is perhaps no accident that many of these choreographers are women.

Dance grouped under the postmodern rubric is enormously varied. Often working in galleries and collaborating across disciplines – Childs’ groundbreaking Dance (1979), for example, features a score from Philip Glass and design by visual artist Sol LeWitt – these choreographers introduced many things to dance that are now taken for granted: everyday movement, improvisation, the vagaries of chance, a sense of collective play. Their work brings a stage to life, activating every inch with a dynamic clarity. Through all the air they create before us rises a bubble of pure delight.

Robbins isn’t strictly a postmodern choreographer, but he was well aware of the work of Childs and others who had collaborated with Glass. He told The New York Times he wanted to treat the music “differently – not minimally”, with the caveat that, because of Glass’s particular style, all dances to his music might be similar. So it appears: a strong sense of minimalism remains in Glass Pieces.

From the moment dozens of dancers walk onto the stage, as if they’re streaming across a concourse or a public square, you can’t help but feel an irresistible joy. Glass Pieces moves through three sections that might be read (or not) as different parts of a day – from maybe a sunny lunchtime to a romantic twilight – but it remains essentially, and pleasingly, abstract. Robbins’ control of the stage is quietly masterful: here even the negative space breathes. The three sections, in which exacting chorus work is offset by some breathtaking pas de deux, are superbly danced by The Australian Ballet ensemble.

A dancer, choreographer and director who worked across ballet and commercial musicals, Robbins is best known for his choreography on West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof. Indeed, there are echoes of the former in a section of Glass Pieces where the men and women face off. The dance came about when Robbins was invited to direct Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten and decided to first choreograph the music. Although he later withdrew from the opera due to scheduling problems, Glass Pieces went on to become a separate production, choreographed to extracts from Akhnaten and two tracks from Glass’s studio album Glassworks, “Rubric” and “Façades”.

Ronald Bates’s set, co-designed with Robbins, is backed by an enormous wall of graph paper, apparently because Robbins used it to work out the movement for the score. Ben Benson’s costumes are in simple block colours, mainly pastels with the odd splash of primary colour. What Robbins most carries from the postmodernists is that sense of airy everydayness. Watching the work now, it feels quintessentially American: a pastoral vision splendid of a United States that now seems to be vanishing into an irrevocable past.

Robbins’ restraint is an excellent foil to the excesses of Stephanie Lake’s Seven Days, a work for seven dancers that is the second offering of her residency at The Australian Ballet. The dancers are fewer than in Lake’s previous maximalist work, but again the quotidian, as per its title, is foregounded. The work is set to – and often driven by – Peter Brikmanis’s adaptation of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, giving a baroque sheen to a dance that operates at a domestic or chamber scale.

Seven Days works through variants and themes that will be familiar to those who have followed Lake’s work – repeated movements that ripple through a row of dancers like flocking, the tension between the group and the individual, expressions of naked conflict and resolution, moments of comedy. Each “day” is punctuated by the dancers gathering casually in the middle of the stage, inaudibly conferring as if planning the next movement, or maybe simply gossiping. There were times when I felt the rhythm faltered – a sequence a tad too long here, a few too many repetitions there – but as a consolidation and focusing of Lake’s work to date, it is a powerful piece.

The production is simple but arresting. Bosco Shaw’s lighting creates and dismantles spaces in a wide darkness, with a mix of diagonal lighting and spotlights. The dancers wear burnt-orange costumes by Kate Davis – one in a babydoll dress, another in shorts with naked torso – that enhance each dancer’s individuality while still creating a strong sense of ensemble.

I found myself increasingly pondering the histrionic body at play in the dance – the gestures often seem exaggerated, even melodramatic, although perhaps that is also a result of seeing it through the prism of Robbins’ cool restraint. It made me think of Christina Stead telling a friend that the worst thing about real life is that in moments of crisis one finds oneself speaking like a character out of a bad novel. Lake brings to stage the mess of ordinary lives – the unresolved, the comic, the awkward. Each new day, the dancers gather it all up and begin again.

William Forsythe’s Blake Works V (The Barre Project) is different again, and for me the highlight of the evening. The choreography, adapted by Forsythe himself for individual Australian Ballet dancers, emerged in the lockdowns of the pandemic, when he was inspired by the dancers who maintained their daily discipline by practising barre techniques wherever they could at home. It’s the result of a long-term collaboration between Forsythe and the Grammy Award-winning musician and composer James Blake that began in 2016.

Blake’s electronic music is a stark contrast with the classical piano music that usually accompanies barre work. Against a monochrome set with a single prop – a barre dimly lit backstage – dancers whirl on and off stage, elaborating a formal exploration of barre exercise that builds through a series of exhilarating solos, duets and trios to an exuberant full-ensemble finale.

In one filmed sequence, projected onto a full-stage scrim to the haunting, electronically treated voice of Blake’s “Lindisfarne I”, we see hands moving together on a barre, expressive both of aloneness and of the desire for connection. There’s something very moving about the solitudes explored here. This austerely beautiful dance has the air of a “late” work from a master artist – the complex revealed through the apparently simple, the elegant refinement of a lifetime’s work.

Prism is playing at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, until October 4 and at the Sydney Opera House November 7-15.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 4, 2025 as "Heart of Glass".

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