Royal NZ Ballet salutes the fallen

Salute
The Royal New Zealand Ballet
Aotea Centre
Until June 25

There have been a number of exhibitions and performance relating to World War I over the past year. Each has explored different dimensions of the way that war has affected the individuals and the nation. They have all sought to understand the event as well as comprehend the notions of heroism, despair, failure and reflect on both importance and pointlessness of warfare.

The Royal New Zealand Ballet has produced “Salute," its own homage, with four dances that explore the emotional and spiritual dimensions of the way warfare impacts of the psyche of the individual and nation.
The programme should have started with the third work on the programme, “Salute,” by choreographer Johan Kobborg. This was a light-hearted work which could be seen as the ball before the battle of Waterloo, soldiers parading and preening with a bevy of young women. Here the soldiers could put on their brave exteriors, a mixture of bravado and civility as they vied for the opportunities to dance. The work consisted of a number of vignettes with posturing and display by the soldiers and coquettish dancing by the young women.

Behind the frivolous dancing there was a sense that all is not right. In one sequence a young soldier is constantly tempted by one of the women, yet he is distracted by something in the distance – a sound, a memory or a premonition of battle.

The three other works were firmly centred on the battlefield; “Dear Horizon” choreographed by Andrew Simmons, “Soldier’s Mass” by Jiri Kylian and “Paschendaele” by Neil Ieremia.

“Dear Horizon” was moving and evocative work in which male and female dancers met in a collision of love and death. The female dancers were a combination of girlfriend, guardian angel and angel of death. Much of the dance was concerned with mutual support as both male and female dancers lifted, held up, walked with and sustained each other. At times the male dances were physical protectors of the females but equally the females provided emotional and spiritual protection.

The dancers' movements were at times limpid, slow and dignified while at others tense and angular. Some of the movements were a mix of parade ground symmetry and battle front confusion. Many of the sequences gained power because of the interplay between dancers, the elaborate set designed by Tracy Grant Lord and the ferocious music of Gareth Farr, which captured a sense of impending doom. Crucial to the music was the cello playing of Rolf Gjelsten, which provided an emotional and beseeching cry. 

The “Soldiers Mass” danced to the music of Bohuslav Martinu focuses on the fears and apprehension of soldiers. We initially encounter them dressed in khaki outfits, with their backs to us as though at a religious service, contemplating a bloody landscape but then they move through the landscape. They stoop, stumble, run and fall, dying multiple deaths, resurrected to die again. Most of the time they move as a group in a series of dances that are a mix of calisthenics and army drills following the various stages of the soldiers' life, their dancing capturing their evolving physical and emotional states. Occasionally there are individuals or small groups whose dancing stressed the interdependence of the individual and the group but also emphasised their vulnerability.

The final piece “Passchendaele” by Neil Jeremiah was the outstanding work on the programme. Deriving from Ieremia’s unique modernist form of dance rather than a ballet tradition the work stressed physicality and energy. It was a brilliantly conceived work of extraordinary pathos and beauty and the one work on the programme that needed to be longer. The men threw themselves around the stage with a ferocious energy and a palpable sense of urgency and drama.

The music by Dwayne Blomfield provided a chilling accompaniment to the dance from the staccato noise of machine guns to the mix of the martial and rousing sounds. In the midst of the music there was also the shrill sound of a whistle instructing the men out of the trenches and onto the battlefield. 

Adding to the drama of the work were images by artist Geoff Tune, his red and black images of the battlefield and corpses providing an unsettling panorama The work concludes with a loud knock, an aural image which recalls the knock on the door that family’s came to dread with news of a fallen son but it was also the knock that is said to precede death.

Both the Simmonds and Ieremia works will be included in the ballet company's tour of Europe later in the year, fine and poignant examples of current New Zealand choreography as well as being relevant to a European audience.

Disclosure: John Daly-Peoples has a relative on the board of the Royal New Zealand Ballet