The Oracle: Meryl Tankard Tackles The Rite of Spring

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Meryl Tankard and Paul White Tackle Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring written by Philip Szporer

“Sensual” and “intense” are two words often adopted to describe the dances created by Meryl Tankard, one of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary artists. The Oracle, co-choreographed with its dancer, Paul White, is a new and inspired reading of The Rite of Spring. Created as a solo for a male dancer, it is a 21st century “modern incantation of ancient rites and classical male beauty.”

As many choreographers before her, Tankard was drawn to Igor Stravinsky’s seminal score for the infamous Vaslav Nijinsky ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, created for the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev in 1913. In the original production, Nicholas Roerich, a specialist in the primitive iconography of pagan Russia, created sets and costumes. A hundred years ago, the ballet elicited booing, catcalls from the audience, even fistfights, at its Paris premiere at the Théatre des Champs-Élysées, and was considered to be a flop at the time.

Nijinsky’s angular, abstract, and geometric movement style embodied both the logic and frenzy of Stravinsky’s score, and the creative troika captured the urgency of the score’s theme of life, death, sacrifice, and rebirth. But his movement ideas derailed audiences habitually in adoration of airborne Romantic styles.

In 2009’s The Oracle, Tankard crafts a rich exploration of mysticism and the conflicting forces in both nature and man. “Meditative

Meryl Tankard

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Paul White in “The Oracle” all photos by Regis Lansac

and sensual, disturbing and wise, (dancer Paul White) is the oracle, the interpreter of signs we cannot afford to miss. What sacrifice will nature require to renew a harmony squandered by greed and indifference?” she asks. As White explains, “The piece is full of opposing forces. It’s masculine and feminine, it’s violent and nurturing, there is strength and vulnerability. The ‘chosen one’ in the tale of The Rite of Spring is honored to be selected as the sacrifice, but fearful and wary simultaneously.”

While conceiving the project, Tankard was drawn to the enigmatic paintings of Norwegian figurative contemporary artist, Odd Nerdrum, whose affinity to Rembrandt and Caravaggio has guided his skillful work noted for its “dramatic lighting and emotive figures.” As well, she filters her ideas through another Nordic sensibility: the haunting images in Ingmar Bergman’s film, Virgin Spring, a harrowing tale filled with undercurrents of faith, revenge, savagery and hypocrisy.

Tankard creatively builds the dramatic intensity and follows the structure and syntax in the abstract music – which Stravinsky re-

ferred to as “architectonic” – and references Nijinsky’s original movement phrases.

As White says, Tankard kept seeing a ‘Nijinsky-esque’ type quality to his own body and movement. “An improvised solo of his about earthquakes fitted perfectly to music from the Rite… Nijinsky’s solo is still in the piece today, almost unedited.” White offers a skillful and passionate performance that is sensuous, intricate, demanding, explosive, and controlled. Melbourne’s Herald Sun celebrates his “elusive combination of strength, suppleness, and flexibility.” White continued...

Meryl Tankard’s

“The Oracle”

February 26, 2013 at 8pm www.meryltankard.com Dance Series support provided by

The Cheng Family Foundation with additional support by

Kari and Michael Kerr & Sonnet Technologies

IRVINE

BARCLA Y THEATRE

www.thebarclay.org

IRVINEBARCLAYPRESENTS the 2012-13 International Contemporary Dance Series

often combines dance, acting, singing and music in a dynamic, expressive, often humorous form of dance theatre. The Canberra Times comments, “As with musical composition, her works are aesthetically and technically structured yet invoke deep emotional responses that evade expression in mere words.”

For The Oracle, Tankard has assembled a talented array of designers. Visual and set designer, Régis Lansac (also her husband), has created an opening sequence of kaleidoscopic projections fracturing White’s body, with a recording of Magnificat by the Portuguese composer of the baroque period, João Rodrigues Esteves, rising over a soundscape of natural and mechanical sounds. Lansac’s projections and video sequences appear throughout the piece and provide an evocative background, while lighting by Damien Cooper and Matt Cox add stunning moments of theatrical invention. continues, “Many of the movements in the piece appear as if there are alternate forces at play. I cower in fear, move cautiously, explode through the air, fight invisible forces, and caress the earth.”

Born in Darwin, Tankard grew up in Melbourne, Penang (Malaysia), Newcastle and Sydney. She joined the Australian Ballet School in 1973 and the Australian Ballet in 1975. By 1977 she was also choreographing, and between 1978 and 1984 she danced for Pina Bausch’s famous Tanztheater Wuppertal. She was director of the Meryl Tankard Company in Canberra (1989-92) and director (1993-99) of the Australian Dance Theatre in Adelaide, subsequently renamed the Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre during her tenure. Becoming a freelance choreographer in 1998, she created large-scale commissions, such as the “Deep Sea Dreaming” sequence for the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, a short work showcasing the history of the pearl for Tiffany and Co., and creating the choreography for the Broadway musical staging of Tarzan in 2006, as well as ongoing work in film and opera. In 2010, Tarzan was honored with the Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography.

Tankard was a leading and devoted member of Bausch’s company, featured prominently in the renowned German choreographer’s uncompromising and intense

creations such as The Rite of Spring and BlueBeard. Bausch once remarked about Tankard’s contribution to her work: “There was a tension between her fragility and her courage. Meryl had an understanding of measure, of boundaries; this instinct and experience gave her that edge.”

In Bausch’s creations Tankard learned about commitment and being honest. “Every single movement had to be real,” Tankard has said. “It had to come from inside you.” Bausch’s much-quoted statement that she is “less interested in how people move, as what moves them,” is easily applicable to Tankard’s subsequent creative process. As such, choreography does not have a narrow definition, nor is it represented merely by a series of connected movement. Dance is actively being questioned in terms of how audiences react to work and what comprises stage production. For the Bausch dancers it was a matter of not hiding anything, and allowing for the possibility of doing anything. Audiences, Tankard has said, “would connect with our vulnerability.”

White is front and center throughout. The intensity of the choreography is, he says, “visceral and earthy and often evokes anger, fear and sensuality in me. By the end of the piece, having danced the ‘sacrifice,’ I’m exhausted which, as an athlete, is very satisfying.” The impressive physicality exhibited in The Oracle is matched, of course, by Tankard’s fertile ideas, and above all else the magnificence and power of Stravinsky’s score, which seems to forever fuel the imagination.

Philip Szporer is a Montreal-based lecturer, writer and filmmaker.

Similarly, Tankard’s approach to working with dancers is collaborative and personal, inviting them to own the works by using their bodies and their idiosyncrasies as inspiration. The work is the dancers. Problems are posed and the performers negotiate solutions and respond to the questions.

Tankard then sees what she likes and crafts the choreography. Tankard’s larger oeuvre

IRVINEBARCLAYPRESENTS the 2012-13 International Contemporary Dance Series