Anna Karenina

International choreographer Yuri Possokhov and his Russian composer Ilya Demutsky have created a beautifully dark, modern retelling of Tolstoy’s great classic. 

So unrelenting is its narrative, so psychological its tone, that these dancers also must be fine actors. Robyn Hendricks as Anna Karenina, who sacrifices all for a passion which doesn’t last, and Callum Linnane as her remorseful lover, Vronsky, excel at both. 

Possokhov’s choreography is rich in personal expression, natural gestures which often top a classical move.  Indeed, as the women are constantly rolled over male shoulders, some dance purists may regret how this more contemporary vernacular movement has replaced a more conventional classical choreography. Not me.   

Demutsky’s ever shifting music, with its melodies and many hints of Russian tradition, is highly romantic, and drives the narrative like a film score.

Supporting this intense storytelling, highlighting the visual feast, is Tom Pye’s modernist monochromatic set with its huge suspended translucent screens, quickly transforming into bedrooms, ballrooms, a racecourse, salons and that smoky ominous railway station. Behind are the integrated, seeming 3D projections (Finn Ross), mostly in ghostly greys. It’s from the same cold industrial world as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. 

The colour is in Pye’s costumes, especially in his meticulously detailed dresses, which suggest Tolstoy’s world of 1878 but, like his set, unobtrusively reaches beyond to other places. Mezzo-soprano Dimity Shepherd is often there on stage, singing the internal agonies of Anna.

All the creatives come with the Joffrey Ballet, which first staged this Australian Ballet co-production in Chicago. But not the dancers.

Linnane proves why he’s just been promoted to a Principal Artist. He shares a compelling intimacy with Hendricks, who in dance and gesture so perfectly traces Anna’s painful arc from obsession to opium- fuelled madness. Adam Bull is well-cast as the chilly husband Anna leaves behind, along with her boy and social position, and Nicola Curry is nicely devious as the Countess.

Tolstoy, partly, posits an alternative way of loving with another, rather twee couple. Benedicte Bemet is exuberant as young Kitty, who recovers from Vronsky’s rejection to find a happy domesticity with the reliable Konstantin. 

As the story leaves the impassioned lovers to their unhappy fate, the world finally ends in golden fields. There Brett Chynoweth skilfully dances Konstantin’s joy and his now acceptance of his fate.  The path it seems is through nature and stubborn faith.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Jeff Busby