Bespoke

What an exhilarating afternoon of dance Bespoke was. As Li Cunxin said in his program note, ‘there’s always a sense of excitement in the air around Bespoke time,’ Queensland Ballet’s annual contemporary dance season, and this year was no exception. I don’t know whether it’s because this is the first time in two years they’ve staged a Bespoke season, or we were all celebrating that it was good to have it back.

Company principals, corps dancers, and Jette Parker Young Artists, all come together in a euphoric program of dance, with everything from modern to classical and a little bit of off-the-wall surprise.

Opening with former Principal Paul Boyd’s Caravanserai, the Pre-Professional Program Dancers took us into the maze of a spice bazaar on the ‘Silk Road’, in an arresting series of dances that were as colorful as the orange-colored harem pants and tops the girls wore. With the boys bare-chested and in black culottes, and a physicality to the dance not unlike a haka, it was a romp through Asian exotica on various themes relating to ceremony and unity.

Resident choreographer Natalie Weir’s Fallen, taken from the text of Shubert’s Winterreise, and poems by Wilhelm Muller, was danced by the Jette Parker Young Artists, and was about loss and despair. A Caravaggio-like gloom opus that got darker as it progressed, Weir’s use of dramatic light by Cameron Goerg was masterful, beginning on a man in a chair bathed in a square of light that opened out to a rectangle and finally full-stage as the man and his alter ego experience angst and hopelessness against a background of female dancers in blue dresses who acted like a Greek Chorus. The striking appearance of a woman in red, a lost love held aloft with fingers reaching for the man, was searingly effective. Like all of Weir’s work it was steeped in emotion.