Kunstkamer review – this fiendishly complicated ballet is astonishing

Cabinets of curiosities had been all the fashion within the 18th century; earlier than fashionable museums existed, personal collections of pure phenomena had been the true markers of standing. One of many largest belonged to Albertus Seba, a Dutch pharmacist and zoologist. He finally printed a four-volume ebook, Cupboard of Pure Curiosities, a shocking, exhaustively detailed doc of exotica that turned a touchstone of taxonomy and image of the Enlightenment.

Seba’s ebook impressed Nederlands Dans Theater’s home choreographers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot, together with Crystal Pite and Marco Goecke, to create a ballet: Kunstkamer. The Australian Ballet inventive director, David Hallberg, secured it for the premiere efficiency exterior the Netherlands, and it isn’t arduous to see what attracted him to it. It’s a daring, expansive work, and fiendishly difficult – the type that challenges a dance firm to achieve out for brand new modes of expression. A standing marker.

‘León and Lightfoot’s dense choreographic language is worlds away from the calls for of conventional ballet – but it surely additionally feels utterly innate, as if up to date dance had been this firm’s pure house.’ Photograph: Jeff Busby

Tempting although it's to catalogue the assorted choreographers’ stylistic quirks, Kunstkamer truly works finest when considered as a cohesive entire, a meditation on connectivity and our need for that means. It has an typically dizzying array of moods and textures, from flippant humour to aching romanticism, and it strikes between them with lightning velocity. However even its violent shifts really feel superbly built-in, the infinite selection seemingly bursting forth from a singular inventive imaginative and prescient.

It opens, after a haunting sequence of projections, with Hallberg himself, returning to the stage as a dancer after retiring in 2019. After a sleek frontal cut up, he turns to the viewers and easily says: “Ouch.” He’s a rare presence all through, with hooded eyes like an owl and limbs like a brolga. Hallberg is brilliantly matched by visitor artist Jorge Nozal, hunched over like a pantomime villain, his face a white masks straight out of German Expressionism. Collectively they create an unsettling picture of non secular oscillation, a toggling between mild and darkish; the entire ballet appears to emanate from their uneasy dynamic.

A lot of the motion, particularly within the first act, is jittery and jagged, the dancers’ elegant traces interrupted by angular extremities – a turned-out foot or a tilted head. Arms are continuously flitting across the higher physique, earlier than slapping down arduous on the outer thigh. Animals come to mind, both immediately or obliquely, however even right here natural actions are stymied, contracted. It’s actually solely within the second act that the choreography loosens, permitting for some heart-wrenching romanticism. A theme emerges progressively, of a wildness barely contained, the sounds of breaking waves a reminder of an unlimited untameable world exterior.

‘However better of all is the corps, thrumming with power.’ Photograph: Jeff Busby

That is most evident within the extraordinary group work, with lengthy traces of dancers undulating in waves. Our bodies look managed like marionettes, faces contorted into exaggerated laughs or screams – however additionally they escape into moments of pure lyricism and an individuated longing.

A number of principal artists shine in solos or pas de deux. Callum Linnane is splendidly sensual and commanding; Brett Chynoweth is, as all the time, daring and vivid; Amy Harris is gorgeously supple and poignant. The elevation of Lucien Xu from the Coryphées and Lilla Harvey from the Corps de Ballet is a stunning shock; it’s terrific to see them given an opportunity to shine, and so they rise effortlessly to the problem. However better of all is the corps, thrumming with power. León and Lightfoot’s dense choreographic language is worlds away from the calls for of conventional ballet – but it surely additionally feels utterly innate, as if up to date dance had been this firm’s pure house.

The set design, by León and Lightfoot themselves, is magnificent, towering and extreme. Three large darkish gray partitions fold out and in, like pages in an enormous ebook, doorways opening in all places like lift-the-flap insets. The monochrome costumes (Joke Visser, Hermien Hollander) are placing, the one flash of pink hinting on the colouring course of that adopted Seba’s preliminary black and white illustrations. The music ranges from the baroque formalism of Purcell to the dreamy atmosphere of Ólafur Arnalds, all performed beautifully by Orchestra Victoria below the skilled baton of Nicolette Fraillon. And the lighting design (Tom Bevoort, Udo Haberland, Tom Visser) is astonishing, creating corridors and swimming pools or throwing menacing shadows.

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Kunstkamer is a pinnacle of Hallberg’s tenure to date, a convincing indication of future instructions. It permits for particular person excellence, but it surely finally champions the interconnectivity of the entire, the best way that divine individuality subsumes itself into the group, species into genus. That is up to date dance as Regency fever dream. Like Seba’s cupboard, stuffed with awe and awe inspiring.

• Kunstkamer, carried out by the Australian Ballet, is on at Arts Centre Melbourne till 11 June. It should even be livestreamed on 10 June.