LAST Friday, exactly 20 years after the Australian Ballet inaugurated the Arts Centre's capacious State Theatre stage, the company paid tribute to the venue it calls home with a stylish, all-stops-out gala. Underpinning the event, Orchestra Victoria, under AB music director Nicolette Fraillon, gave one of its best performances of the year.
Attracting loyal patrons from across the country, the gala was simultaneously an old-fashioned love-in with Russian ballet and a test of the company's credentials. It was pleasing to see a resurgence in classicism in the company: considerable focus on contemporary ballets for the past 15 years has dulled the clarity of 19th-century style among some dancers.
Five numbers by 19th-century master Marius Petipa began with the Kingdom of the Shades scene from Petipa's La Bayadere, a mantra of lilting arabesques weaving mesmerically across the stage. The AB's beloved veteran principal Steven Heathcote and the company's newest principal ballerina, Rachel Rawlins, extended this potentially academic scene with deep feeling and glamour. Rawlins was wonderful, pulling out long, lingering phrases, elegant and noble with wistful beauty: no wonder Heathcote danced with such ardour.
Another new principal, Matthew Lawrence, emerged as the company's most serious male classicist in The Nutcracker pas de deux. His exquisite precision and taste made light work of a solo full of thrilling pirouettes and tantalisingly complex jumps. He had fun, too � unlike Amber Scott, who seemed uncharacteristically out of tune with this choreography. Lana Jones and Jia Yin Du worked hard to pull off hundreds of star turns in Vasily Vainonen's thankless revolutionary Soviet ballet, The Flames of Paris.
The Don Quixote and Black Swan pas de deux, danced with maximum commitment by Madeleine Eastoe and Marc Cassidy, and Gaylene Cummerfield and Robert Curran respectively, pleased the audience but did not have the spark and classiness these brilliant duets demand. The appearance of Christine Walsh � a joyous, unforgettable Aurora in 1984 � as the Queen in The Sleeping Beauty sent waves of nostalgia through the house. Her latest successor, Lucinda Dunn, danced the Act1 solos with great panache.
The gala closed excitingly with George Balanchine's Symphony in C and the dancers seemed infinitely more relaxed than they did earlier this year. It was a joyous finale, with stand-outs including Danielle Rowe, Dunn, Curran, Cummerfield and Adam Bull, who reprised a lead role at a week's notice.
By Lee Christofis - The Australian