Sydney Dance Company at Annenberg

Homage to a piano

LEWIS WHITTINGTON

The last time the Sydney Dance Company performed at the Annenberg, its set for Eclipse— a snaky tubular metal structure that framed the dances arena— was seized for X-ray as suspicious cargo by customs. The company’s choreographer and director Graeme Murphy took it all in stride, and the work’s raucous brand of outback balleroo, propelled by its own pyro-theatrics, left the audience panting in the aisles. Murphy thinks big choreographically, uses plenty of dancers onstage, and power-loads his canvas with flash narrative and comic invention.

No production problems arose with Sydney’s new work, Grand, as in piano, which stood securely onstage at the Annenberg for their return last week. Its black lacquered S-shaped casing enshrouded the instrument dramatically and later floated above it, or it opened up as a backdrop when the instrument traveled across the stage. Grand, by the nature of its 20 different pieces of music in every style, keeps Graeme reined in from shooting off all of his fireworks at once, and the restraint shows specifically and cumulatively.

Time-traveling medley

The score, book-ended by Bach and played with sustained drama by pianist Scott Davie, is a 75-minute time-traveling medley of everything from sinewy transcriptions of Villa-Lobos, Ligeti, Beethoven and Gershwin to show jazz from Harold Arlen to Fats Waller. The musicians and dancers are positioned together onstage, a revelation of the musician-dancer relationship that’s a rare study itself— the usually invisible element in dance that can float or deflate a piece.

Costumes with notes on them or skirts swirling like piano rolls threaten thematic bloat, but this unsubtle symbolism is just another un-ironic design in the mix. Murphy is a straightforward Aussie auteur, with no need to abstract into artsy realms. He gets you there right away with a free-wheeling showcase, with flash homage to everyone from Busby Berkeley (in blooming canon lines, rather than typical campy static kaleidoscopes) to Nijinsky‘s Afternoon of a Faun.

A showman sidetracked by comedy

Grand dramatically contrasted the look of Eclipse’s density, with precision solos and silky duets, building foundation for the ensemble segments, which were liberated but not watered-down in detail. Murphy, the showman, likes dance comedy and gets sidetracked with such offerings as a fey boy determined to conquer his dancing boy fear, even when his leg keeps springing out from fifth position or during dangerous pointe shoe pratfalls with a budding ballerina who’s Pavlova standing still but Gilda Radner in flight.

One eerie section has pianist Davie reaching in the guts of the piano to strum the strings. This number is danced by two women in double-tempo hyper-duet under spine-stenciled smoke. Bradley Chatfield’s beefy acrobatic style includes a series of muscularly danced single-arm somersaults thrown in like that of classical ballet fouettes. A cameraman comes in cam to transfer a live keyboard feed projected on a scrim, with Davie’s fingers dancing around the dancer. Chen Wen solos the Faun tableau with such control and body articulation that singular gorgeous bodyscapes keep blooming.

Later, a quartet for three men and a woman proves an equally dramatic study: The men walk her through the air on their hands and toss her around when they aren’t erotically dancing with her. Is she their partner, or does she represent femininity between them?

Full company dances, such as Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow, open up into a cathartic statement of humanism. Murphy doesn’t try to choreograph Bach’s profundities; his is a lighter, wiser hand that moves the dancers around the music’s environs and innerspace.