This simple homage to Jane Austen is a genuine delight

Presented by Spiritworks & Theatre Tours International, this is a warmly enjoyable, nobly intentioned invitation for audiences to gather in a stage-crafted drawing room and listen. With the bonus of world-class musicians, Austen fans will relish this adaptation of her best-loved classic in the manner it was first told.

Dance
INDance 2024 Week One
Sydney Dance Company Neilson Studio
August 15 to 17
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★

Independent creators can push an art form’s boundaries, and sometimes it’s part of the fun when their experiments cook up something a little unexpected. Sydney Dance Company’s annual INDance program creates a space for these artists in its Neilson Studio: an intimate venue tucked at the back of the SDC wharf.

The friendly locale tempers the potential excesses of the experimental edge and makes the experience affordable, allowing audiences to engage with a relaxed, open mind. It’s the dance venue equivalent of going to a cosy dinner party at a friend’s house rather than attending a fancy restaurant.

INDance 2024 Week One features two works by Melbourne choreographers: Sarah Aiken’s visual projection-heavy Make Your Life Count and Harrison Ritchie-Jones’s wrestling-inspired Cuddle.

Make Your Life Count contemplates modern life’s paradox of individualism and insignificance. It is quite literally absorbed in its own self-reflection. Aiken spends the first half dialoguing with a giant on-screen projection of herself, then the second half coordinating dozens of tiny projections of her own image dancing in outer space.

It’s tonally unclear what mood the dialogue means to evoke, at times ironic (the giant projection advises Aiken to practise “gratitude” and “hydrate”) and other times attempting to reach the profound. A coda featuring The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony feels unnecessary and cliched in its montage on the cycles of life. But there’s no denying Make Your Life Count is visually striking, with the pink and yellow of Aiken’s costume vividly matching the microscopic close-ups of her skin and eye.

Unsurprisingly, it won an Australian Green Room Award for Best Visual Design. It would be perfect as a shorter dance and art installation piece, especially in a gallery or public arts space, but as an hour-long dance performance, it feels a little bloated.

Cuddle is a quirky, entertaining, and unsettling enigma. Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheef play two heist partners in crime, complete with getaway car, balaclavas, and voice-changing microphones. Their costumes – which they gradually peel off – are stuffed with squeaky toys, creating an amusing symphony of sound effects.

The wrestling-inspired choreography is carefully considered, unsettling with the vulnerability of Tancheef’s toplessness, and simultaneously violent, intimate, and amusing. A live-feed camera projects the dancing onto three screens and the audience sit in the round, so you really do feel like you’re at a wrestling match. For a night of experimental modern dance, that’s quite a fun place to land.

Augustin Hadelich and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra
City Recital Hall, August 15
By PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

Violinist Augustin Hadelich began each half of this carefully curated journey to despair and back with one of the Mystery Sonatas for solo violin by American composer David Lang. Before Sorrow, which started the program, was a prayer-like meditation around a small number of pitches, pausing every few notes and varying the pattern like the changes in bell ringing.

The piece spirals downwards and becomes ever quieter before moving to the very highest register and repeating the process. Hadelich’s remarkable control of tone and inflection made this deceptively simple idea spellbinding.

The “sorrow” that followed was Shostakovich’s Violin Sonata, Opus 134 arranged for violin and string orchestra with percussion by Michail Zinman and Andre Pushkarev. Its outer movements dwell in dark shadows around a central movement of forceful bitterness, driven energy and bludgeoning force in which the warmth and creativity of every musical thought is hammered into banality.

In the hushed utterances of the third movement, a quiet passacaglia on a gradually mutating bass, Hadelich and the string players of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, led by Andrew Haveron, maintained suppressed tension as though contemplating the smouldering ruins of humanity after a titanic battle. At the close, a mistuned march starts up but dissolves into shudders on solo violin.

It was a bold move to end the first half in such depths, but the second half was a journey back to the light. After sorrow, another of Lang’s Mystery Sonatas was built on a series of rising broken chords, each note receiving the same purity of sound. Hadelich built intensity in imperceptibly subtle gradations to reach a peak of pristine brightness.

Having raised us from the depths, Hadelich showed what paradise looks like in the form of three movements from Bach’s Partita In E major for solo violin. The Prelude had magically deft lightness, the Loure sweet purity, while the Gavotte assumed such simple clarity, charm and naturalness of phrase as to become the very perfection of grace.

The last piece, a rarity, was a more light-hearted postcard from Arcadia, a Violin Concerto in A major, Opus 5 No 2 by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George. Son of a plantation owner and a slave, he dazzled pre-Revolutionary Paris with his musical brilliance and counted Marie Antoinette among his fans.

Supported by excellent ensemble playing and careful listing from Haveron and the orchestra, Hadelich maintained the spirit of sparkling elegance while accommodating innovative and dazzling virtuosic writing without skipping a breath.