Just as a prism splits white light into colours, The Australian Ballet’s triple bill Prism beams out three different dance and sound worlds in Glass Pieces by Jerome Robbins (created in 1983), Seven Days by Stephanie Lake (2025), and Blake Works V by William Forsythe (2023).
Glass Pieces is in three sections to music by Philip Glass: ‘Rubric’, ‘Facades’ (both from Glassworks) and excerpts from the opera Akhnaten, set in Ancient Egypt. ‘Rubric’ opens in the brightly lit everyday, with dancers rushing around in multicoloured practice clothes, dodging one another as if hurrying through a crowd. These crowd scenes are repeated, bookending neoclassical duos and group work. Three featured soloist couples, Mia Heathcote and Hugo Dumapit, Aya Watanabe and Drew Hedditch, Yuumi Yamada and Harrison Bradley, danced with energy and precision, looking sleek in pastel-coloured shiny unitards.
The ‘Facades’ section is more dimly lit, with the graph-paper grid of the backdrop a graded wash of blue. In a lyrical duo, principal couple Benedicte Bemet and Maxim Zenin moved into another dimension of beauty, flow and control. They too wear unitards, saltbush-grey for Bemet, with burgundy for Zenin (costume design is by Ben Benson and lighting by Jennifer Tipton).
Behind them at the back of the stage, an all-female chorus is silhouetted against the backdrop. Their parallel feet, side views, arm movements and halting walk evoke images in Ancient Egyptian art, and suggest hypnotic ritual. Other signature moves in Glass Pieces include running in extended strides with bent legs, a révérence, a limping run, and arm movements with flexed wrists.
The start of the Akhnaten section ramps up the energy. The men burst onto the stage, running and jumping. They wear cream or white T-shirts and bright lycra tights. The women enter later, wearing skirts over leotards of different colours. The movement is vigorous and relentless, as the music thunders to a climax, the brass and percussion stoking up the action. The whole performance was polished and uplifting.
Following Glass Pieces came Stephanie Lake’s Seven Days, for seven dancers, set to seven reimaginings of JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations by Peter Brikmanis. These are fascinatingly different from one another in style, pace and instrumentation.
Marking the beginning of each section, a bright light spears out of the dark towards the audience. The piece opens with a lot of movement in canon, to the point of monotony. The dancers wear various combinations of russet-orange tunics, kilts and shorts. Costume design is by Kate Davis and lighting design by Bosco Shaw.
Lake’s work is characterised by a group energy. The dancers fling their arms, roll onto the floor, sit, exhale loudly, play-wrestle, stamp, talk and laugh. A tiny woman is thrown around in a very acrobatic sequence. Three women skip and twirl like little sprites. In the final section, the dancers dance on and around a row of chairs, and later bustle around like birds.
While the movement in Seven Days complements the music, the seven sections feel like a book of unrelated short stories: individually absorbing, but not integrating into a whole.
Orchestra Victoria with conductor Joel Bass played for this first half of the program. The whole orchestra was in electrifying form, with some particularly beautiful brass passages and wind solos, and rousing percussion.
In the second half, William Forsythe’s Blake Works V moves into a completely different world from the previous vigour and extroversion – darker, intense and inward-looking. The work is a further development of The Barre Project, conceived during the pandemic, with the first ‘episode’ created, rehearsed, filmed and assembled via Zoom.
The recorded music by singer-songwriter James Blake begins with the distorted monotony of repeated broken phrases of song. This reflects The Barre Project’s foundation in pandemic times and the fractured communication via Zoom (the program notes are helpful here).
The movement is characterised by sudden bursts of activity, lunges, off-centre balances and counterbalances, increasing in pace and energy towards the end. Part of the work is a video of hands being placed on a barre, the images cut into three moving out-of-time with one another. The asynchrony of this attempted connection also harks back to pandemic times.
The dancers, four women and eight men, wear various combinations of grey and black, in unitards, leotards, tights, trunks, singlets, and little skirts (costume design by William Forsythe). They are fleet, athletic and precise. Larissa Kiyoto-Ward and Jeremy Hargreaves scintillated in a duo resembling ballroom-style Latin dance.
A triple bill like Prism is a great opportunity to see works by different choreographers, and the dancers shining in response to new challenges. Their stamina and personification of the music were astonishing. The live music in Prism was a particular highlight.
One quibble – looking in different places for information about the production, some online and some in the printed program, is confusing.
