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Frances Maguire

‘Poignant, beautiful story’

Frances Maguire

Frances Maguire

‘Highly respected’

Frances Maguire

Australia sees so little international contemporary dance – considered too far and too expensive a journey, with too small a dedicated dance audience to make it worthwhile. What does appear is mostly in Melbourne and Sydney. So it’s a curious coup for Brisbane festival to land the second visit to Australia by L.A. Dance Project – the troupe founded by the former New York City Ballet principal Benjamin Millepied – after the Sydney Opera House’s presentation of his contemporary, genderqueer Romeo and Juliet Suite last year.

For this year’s Brisbane festival, L.A. Dance Project presented a trilogy of contemporary ballets – commissioned between 2013 and 2016 for the company’s key funder, Van Cleef & Arpels – on the theme of gems. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. There’s precedent: NYCB founder George Balanchine’s landmark 1967 abstract ballet Jewels was inspired by the French jewellery company’s wares, with each of its three acts a tribute to a different precious stone.

While Millepied’s Gems trilogy ostensibly takes the same source inspiration (rubies, diamonds and emeralds), the connection to jewels and Balanchine’s work ends there. Audiences are instead presented with three distinct works, each with its own design team. This is the first time they have been shown together. Presented in chronological order, it’s impossible not to read them as a progression through Millepied’s choreographic development – made more interesting by the fact the final work in the trilogy, 2016’s On the Other Side, got an overhaul ahead of its Brisbane showing.

In 2013’s Reflections, the influence of Jerome Robbins, godfather of contemporary American ballet and Millepied’s mentor, shows. The blend of balletic lyricism and playful, jazzy movement often feels like a genuine interaction between people, witnessed by chance, rather than a deliberate choreography performed to the audience.

The ballet is structured as a series of vignettes – duets, solos and groups of up to five – to David Lang’s music for solo piano, against a dramatic white-on-red text work by Barbara Kruger. Its words – STAY, emblazoned on the back of the stage; GO, on a curtain that drops across the middle of the stage partway through – offer a clue to the theme. The choreography, created in collaboration with founding L.A. Dance Project members, plays with bodies in relationship to one other, from romantic longing to platonic interdependence and play.

The most flawless of the evening’s works, Reflections is a showcase for the dancers’ superb technique. The duets are masterclasses in silken independence. A solo by Shu Kinouchi is stunning, his supple control and springy athleticism drawing a huff of appreciation from the audience. The piece’s variegated movement keeps it constantly – delightfully – surprising, along with playful interactions that feel intuitive and off-the-cuff.

But Hearts and Arrows (2014) is the crowdpleaser: short and exhilarating, set to music from Philip Glass’s popular Mishima soundtrack that is performed live by members of Queensland’s chamber orchestra Camerata. If the choreography feels less distinctive and original than Reflections, it’s also a more perfect marriage of music and movement, with Glass’s propulsive score matched by buoyant athleticism in dazzling whole-of-ensemble formations.

It’s less impeccably executed than Reflections, but the dancers are clearly having fun, and seem fuelled by the music as if it were an electric current. The energy is irresistible and it’s impossible to look away – belatedly, you realise you’ve been holding your breath.

On The Other Side feels like the weakest link: its score – a selection of solo piano music by Glass – is less coherent and dramatic; the set design – a massive backdrop featuring the work of the abstract artist Mark Bradford – is the evening’s least theatrical; the dancers’ execution here feels the least confident; and the choreography is less obviously pleasing than in the earlier works.

But there’s something heartfelt here, particularly in melancholic duets and in a solo by Courtney Conovan that feels more like a spontaneous expression of the soul than something rehearsed. Sequences of interplay between individuals and the group invoke a meditation on community in a daunting world – though ultimately with slim consolation, ending on a strikingly sombre note with the ensemble huddled together, trepidatious.

Gems is most striking as a chance to see a strain and calibre of international dance that audiences arenot often exposed to in Australia. So it was disappointing to see the audience dwindle significantly across the evening’s two intervals – and the local musicians receiving the lion’s share of applause at each curtain call felt almost churlish. It consolidated the sense that Millepied’s trilogy was a bold choice of headliner for the festival’s opening weekend.

• Gems runs until 7 September at Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, as part of the Brisbane festival.