Looking Back To Our Salad Days

 

Party Of Two -
Them's The Rules Right Now

Well, Dear Reader, it seems that the Good Times weren't to last, for we've been enjoying a bit of "Soft Lockdown" lately in this neck of the woods. It was all lovely at the time and at least we got about and Did Things for a bit. In the way of such things, we didn't squeeze in all the joy available at the time as the expectation was that it should last a bit longer, so there's a lesson there for those keen to find such things. Anyhoo, shall we have a little look back at those Salad Days?

First up, a bit of Family Time via a couple of trips on the train down the coast to visit Dear Parents, where we got to generally loll about and take in some invigorating sea air, which are always top priority pastimes. Dear Mother is pretty cracking at Scrabble, by the by, so the least said about that the better.

On a fine day, three hours south of Sydney
Behold the white sands of Jervis Bay

More recently, the drenching and windy coastline
Where I failed to photograph an obliging pod of dolphins

Apart from the novelty of be-masked train journeys beyond the perimeter of Sydney, which are presently deemed verboten, our gallivanting was of typically local fare: dancing classes for Your Correspondent; lunches and dinners with friends and family; a Greek-flavoured wedding; a couple of lectures at the Art Gallery on the "collision of art and fashion" -viz., Impressionism & C19th Fashion and Oppositional Art & 1920s Fashion; and a short architectural walking tour poking around some new/old city corners. E.g.:

Kan Yasuda marble scultpure, Touchstones, fore
Victorian-era sandstone Lands Department Building, aft

The fresh facade on Sydney Hospital
A Plague Year sandstone cleaning project

When indoor socialising went off the agenda again, walking with friends became the de rigueur opportunities for airing the activewear* on the able-bodied and ant-trails of Sydneysiders could be seen marching hither and thither around the beauty spots. And sometimes getting carried:

No mask required for this hitchhiker

[Nota bene: If you've no interest in the abridged theatrical reviews which follow, avert your gaze now!]

It may be recalled that the Pipistrellos had a musical night out a few months ago, but that was not our only visit to the same concert hall, for we had another glorious night in Angel Place listening to the Pinchgut Opera's first concert for over a year, Claudio Monteverdi's Vespers. 

Pinchgut Island (sans gibbet & encircling sharks), 1840
Sydney Harbour's island of banishment for incorrigible convicts

Pinchgut (named for the island), under the masterful guidance of artistic director Erin Helyard, ordinarily frolics in the dustier corners of the Baroque period, so the 8-member Cantillation chorus and the Orchestra of the Antipodes, by celebrating a return to the stage with something better known, took the opulent Vespers back to its 1610 roots with one voice to a part, all the better for social distancing, one guesses.

Pre-performance tuning
Harp, lirone and a lion-headed bass viola da gamba

Then we went not once but twice! to the Opera House to see the ballet.  For we delight in bargains - almost as good as Free Stuffs - the first performance was to the full dress rehearsal of the triple bill New York Dialects. After the retirement last year of Artistic Director David McAllister, there's a new face in charge, hailing from Phoenix in Arizona via the American Ballet Theatre and Bolshoi Ballet and finally Resident Guest Artist of the Australian Ballet ... dancer David Hallberg!

Such beguiling Classical danseur good looks,
Disguises David Hallberg's avant-garde contemporary taste

DH is looking to shake things up a bit and used the launch of his first season to commission a new work by American contemporary choreographer Pam Tanowitz to sit between two works by the late George Balanchine: the romantic and exquisite exercise in classical technique Serenade and the modernist and abstract neoclassical favourite The Four Temperaments. 

Early birds, again, to the Opera House

The new Watermark proved not to be to our taste, although composer Caroline Shaw's piano concerto of the same name was really lovely, and I'm afraid to say that the flimsy white jumpsuits and jazz shoes adorning the dancers were a bit, well, interesting and the whole brought to my mind androids with a computer glitch trying to dance. There was a fair bit of bouncing about and shaking of feet and I'm sure the dancers had fun, and a diet of story-book ballets can be rather unadventurous when Ballet Dancing is your Day Job, but Mr. P and I are made of old-fashioned stuff and like our contemporary ballet to be less kooky. DH will no doubt hope to wear our stuffiness down with time.

All in all, Serenade was the hands-down favourite. And then we had the bonus of sharing our bus home (cheap night out!) with some of the lissome dancers who were heading back to their temporary Sydney digs somewhere beyond our casa.

Then for proper pesos we got some top shelf tickets for a Saturday night in May when the Melbourne-based Australian Ballet came back to Sydney for another triple bill, Counterpointe. Thrilling and delicious entree-main-dessert this time with Act III of Marius Petipa's Raymonda; George Balanchine's Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux; and a first for the AB, William Forsyth's Artifact Suite. 

A staple in the Australian Ballet's repertoire, Raymonda was taught to them by newly-defected Rudolph Nureyev in 1965, and he and his (reputedly platonic) partner Margot Fonteyn originally danced the leads as guest artists. For our performance, we had real-life husband & wife principals Chengwu Guo and Ako Kondo dazzling as the leads, and who dance so beautifully together I can't imagine when they don't use any opportunity to practise, including dancing down the path to their letterbox each morning.

AB's original Raymonda pairing of Nureyev and Fonteyn
Opening night Baalbeck Festival, 1964

This is a proper glamorous tutu and brocade jacket affair, with Raymonda and Jean de Brienne donned in white, and the other dancers in a (tricky) mustard, and straight out of the AB's late 1990s costume box, and a charming counterpoint to the Kermit-the-Frog-green unitards of Artifact Suite. AS is itself a display of hyperflexibility and snappy footwork, and amazing precision between dancers on the annoyingly cramped stage of the Opera Theatre**.

Sandwiched between, we had Principals Benedicte Bemet and Brett Chynoweth dancing the Tschai Pas, and they might be my new favourite partnering, dancing this energetic and challenging short piece with its lifts and swooping fish-dives and pirouette competitions with such verve and evident fun. And Benedicte was perfectly full of beans, too, after dancing the rôle of Raymonda for the matinée.

Who else stood out? Soloists Jill Ogai and Nathan Brook, who has won both the recent Telstra Ballet Dancer Awards and was perfectly partnering a fortunate Isobelle Dashwood from the Corps in Raymonda. But it was just wonderful to see everyone again, and who knows if they'll return to Sydney for the rest of the season later this year, so we were pretty lucky to get to two performances. And that's something to crow about!

This extraordinary bit of Garden Art
Found (thankfully) not too near the parentis domo
Hopes you had a Happy Bastille Day!

* Never on the Pipistrello bods, mind!

** And no doubt will never be addressed since $200 million is presently being spent on renovating the larger Concert Hall of the Opera House.

Image credits: 1: via sidebar blogger Gods and Foolish Grandeur; 7: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences; 9: Daniel Boud via The Australian Ballet; 11: via Pinterest; all else: Flying With Hands