Keyed Up Down Under

Graeme Murphy's evening-length Grand for Sydney Dance Company is a love letter to the piano.

by Janet Anderson

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Published: Apr 4, 2007

Graeme Murphy's evening-length Grand for Sydney Dance Company is a love letter to the piano and a graceful homage to his mother, a pianist who recently died. Murphy seamlessly strings together an uninterrupted, and very diverse, 17 dances performed to piano accompaniment ranging from Bach to Fats Waller and Gyorgy Ligeti. Or did the dancing accompany a piano concert at Annenberg last weekend?

The curtain rose on a large lacquered shell in the shape of a grand piano, which obscured the actual instrument although the audience could hear pianist Scott Davie playing Bach's Goldberg Variations Aria. This shell lifted overhead, becoming a shadow hovering over the concert below. Meanwhile, Davie's own instrument moved all over the stage. Still, he superbly played Murphy's diverse piano score unaffected by 18 dancers performing around him, pushing his piano into place, or even leaning over to pluck the piano strings.

Like the piano keys, everything in this production is black and white, including Australian fashion designer Akira Isogawa's silky, fluttering costumes. Artfully suspended mirrors made Davie's playing hands visible, and one remarkable sequence used live-action video to project them shadowlike onto a scrim. The finale included a chandelier created from old piano keys. Talk about a total concept.

Luckily, Murphy's choreography is as inventive and clever as his themes. Whether flipping around amusingly to Bumblebee's familiar buzz, or swirling to Gershwin's Shall We Dance while a company member sang, the dancers effortlessly tackled every odd movement, every change in tempo. The Aussies are a handsome troupe with an idiosyncratic mix of body types. Murphy uses them like human Play-Doh, weaving them in lines that mimicked the piano shape, or in up-and-down shifts like living piano keys. He also demonstrated irrefutably that he meant every word about the piano being the focal point of the dance.

Surely Murphy referenced his own youthful experiences with his mother in the amusing sections about young dancers performing in competitions or learning to waltz, and there was certainly grief in Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a dance interlude of such yearning and poignancy it brought tears to the eye. However, ultimately it doesn't matter what was or was not personal, because Grand stands alone as great theater.

(j_anderson@citypaper.net)

Sydney Dance Company, Annenberg Center, March 29, 7:30 p.m.

 

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