Ballet back to heartland

By BERNADETTE RAE

They're off. The tights, tiaras and toe shoes are all packed, the buses loaded and the Royal New Zealand Ballet, after two years of intense planning for their 50th anniversary, are on a celebration tour.

Sixteen of the company's 32 dancers are in the South Island, performing in towns such as Akaroa, Oamaru and Twizel. The other 16 are heading north, with gigs in Dargaville, Dannevirke, Waipukurau and many other centres.

They will perform at the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna next week from Friday until Sunday, and in the Selwyn College Theatre, Kohimarama, on Wednesday, March 12.

Altogether the New Zealand Post Tutus on Tour will touch 50 separate centres, performing in community theatres, school halls and some old opera houses as well, echoing the tiki-touring history of the company.

Poul Gnat, the company's founder, first forged a link with the country's heartland way back in 1953. In those early days performances were held almost anywhere - with dancers leaping gaps in hastily constructed stages, and pianist Dorothea Franchi frequently having to repair the honky tonk pianos provided with her travelling set of screwdriver and spanner.

The company was perennially short of money so the dancers were billeted along the way, often making life-long friendships with the farming families who took care of them on the road.

The tour of 2003 will be cushy by comparison - but the aim of "making friends" with the country and honouring the company's pioneering history remains its driving force.

The national tour has often been referred to, in RNZB-speak, as the "smalls tour", referring to the programme consisting of several small works, or snippets of a big one.

But there is nothing small about the 2003 programme. It premieres a powerful new work, Milagros, from one of the world's leading choreographers, Javier De Frutos.

De Frutos was born in Caracas, Venezuela, of Spanish extraction. He began his dance training there, describing it as a compulsion that overwhelmed him at the rather late age of 18.

He studied further at the London School of Contemporary Dance and in New York at the Merce Cunningham Studio, and with Barbara Mahler and Sara Rudner. In 1989 he joined the Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians.

Back in London in 1994 he established the Javier De Frutos Dance Company, which has toured internationally to great acclaim. His works are performed widely and he has received several accolades, most recently a two-year Arts Council of England fellowship.

Milagros takes its name from the Spanish word that means both miracles and the votive offerings left at churches and shrines. The work is set to a pianola recording of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

Stravinsky's original concept was of a sacrificial virgin dancing herself to death to appease the God of Spring and De Frutos adds his own cultural memories of Spanish religious ritual and his forebears' enormous faith to the music's traditional theme.

But he admits his "chosen one" is a tad more rebellious and questioning of her tribe's decision, and a little more argumentative with Fate.

Fate had its hand in De Frutos deciding on The Rite of Spring for the work, commissioned by RNZB artistic director Gary Harris.

He had created and performed a solo piece in 1990 and claims it changed his life. At the same time there remained "an itch - something unresolved".

While thinking about the RNZB commission he came across a selection of different recordings of the music and the pianola score recaptured his interest, with its fierce, passionate and uncompromising tempo.

"You can argue with Fate but you cannot change it," he says.

The 12 dancers in Milagros, both male and female, wear flowing white skirts, couples mysteriously marked with shadowy red numbers on their backs. The work is non-narrative, poetic and driven by subconscious images, says De Frutos, both his own and those elicited in his dancers.

Its meaning, he insists, is for the audience to decide.

There is the strong possibility that some will find Milagros more nightmare than pleasure but De Frutos has no fears about presenting a difficult work to the country.

Some of the best interpretations of his work have come, he says, from the most inexperienced of audiences - children, whose views are untainted by expectation and theory.

Milagros nestles comfortably in the varied Tutus on Tour programme that opens with Gary Harris' new staging of Paquita, Petipa's classical showpiece, and includes two Mark Baldwin choreographies.

The first is the delicious duet Melting Moments, and the finale is a re-run of FrENZy, set to the music of Split Enz icons, the Finn brothers.

* Tutus on Tour travels New Zealand until April 5.