Ahead in leaps and bounds

The Australian Ballet, Arts Centre, Until September 1

THREE recent works combine to demonstrate the astonishing advances the Australian Ballet is making. It is now a world-class ensemble, assured and brilliantly versatile. The program also reveals, as if through a prism, aspects of the international history that helped to shape Australian dance.

Just as Diaghilev's effect on European audiences of 1911 was climaxed by Fokine's Polovtsian Dances, so Concord opens into the distant world of golden age Spain. Nacho Duato's Por Vos Muero (For Thee I Die): on a darkened stage, the living pass from us, like great birds seeking perpetual night. Yet in their swirling figures, we glimpse cycles of loss and joy, endless intertwinings of fresh growth and obliteration. Richly danced throughout, it is choreography to watch time and again.

Alexei Ratmansky's Scuola di Ballo is the perfect chaser. In the Massine/Lichine tradition of frolics, it has enough charm to choke a grizzly bear. The setting is delightful, the dancing a cascade of turns and jumps, several per semiquaver, making even speedy Boccherini puff to keep up. But the triumph belongs to the principals: Jane Casson, the desperate would-be ballerina; Lana Jones, the model student; Ben Davis, the irrepressible dancing-master.

Wayne McGregor's Dyad 1929 invites us to understand it as an image of the period 1909-1929, rich with discovery and experimentation, era of aviators, scientists, inventors, new thinkers. I venture to take it as a companion-piece to Diaghilev's sports-ballets, from Jeux to Le Train Bleu.

On McGregor's playground, the swimwear is see-through slick, yet the women have hardly a foot to stand on, being spun like surfboards, splayed like compasses. Relationships are mechanical, and the crash of the surf unending, for the music, like the ballet, gets nowhere. But that's the point: it's pointless. Narrative is abolished; expectations frustrated; movement thrust almost beyond the possible. These are signals of the post-modernist present.

The challenge of such atonality was splendidly met by Orchestra Victoria under Nicolette Fraillon. No less impressive were the dancers; no less admirable the audience, who seized the chance to respond to an experience far beyond the usual limits of ballet.