What To Expect From A Ballet Set To German Electronica

When a resident choreographer with the Australian Ballet, tasked with creating a new short work, commissions an experimental German electro-acoustic duo to compose an original score, you know that certain expectations will be usurped. It's nothing so bland as working at distance, or even the marriage of glitch soundscapes and dance, but rather the naked aggression and the determined silence. 

Asked about his creation, choreographer Tim Harbour says simply, "I would distil it down to wanting to find a catharsis for aggression."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Munich-based 48nord contemplate Harbour's deeply emotional vision for his new ballet, Filigree & Shadow. As Siegfried Rössert (one half of a duo with Ulrich Müller) explains it, "Tim gave us specific instructions for each section. So we had a solid guideline. At the same time we were free to follow our imagination and the dynamic of the growing work itself. But working on a dance piece, same as with theatre or film, is always teamwork."

"Working on a dance piece, same as with theatre or film, is always teamwork."

While this might seem obvious, Harbour and 48nord have adopted a quite specific and unusual approach. "With this work," says the former, "I haven't devised the choreography as a reflection or as a reaction to the score. I've worked with the dancers in silence and pretty much I've only brought the music in at the last moment."

As experienced dance/theatre composers with a firmly established international reputation, you might imagine Rössert and Müller would take umbrage. Not so. "As we have composed a lot of ballet scores we've developed a certain instinct for possible physical and scenic translations of music," Rössert assures. "It's the choreographer's visuals which show the way of the whole production and we should try to follow this as well as we can, but without neglecting our own musical intuition. And so, it's not that big a difference for us whether the choreographer starts with the dancer in silence or with the first sketches of the score."

Yet amid all this agreeable collaboration, Filigree & Shadow dives unapologetically into a sea of broiling aggression. Harbour speaks of the "forceful imperative" that inspires change. "At points in my life where I've been fearful of change I've geared myself up almost to the point of aggression to be brave enough to take that next step."

Picking up this thread, Rössert muses, "We live in times of permanent acceleration. This acceleration, paired with a higher density of disparate things in our life, has an aggressive component. In the score for Filigree & Shadow we try to reflect this by creating many layers, which allows us to achieve a dense structure, and I think you can hear this force, or powerful imperative, that Tim talks about."

For Harbour and 48nord, Filigree & Shadow represents an opportunity to share a stage with both contemporary ballet and musical gods, including Balanchine, Tharp, Stravinsky and Glass. It's all part of the Australian Ballet's 'modern' triple bill 20:21. Putting his own spin on this, Rössert concludes, "This reflects the contemporary experience of a mostly media-conveyed reality, where disparate phenomena are channelled simultaneously no matter what their historical or cultural roots are."

So, while aggression and silence have played their part, coalescence will now take centre stage as 48nord, Tim Harbour and The Australian Ballet propel the artform towards its future.