Return of the king: David Hallberg performs in Kunstkamer
At 39, Australian Ballet’s new artistic director David Hallberg is pulling on his tights again for a uniquely exhilarating work.
“David’s going to dance in Kunstkamer!” Choreographer Paul Lightfoot, the former artistic director of the Nederlands Dans Theater, mischievously throws this bombshell over his shoulder. He’s heading out the door at the end of our interview about Australian Ballet’s forthcoming contemporary dance piece for the Autumn 2022 season.
David Hallberg, AB’s recently appointed artistic director, grimaces, shakes his head and shoots me a pleading glance. It’s December 2021, we’re in the ballet’s Melbourne headquarters and rehearsals have just started for an extraordinary new work. It turns out Hallberg’s inclusion as a performer is still a deep, dark secret.
Kunstkamer – the word means cabinet of curiosities – was created by and for the Nederland Dans Theater’s 60th anniversary in 2019. It’s a colossally ambitious work involving 21 separate movements and four choreographers: alongside Lightfoot, there is Sol León, his long-term creative and life partner, and NDT associate choreographers Marco Goecke and Crystal Pite.
Lightfoot, who retired as NDT’s artistic director in 2020, planned Kunstkamer as a dazzling work that would play across Europe, but it’s only ever been performed in its homeland. The European tour in 2020 was cancelled in the first wave of the pandemic, so Australian audiences will get to see a work the company has nicknamed “the monster” before Paris, London or Madrid.
Hallberg also had plans for a tour of world stages in 2020, including an evening of works curated by him with the dancers of the Bolshoi Ballet that was going to New York alongside Yuri Possokhov’s ballet Nureyev; there was also a US tour with La Scala, a farewell season with his alma mater the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House; a farewell gala in Japan; and Swan Lake at the Royal Ballet in London. Great romantic roles from one of this century’s most lauded classical dancers, a swan song for audiences around the world before he vacated the star dressing room and took up the reins as artistic director of the Australian Ballet.
None of that happened and like billions of others he went into lockdown.
But now, just over a year into Australia’s top ballet job, he’s pulling on his tights again.
For an artistic director, it’s a highly unusual move. Yes, he says, a few ADs have also danced with their companies; Mikhail Baryshnikov did, when at the helm of the American Ballet Theatre; there’s Tamara Rojo at the English National Ballet and Carlos Acosta at Birmingham Royal Ballet. But it’s rare and he says it’s all down to the persuasive powers of Sol León.
“I commissioned Kunstkamer as a director, and this has been a labour of love since before I became AD,” he explains.
“But then Sol said ‘I’m trying to envisage a company (the Australian Ballet) I don’t really know very well and how this will best work harmoniously with me bridging that gap and there’s a role in the work that you have to do!’ And I said, ‘Oh my God Sol, I’m not dancing any more’, and she said ‘Have a look at it and get back to me’.”
So he watched footage of NDT dancer Jorge Nozal in the original production and thought, yes, it could work.
“Although it’s not my goal as a director to return to the stage, at my age if there are appropriate roles and creative journeys to go on, specifically with the dancers that I’m directing, I think it could be a really beneficial experience for them and for Australian audiences,” he says.
At 39, he says, these opportunities don’t come along all that often. “I won’t be able to do this forever and this is a unique opportunity for me,” he points out.
What about upstaging the company? I ask.
No, he says, he’d never want to do that, it’s what he struggled with when asked to play the role. He believes passionately in Kunstkamer and its sweep as an ensemble work. It’s not a starring role, he emphasises – “It’s not like in the past where I’m the prince in Swan Lake” – but instead, he observes, he’s a vivid but intermittent character who hovers over the whole evening, a looming but diffident presence in an enormous work with a cast of 46.
León, in a later email, elaborates on the part. She created it for Nozal, she writes, and will re-create the role on Hallberg when she arrives in late February to rehearse her segments with the entire cast. She describes the figure as an alchemist, “a guardian between times” or a “capitán” who “observes and feeds the place in a magic manner”.
Kunstkamer is based on a 1734 treatise of natural history, the Cabinet of Natural Curiosities written by Dutch collector Albertus Seba, who amassed a museum’s worth of marvellous, strange and baffling specimens.
The wood-panelled set becomes its own Kunstkamer with projections and a piano on stage and the dancers transform into a company of curiosities, or, as Lightfoot elaborates “a collection of species all brought together in one space”. It’s a symbolic work, he continues, “where science meets art”.
The dancers frequently break the conventions of dance; they speak, they sing four-part harmonies. The NDT is famed for its jumbling of genres and traditions to create an eclectic new language and this is reflected in a musical line that moves from Purcell, Beethoven and Britten to Janis Joplin and Joby Talbot. Everyone is expected to work outside their comfort zone. The orchestra, Lightfoot assures us, delightedly, will double as a choir.
Lightfoot, 56, an Englishman who joined the NDT as a teenage dancer straight out of the Royal Ballet, is a man of boundless enthusiasm, a Pied Piper eager to lead the AB’s dancers to an exciting new realm. When he joined the NDT it was run by the revered and renowned choreographer Jiří Kylián, whose works have frequently been performed over here, on tour with the NDT or as part of the Australian Ballet’s repertoire.
Lightfoot, León and Hallberg have known each other for more than 20 years and although they’ve always wanted to work together, it never happened. Until now.
The NDT is one of the world’s great companies, says Hallberg. “Very few companies garner such collective interest in the dance world as NDT … it has such a rich lineage of creation and wherever I’ve been in the world, if NDT is on tour, everyone is there.”
Lightfoot is similarly full of admiration for the AB but says he’s as interested in the personalities of the dancers as he is their skills, and that includes their vulnerabilities.
“It’s important to embrace their imperfections because those are their characteristics, that’s their beauty,” he says. While he’ll be teaching the dancers a new language – “It’s like I would say ‘You speak English very well but now I’m going to teach you a bit of Russian, French and Japanese’” – he wants to encourage them to find the confidence in themselves to tell him what they think about their roles. “I think it’s important as a creator to meet the artists halfway,” he says.
So what do the dancers think?
Principal artist Benedicte Bemet says this is a huge and powerful piece that will enthral audiences. “It’s amazing and captivating,” she says, and it’s incredible to offer it to a classical ballet company. But the AB is known for the strengths and diversity of its dancers, she adds, and the dancers are eager to tap into the energy of new ideas. Lightfoot, she says, doesn’t care if you’re a star or the newest recruit. “He gives everyone attention and corrections,” she says.
Elijah Trevitt joined the AB in October 2021, straight after graduating from the Royal Ballet in London. He’s not sure if it helped his audition but he said he gained enormously from an intensive summer school he did with the NDT last year. He says Lightfoot’s classical training means he understands how to choreograph on the classically trained body as well as pushing the boundaries in contemporary dance. “It’s almost like a new medium,” he enthuses.
He wanted to join the AB, he says, because it offered a challenging blend of the classical and contemporary.
“I knew that David Hallberg had a more holistic approach and he’s really great; he takes us for warm-ups in the morning and he is so articulate and really helps you,” he says. “I feel like I’m at the start of something new and really exciting.”
Hallberg says that as a dancer who made his reputation in the great narrative roles of classical ballet, he is ambitious for the AB to excel in the traditional repertoire. But he’s also committed to bringing in new work to show what the dancers can dance.
Kunstkamer represents such an opportunity.
“This is a sign of the future of the Australian Ballet, in one regard,” he says. “Of course, we’re continuing to do all the classics so all those who love Swan Lake, never fear. But those who want to see fresh new interesting exhilarating creations? Kunstkamer is absolutely that.
“My vision is to program the full arc of dance repertoire.”
And after his role in Kunstkamer, will he dance again? Hallberg pauses a moment before laughing. “That’s the million-dollar question,” he replies. “And I can’t say ‘Never say never’. I’m not dancing to fill a missing need,” he continues, “so, no, it’s not a return to the stage but this is also not a one-off occasion.”
The stage is there and the call may come again, he says, with a work that offers similar opportunities to NDT’s magnum Opus.
“This (performance) is not a farewell,” he says. “It’s a way to connect.”
Kunstkamer runs at Sydney Opera House from April 29-May 14, then Melbourne June 3-11.
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