The Melbourne Festival has announced its first highlight from this year's program, and it promises to be the must-see event for dance lovers anywhere in the country in 2017.
In an Australian premiere, the world’s greatest ballet troupe, the Paris Opera Ballet, alongside dancers from the Wayne McGregor Dance Company, will perform legendary British choreographer Wayne McGregor's Tree Of Codes.
The show features a world-class roll call of collaborators, including music by Mercury Prize-winning British DJ and producer Jamie xx, and production design by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, best known for his light installations including the stunning 2003 Turbine Hall display for London’s Tate Modern, The Weather Project.
McGregor is ranked amongst the world’s top contemporary choreographers. He has created work for more than a dozen ballet companies, including world leaders in the art form such as the Bolshoi Ballet, New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet Covent Garden, where is a Resident Artist. He also boasts an impressive list of stage and screen credits, creating choreography for such as films as Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire and Tarzan, and music videos for Radiohead and The Chemical Brothers.
Tree Of Codes is a response to award-winning American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s innovative book-sculpture of the same name, which Foer constructed by dismantling and rearranging the text of Polish author Bruno Shulz’s The Street Of Crocodiles. A similar process of deconstruction and reinvention underpins the creative process explored in the stage production, drawing fascinating comparisons between Foer’s complex investigation of the intersection between the technical, the emotional and the intellectual.
15 dancers, including 4 soloists from the ranks of the Paris Opera Ballet – the world’s longest-running ballet company, largely considered to be the most talent-packed in the world – will give just six performances of Tree Of Codes, at the Arts Centre Melbourne’s State Theatre.
The production, which premiered at the 2015 Manchester International Festival in the UK, earning a raft of rave reviews, is an ideal event for an arts festival, says Melbourne Festival Artistic Director Jonathan Holloway. “All festival directors have their top 50, the list of artists they dream of presenting during their festival tenure. Tree Of Codes was created by three contemporary artists from the very top of my list, so bringing it to Melbourne in its original form, with soloists from the Paris Opera Ballet, is three dreams come true.”
Tree Of Codes will play at Art Centre Melbourne's State Theatre from 17-21 October — head to the Melbourne Festival website for more details.
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