The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts are wrapping up the year with a fabulous showcase of dance from the school’s 2nd and 3rd year dance students.
‘Flourish’ will feature four works for lovers of classical and contemporary dance alike, highlighting some of the best in Perth’s rising stars of dance.
One of the world’s best-loved classical ballets, ‘Paquita’ will be restaged under the instruction of Australian choreographer Sue Healey.
Healey’s highly physical style will tell dance legend Marius Peptipa’s story of the young Paquita, rescued from a massacre as a child by gypsies, who years later while traveling and dancing with the gypsy band, returns to her home in the Spanish valley town and reunited with her family.
WAAPA graduate Rhiannon Newton has created her own piece for the showcase that explores the universal language of dance with her work, ‘Circle Dance’. Newton creates a new circle dance, one that brings together the dancers’ individual movement histories, desires and interests in a single, sustained and unified group movement.
“The idea for this work comes out of the last piece I made,” Newton says, “For a while my work has been dealing with repetition, and more and more and I have been focusing on repetition as a generative force that is constantly transforming and giving rise to new movements.
“The students in second year are coming from all sorts of different backgrounds… I also remember my own second year at WAAPA being quite defining and transformative time for my former small-town-girl self. Given this I thought it would be really wonderful to produce a dance that is some sort of charting of how their individual differences and histories meet in a group dance.”
‘Endless Possibility’, which recently premiered at the World Dance Alliance conference in Singapore, is an original piece from WAAPA’s award winning choreographer Sue Peacock.
“The title says it all,” says Peacock, “A bit similar to the way that any day can progress from the sublime to the ridiculous in an instant with no apparent reason, it just happens.”
‘Flourish’ will be performed at the Geoff Gibbs Theatre at Edith Cowan University from Saturday 14th November – Saturday 21st November. Tickets available from waapa.ecu.edu.au or call 9370 6636.
