The Sydney Dance Company is set to bid a sad farewell to choreographers and collaborators Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon after an amazing 31 years, but not before they bring their critically acclaimed show Grand to Perth for their final season.
Grand has been described as a love letter to the piano and explores the dynamic relationship between dance and the iconic instrument.
Zoe Carter spoke to Graeme about Grand and his future after Sydney Dance Company.
Zoe Carter: Tell me about Grand…
Graeme Murphy: The heart of the work is the piano and I think that’s clearly apparent as it’s a work that’s named after and revolves around the grand piano and the most extraordinary repertoire of that instrument – hardly a composer who has ever written a note didn’t write something for the piano. It has all the ingredients of a big, big night of grand dance, and it covers a lot of emotions because it was created as a tribute to my late mum who was my favourite pianist basically. I owe my musicality and love of music to her, so that’s a big debt.
ZC: How did you go about thinking about the piano and unraveling that into a dance?
GM: I took my collaborators (designer Gerard Manion and costume designer Akira Isogawa) down to Tasmania, which is my home state, and we locked ourselves away on a property that my sister and I have down there in the bush. There was an old pianola – the ones that you pedal away and it plays you great tunes because my piano playing is atrocious. We dissected that piano like a terrible lobotomy. We just took it to bits and out of that instrument all the inspiration for the design and the costumes came. Of course, nature was another inspiration. We were in the wild and it was just a beautiful way to approach the work. The choice of music was always going to be a difficult one – there is so much repertoire to choose from but I worked with Scott Davie, the pianist -who plays the 90 minutes of music from his head and is wheeled around. He is a very mobile pianist in this production. One thinks of a concert pianist as being static and not moving in the entire evening, but he travels a great distance in this work on a platform that moves around and he is very much incorporated in the choreography, which is great because otherwise he would be just an accomplice and he’s not.
ZC: You started with Sydney Dance Company in 1976, what do you feel about the process of growing with this organization and what have you learnt from it?
GM: I’ve learnt that no one is alone and you need love to surround you to really reach your full potential. That’s the one thing that this company has given me, like a family base of absolute love, a support system that allows me to take incredible risks and not have to be tied into some conventional aspect of what dance is for most people. We’ve been able to write our own rules in this company. We’ve been such a great team.
ZC: Is it a bit terrifying to be moving out of the ‘family home’?
GM: You know, I’m not scared. I’ve never been a very scared person in terms of the arts or in terms of creativity. I think this is the one profession where risk taking is really rewarded. So, I’m not afraid of the new adventures that are ahead, but I do have a sort of sadness that this can’t be repeated.
ZC: What’s particularly exciting about the opportunity that you have now, in moving on from being in the heart of a dance company? What are you looking forward to in that challenge?
GM: Well, there is the thing that you are attached to an organization only for the duration of that next project and then you have to let go of what you’ve created. I haven’t had to do that with Sydney Dance Company. I’ve always been able to nurture a work to its absolute fruition. But in the world of freelance you see the opening night often and that’s it, then it’s someone else’s baby to care for. So I find that’s going to be quite difficult, but at the same time the opportunity to have such diverse canvases to work on. I’ll be working a lot in China because I love that particular area of the world and where it’s going in dance is basically where it’s going in global terms and it’s so exciting. I think I have a real rapport with that culture. I look forward to those adventures.
