Review: Standing on a Rising Wave
Yuiko Masukawa for The Australian Ballet | Arts Centre Melbourne, Boon Wurrung & Wurundjeri Country | 11/2024.
William Forsythe once said that the appeal of ballet is not its perfection, but its proximity to failure.
Ballet, he suggested, “Flirts with failure” given its extremity (1). Everything that is technically virtuosic is just as close to collapse as it is to triumph. The hip that lifts a leg beside one’s face may tear; a spinning leap risks falling and every lift a sudden drop. All physical pursuits in ballet are double-bound by this logic of perfection/failure, and every thematic intention is equally so. It is a genre that strives for success yet cannot always win.
This same sentiment, however, underscores the success of Standing on a Rising Wave, a short ballet by Melbourne choreographer Yuiko Masukawa.
Masukawa — co-recipient of the 2023 Telstra Emerging Choreographer Award — presents this new piece as part of the Australian Ballet’s Bodytorque: New World Record season. One of six works commissioned for Bodytorque, I can only write about Masukawa’s efforts here but do so while acknowledging the other pieces by Adam Elmes, Benjamin Garrett, Jill Ogai, Erin O’Rourke, and Serena Graham.
Standing on a Rising Wave is a pas de six between Amy Ronnfedlt, Belle Urwin, Yaru Xu, Drew Hedditch, Harrison Bradley, and Alain Juelg. The structure of the piece evolves through solos, partnering, and ensemble work. Despite its short length, it is physically compelling, resolved, and bright.
Perhaps the most direct comparison would be Ashton’s Rhapsody (1980): technical, energetic, and demanding. For example, Hedditch’s en diagonale sequence near the midpoint — a flurry of turns and leaps, punctuated by his arms circling overhead and waist twisting between each jump. All of the performers are open and present, and address the complexity of the material with clear-eyed earnestness.
The score, by Alisdair MacIndoe, drives the work forward with urgency. The spacing, however, is a challenge throughout as the ensemble is cloistered onto a stage too small for both Masukawa’s phrasing and the dancers’ reach. One wonders if the use of jeté in attitude is a stylistic choice or an economic one.
To a lesser extent, Standing on a Rising Wave also reminds me of MacMillan’s Concerto (1966) with its divertissement and mid-century ‘gaiety of form.’ Lines are oblique, and legs often work through 2nd while the body moves off-centre. Feet snap in and out from the knee and sail high in sissonne. Turns are delivered with the arms in open 5th, which evokes a certain naivety or idealism. The dancers sweep their arms out into high V-shapes, and thrust their breastbones forward as if to say, “This is from the heart.”
The port de bras is declarative in this way — demanding the audience take seriously the intent of the work. One dancer flexes their hands at the end of straight arms, playfully pressing the edges of the world away. Masukawa’s pastel costumes compliment this upbeat — and again MacMillanian — sensibility, and the dancers wear soft combinations of yellow and periwinkle blue, rust reds and pinks. The artists look like Dippin Dots against the black box of the Show Room.
In Masukawa’s program notes for Standing on a Rising Wave, she shares her desire “To create something collectively that could never be possible alone.” Paired with the title, we might assume the work promises a proletariat revolution. However, this version of the collective does not manifest, at least not explicitly.
We have long known that different cultures hold different views on the development and practice of the self. Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama discuss this in their widely-cited Culture and the Self: our cultural tendency towards Western Individualism and Eastern Collectivism (2). In the West, the independent self is distinct from the ecological self (the physical self divided from its surroundings) but no less invested in the self as a discrete social entity that can have relationships but is not of relationships.
For Eastern cultures, Markus and Kitayama contrast this with the development of the interdependent self — a collective self contingent upon relationships with others rather than isolated as in the West. As a criticism of the ‘universal’ (Western individualist) concept of the self, the latter is a necessary lens when considering Masukawa’s aims.
Western concert ballet is not readily described as a collectivist practice. It is, perhaps infamously, the opposite: an individualist pursuit defined by external and internal hierarchies that sharpen the relief between self and other. To the latter, consider the relationship between ballet, perfectionism and competition. This is not to demean ballet as somehow psychologically backward, but rather to highlight the tension that can dominate the independent self in ballet: the need to strive and the urge to make an impression. This is the tension Forsythe alludes to — the fragility of a form (and the subjects who perform it) otherwise known for its rigour.
Standing on a Rising Wave treads far more lightly, which is where much of its political promise lies. The piece is decidedly optimistic — resolute in its buoyancy.
It is a heavy mantle, collectivism, and the virtue of Masukawa’s intent neither hastens nor eases her task. However, it is heartening to watch ballet that addresses optimism in this way; ballet that speaks to our need for collective ideas of the self. As Forsythe also said, “A life in a body is a life of negotiating the real world” (3). Surely this negotiation demands a similar, brilliant coalition like that in Standing on a Rising Wave. ▮
Notes
(1) Roslyn Sulcas, “Ideas Move Us: Consistent Preoccupations and Explorations in the Work of William Forsythe,” in William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects (The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2018), 27.
(2) Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 224–253, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224
(3) Sulcas, “Ideas Move Us,” 27.
