Risky business: Queensland Ballet’s Bespoke is set to thrill
Each year Queensland Ballet throws caution to the wind to delight in risk taking with its Bespoke program.
Blindness and dance aren’t often paired as words, let alone onstage. But they are in acclaimed Canadian choreographer Robert Binet’s Newborn Giants.
So, if ever a creation for Queensland Ballet’s eight seasons of Bespoke has nailed its brief to take risks, present diverse perspectives and challenge perceptions, this is it.
The 25-minute work is one of three world premieres comprising Bespoke 2025 in the Talbot Theatre of the Thomas Dixon Centre, July 31 to August 9.
Well-known Australian artists Amelia Waller (formerly of QB) and Bangarra Dance Theatre alumna Yolande Brown’s respective creations, Curious Beings and Canopy – Bool Burn, complete the program.
Newborn Giants evolved from Binet’s collaborations with blind theatre artist and disability studies Assistant Professor Devon Healey, whose lived experience highlights commonalities between blindness and dance that surprise the sighted.
Speaking from Toronto, where both are based, Binet acknowledges initially being “stunned” by the revelation of this “huge connection” before Healey laid out the parallels when they met in 2021.
“The way she moves through the world is so choreographic,” explains Binet. “She has to know exactly how many steps it is. And the stakes of reaching for a glass of water are so much higher when you have to know exactly how far from your body it is, and exactly how to lift it to your face when you can’t rely on vision. It’s so much like dance.”
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But to Healey’s delight, blindness has led their creative process for the first time. In previous projects she created audio descriptions in response to Binet’s choreography – listening through headphones was optional for audience members, whereas they are an integral element of Newborn Giants.
Mind you, these aren’t merely factual outlines of visual details. The practice that Healey terms “immersive descriptive audio” (IDA) is a perceptual sensory accompaniment revealing art’s heart.
Binet shares her process: “She folds in my intentions as a choreographer. She asks the dancers a lot of questions about what’s happening in their bodies, like, ‘Where are you initiating that from? Where do you feel the strain? Where are you sending your head? What’s happening in your spine?’”
A ring of peripheral vision allows Healey to see the way the movement is interacting with her blindness, and the text captures these multiple layers, he continues.
“So it’s not only giving you a sense of what’s happening on stage, but it’s also giving you a more intimate dive into what is happening inside the performer and what they’re trying to achieve.”
That drive to create greater intimacy between audiences and performers, combined with Bespoke’s ethos of risk-taking and innovation, led Binet to seek inspiration through revisiting past IDAs and their “incredibly beautiful text” that he considers “poems of the body”.
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Through the passage of time he couldn’t remember the original choreography they described. Instead, “they were provoking a whole new ballet in my head”, he reveals.
With Healey’s consent an IDA collage became the ballet’s soundscape, alongside amplification of sounds made by the dancers onstage, and music composed by Max Richter to underscore historic speeches. (Considering it a perfect fit, Binet reached out and got Richter’s blessing: “He said, ‘I think it’s a really cool idea, I would love for you to go for it’.”)
This October the personable 34-year-old will present his first Fall for Dance North Festival as artistic director and co-CEO, so in early April he happily left behind Toronto’s single-digit temperatures to spend five weeks at Queensland Ballet creating Newborn Giants on a cast of 13 dancers spanning the ranks. Both the weather and the creative experience were a treat, he enthuses.
From watching class, the choreographer selected a group of about 25 to work with.
“I like someone who surprises and excites, and I need a strong jumper and someone who will take risks. I wanted as broad an age spectrum as you can get in a ballet company, which is usually about 20 years, because that different experience and different energy they each bring makes for a more interesting work.”
While aware that he had “seasoned principal dancers and soloists to young first-year corps de ballet members”, Binet doesn’t actually know everyone’s rank due to an egalitarian culture he declares “one of the really nice things about QB”.
“It’s truly an ensemble work. Because all Devon’s text was written for solos and duets, it was really fun to reinterpret it across a much larger group. I played a lot with patterns and spatial composition.
“Everyone has moments where they shine and moments where they recede. That can be hard to make, but the dancers have such a collaborative team spirit that it evolved really organically, which was a real gift. The dancers were so open and ready to experiment and brought so much of themselves to it.”
Although conceptually innovative, Newborn Giants’ stylistic foundations are classical – Binet’s “first language” as a graduate of Canada’s National Ballet School – overlaid with contemporary and modern dance influences.
“The female dancers are in pointe shoes and there is partnering, but this work mixes together very casual and more pedestrian movement with some quite heroic, stunning, very technical movement.
“If you call it ballet people will feel like they got what they came for, but hopefully they’ll also feel like they got something that has a real humanity and bold personal quality. My guiding principle is that the dancers should appear as people first and dancers second.”
Queensland Ballet’s Bespoke, Talbot Theatre, Thomas Dixon Centre, West End, July 31 to August 9.