Ballet Noir on the Shore

Elemental AKL festival runs from 14th July – 1st August this year, and celebrates the best in “arts, eats, and beats” of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. The programme of free and ticketed events features several that take place on the Shore. One of these is Mary-Jane O’Reilly’s uber-elegant, uber-dark Ballet Noir, tag-lined ‘what becomes of the broken-hearted’, at the Bruce Mason Centre.

Dance aficionados will already know Mary-Jane; for others on the Shore, this is a rare opportunity close to home to see one of the exuberant works of this creative and prolific dancer and choreographer.

Mary-Jane’s professional career spans over 40 years in New Zealand and internationally. She initially studied ballet, gaining Solo Seal while at the National Ballet School (now the New Zealand School of Dance) and performing with the New Zealand Ballet before heading to London on an RAD scholarship to study at the Royal Ballet School and then performing in ballet companies across Europe.

She later turned to contemporary dance, and returned to New Zealand where she co-founded Limbs Dance Company in 1977 as a dancer and choreographer, and was Artistic Director from 1979 to 1986, creating over 45 original works for the company. In 1990 her concept (with Phil O’Reilly) and choreography of the Auckland opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games with a cast of 6000, was viewed by TV audiences of over five million worldwide. Also in 1990, she choreographed the first ever commissioned three-act ballet for the Royal New Zealand Ballet ‘Jean, The Ballet’ about New Zealand aviatrix Jean Batten.

Her career also includes directing contemporary ballet company Auckland Dance Company, teaching at the dance programme of Auckland, and five years as Artistic Director of Tempo, New Zealand’s Festival of Dance. She has received numerous grants and awards including a Queens Service Medal for her services to dance.

Ballet Noir is based on a warmly received preview performance in Auckland Art Gallery’s North Atrium in 2019, and Elemental AKL was quick to pick it up as a full work by Mary-Jane and co-creative Phil O’Reilly.

Mary-Jane is a shape-shifter in the language of dance, and her only rule is that it must exhilarate. Ballet Noir features 12 of Auckland’s finest dancers, and is described by Phil O’Reilly as “an exquisite blend of dance, music, filmic imagery and fantasy… that fluidly straddles the worlds of classical ballet, contemporary dance and neo burlesque.” (The latter two feature in her hit Edinburgh Fringe Festival work ‘In Flagrante’ which has toured globally and is now re-invented as The Mouthfeel Show with whisky tasting and an MC.)

With Ballet Noir drawing on her gift for sizzle and polish, Mary-Jane describes this Elemental AKL work as “a fiendishly clever contemporary ballet work that channels the tragi-romantic narrative of the great ballets through the cryptic and edgy lens of 1940s ‘film noir’, with all its greyscale tension and stylish vainglory”.

It is a “meditation on the mysterious forces of darkness,” she adds. “Characters include jaded femmes fatales, a young innocent abroad and two male rivals who go head-to-head with dance as their weapon.”  Clad in sharply tailored authentic vintage jackets skirts and hats, the dancers inhabit a world of secret rituals, rivalries and power struggles, where salvation only comes with a broken heart.

Where: The Bruce Mason Centre, The Promenade, Takapuna, Auckland. 09 309 2677 

When: Friday July 23rd 8pm; Saturday 24th July, matinee 2pm, and evening 8pm.

Book at: elementalfestival.co.nz