Meryl Tankard
Newington College, a dreaming spires establishment for boys in Sydney's inner west, sponsors our phenomenal taiko drumming ensemble TaikOz by giving them space in one of their gymnasia to practice. Hidden in the backblocks of the school's grassy and green campus, the gym is easy to locate: just follow the muffled rhythmic booming of the huge drums.
"It's just as well the boys are on holidays, I don't think they'd be able to concentrate on classwork if they were here," says uber-choreographer Meryl Tankard as we listen to a piquant combination of drums and warbling magpies.
Aiming for a world premiere this week (January 18) at the Sydney Festival, Tankard has been creating a new work for her dancers and Ian Cleworth's drummers - Kaidan. It's a fluid process which has been going on for some weeks in the space and for years in the choreographer's head. As luck would have it, the day I visit to watch rehearsals, the second half is about to get its first full run-through.
The spacious gym is set up as a temporary stage - tape marks the performance area, the huge drums are on their stands at rear; in the "stalls" are the control desk, assorted chairs and tables and the usual clutter of discarded clothes, shoes, water bottles and snacks. Unique to this production, however, is a large carton of disposable earplugs (Unisafe Signature II brand).
"I don't know how musicians manage without them," says Tankard. She rolls her eyes and shrugs. "It's a tricky balance between being able to hear and being sent deaf."
Tankard claps her hands for attention, quietly issues a few directives and the sequence gets underway. Even in this rough stage, it is immediately electrifying. The dancers are equipped with fluttering red fans which contrast startlingly with the great drums. Suddenly, in a moment of silence, the fans become percussive as the dancers slash the air, whirling and leaping in pas de deux with the animated props.
"Aren't they fantastic!" says Tankard. "They were only $1.95 each, some of them were just a dollar. I love that." After working for Disney in New York on the multi-million dollar Tarzan she finds this kind of imaginative largesse coupled with financial thrift "liberating". (As did Lion King stage creator Julie Taymor, funnily enough. She was most proud of the $5 silver ribbon that represented the tears of the lionesses in that mega-millions production.)
[page]Kaidan is based on a Japanese folk tale - Tankard is fascinated by Japanese culture and architecture - in which a woman is supposed to give up her (polished metal) mirror to be melted down to be made into a bell. But, says Tankard, "She does it with a reluctant heart so it won't melt and she kills herself - as you would. Before she dies she leaves a curse." Tankard grins. "It's a perfect story for a dance work."
The work came about in a classically circuitous fashion, as Tankard explains. "I was in France about four years ago because Sylvie Guillem had asked me to talk about working with her. That didn't work out but I had an image in mind and when I came home I talked to Ian (Cleworth) and said - do you know a Japanese story we could adapt? Then one thing led to another. We were supposed to do it last year, the Opera House wanted it, Fergus wanted it and now they're co-presenting."
Although Kaidan is all about movement and sound, behind it lies Tankard's deep fascination with Japanese architecture and their fascination with the seasons.
"The Japanese use a lot of seasonal motifs," says Tankard. "And they mean different things. It's the same with materials and architecture. I've been reading Henry Plummer. It's called Light on Japanese Architecture and he wrote of 'murmuring colours' and the texture of light. That's what I'm trying to do - red leaves blowing. Dead but reborn. I want landscape but I don't want to see it as it was in the book, if you see what I mean."
Later she sends an email into which she's cut and pasted chunks of the Plummer monograph. The chapter headings particularly tickle her fancy. They are vivid and sparely descriptive: Moonlit Gray, Vermilion Red, Painted Shadows, Woven Air, Autumn Gold, Captured Alive, Streams of the Sun.
Here's what Plummer writes of Autumn Gold: "The overall mood of this yellowing air is linked to the moments just before winter and nightfall, when nature blazes up in color just before gray exhaustion. At these transitional moments of day and year , earth and sky exude rich colors that are no longer clear and fresh, their yellows now more golden, the reds coppery, and the oranges burnt, with shadows saturating them more and more ... Buildings painted in these tones embody the hours and seasons of light at its greatest metamorphoses - twilight and autumn, when poised on the brink between maturity and death, between the final moments of one ending cycle and the interlude of rest before another begins."
And of the Vermilion Red - a key Tankard colour - Plummer writes: "A reddish light belongs not only to transitional phases in nature, but marks their most climactic moments of destruction and creation. The long wavelengths are close to those of infrared radiation, to heat, and are closely linked to experiences of high temperature and the release of energy. Red is the color of light emitted by matter in its most active metamorphic states - molten or rusting metal, fiery embers, dancing flames, live coals, the hearth and the funeral pyre, massive stars at the end of stellar evolution. As burning things are dying and going up in smoke, they last appear to the eye as a glowing, red-hot energy ... Perhaps there is no other single color so bound to the razor edge between life and death, and so able to evoke the contradictory feeling of beginnings and endings, even suggesting the two are closely related, if not one and the same."
Kaidan is Tankard's vision - translated for human bodies, percussion, movement and digital images (by her partner and visual artist, Regis Lansac) - of these reflections on life, death, beauty and story.
Kaidan: a Ghost Story Meryl Tankard and TaikOz, Sydney Opera House, January 18-31; ph: 02 9250 7777 or Festival Ticketek 1300 888 412.
