Copland Dance Episodes - Australian Ballet

Copland Dance Episodes

The Australian Ballet – Sydney Opera House, Joan Sutherland Theatre

The Australian Ballet presents the first staging of Justin Peck's Copland Dance Episodes outside New Yorkn now at Sydney Opera House. Originally commissioned by New York City Ballet, where Peck is Resident Choreographer, the work premiered at the David H. Koch Theatre on 26 January 2023.

An exquisite, hand-painted front curtain greets the audience, a small work of art in its own right. When it rises, the stage is filled with dancers against a white floor, backdrop and open wings. Spontaneous applause.There is an immediate sense of space and freshness, as though a clear, clean breeze has swept through the theatre. It is an invigorating beginning.

What Copland achieves in music, Peck finds in movement. Copland helped bring American music into its own, stripping away European influences and grandiose ornamentation to find a distinctly American voice: open, direct, rhythmic and expansive. Peck approaches the choreography with a similar economy. There is enormous technical virtuosity here, but it never feels laboured or self-conscious. The movement has a disarming ease. Dancers encounter one another, respond, watch and interact with a naturalness that makes the choreography feel like a community of people sharing the same space. Crucially, they really seem to see one another.

The choreographic structure is deceptively simple, and much of its appeal lies in the constant rearrangement of bodies across the stage. Peck moves effortlessly between solos, duets, trios, quartets and larger groupings, allowing the dancers to gather, disperse and regroup in response to the shifting musical textures. There is no linear story to follow. Relationships take shape through movement: a glance, an encounter, a playful exchange, a moment of physical support. The principal pairings – Isobelle Dashwood and Jeremy Hargreaves in Rodeo, and Benedicte Bemet and Elijah Trevitt in Appalachian Spring – provide particular focus, while the constantly changing ensemble keeps the stage alive with new combinations and encounters.

The entire ensemble is striking. With 30 dancers and 22 episodes, there is plenty of opportunity for spectacle, but Peck's real achievement is in making the stage feel like a place of shared pleasure rather than a succession of individual performances.

The visual pleasure is heightened by Ellen Warren's costumes. Colourful, individual pieces continually refresh the stage picture, adding movement, texture and contrast to the otherwise spare white setting. As dancers regroup and configurations shift, the colours ripple across the stage, keeping the whole composition undulating, buoyant and alive. Jeffrey Gibson's set and Brandon Stirling Baker's lighting complete a visual world that feels both carefully composed and wonderfully free.

Copland Dance Episodes is unmistakably American. Not just in its musical references to the open plains, the mythology of the West and the pioneering spirit, but in its broader sensibility: expansive, optimistic, unselfconscious and resolutely democratic. The musical journey moves through four of Copland's defining compositions, written between 1938 and 1944: Billy the Kid (1938), Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944). Each has its own character and musical landscape, from swagger and restless energy to spacious lyricism.

Peck finds the universal in that American energy. The optimism, expansiveness and rhythmic vitality of Copland's music become an invitation to movement and connection that transcends their cultural origins. We may not share the mythology, but we recognise the feeling. We need no translation for the pure joy of bodies in motion, of music made visible, of people responding to one another.

As another hand-painted curtain returns to close the show, there is a satisfying sense of theatrical circularity. It is a lovely final flourish to an evening that has offered so much uncomplicated pleasure. Copland Dance Episodes is a production that leaves you wanting to see it all over again, to revisit the movement, the music, the extraordinary dancers and the sheer exhilaration of it all.

There is real theatrical magic here, delivered by one of Australia's great performing arts companies. Highly recommended.

Review by Kate Gaul

Image Kate Longley