Andre Santos as Alain in West Australian Ballet’s production of La Fille mal gardée . Photo by Emma Fishwick.
THE West Australian Ballet has been treating us to evenings of romance over the years, but this month the company returns to Canberra with a comedy .
Now under the artistic directorship of Aurelien Scannella, the company is billing as spectacular its new production of the comic classic, “La Fille mal gardée”, (“The Wayward Daughter”).
They’re pulling out all the stops with set and costumes designed to take us back into 1950s rural Italy, the concept of noted French choreographer Marc Ribaud to reinterpret the work.
It’s a fairly corny story, like those in many ballets and operas. Lise and Colas are in love, but Lise’s mother has other ideas.
The rest is all beautiful – beautiful costumes, beautiful dancing and beautiful set.
I’m talking to set designer Richard Roberts by phone to Hong Kong, where he’s now head of design at Academy for Performing Arts. A veteran artist, he’s designed for John Bell, the State Theatre Company of SA, the WA Academy of Performing Arts and the Victorian College of the Arts.
Though he’s taught for 16 to 17 years of his extensive career, he tells “CityNews”: “I’ve never stopped working as a freelance designer…I didn’t want to say ‘at one time I was a designer’.”
Roberts jumped at the chance to design this popular ballet of the Perth company and says: “I was very interested in seeing a traditional ballet reimagined by Marc Ribaud”. During a two-month holiday in Europe, he arranged to meet Ribaud in at his home in Nice.
“Marc’s a delightful guy and took me into a village in the mountains where life was still like something like in the ballet.”
Originally, Roberts explains, it was set in the 18th century, but Ribaud updated it to the 1950s about 10 years ago and now for the WA Ballet there’s a new set by Roberts and costumes by Lexi De Silva.
“Marc and I got into it straight away,” Roberts says, but a challenge was designing to fit in with already established choreography.
“In the third act, the dancers must go up a flight of stairs with exactly eight steps – with things like that you have to fit in,” he says, but only to a point. “Marc is a real collaborator. I say: ‘Hey, what if we did this? And Marc answers: ‘I like it – let’s do it!’”
Colourful is the word for this show, but it’s carefully designed colour.
“My set is very sort of sundrenched – sandstone, whitewashed walls, very bleached. It’s a great background for Lexi’s vivid colours,” Roberts says.
As for “La Fille”: “It’s about breaking away from the old… about a very simple young girl who rebels and if you think about it, since the 1950s kids have been saying ‘no, we don’t want to do that’.”
“La Fille mal gardée”, at The Playhouse, October 15 to 18, bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700. Children from ACT dance schools will perform in the village scenes in Act 2.
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