The theatre of war: how the Anzac story has been retold through dance for 80 years
- Written by The Conversation
The story of the Anzacs has been represented through art from the beginning.
The film Hero of the Dardanelles (1915) recreates the landing at Gallipoli. Official war artists were commissioned to document the conflict. One of the most powerful paintings was the ghostly Midnight at Menin Gate (1927) by Will Longstaff.
Banjo Paterson penned an ode to Gallipoli, We’re All Australians Now, in 1915, and novels abound exploring the impacts of war on soldiers and society.
What about dance? As in film, the human body can convey events past. Like fiction, it can present a distinct narrative. Like poetry, it distils human experience. Like paintings, it needs no words to inspire intense emotions.
World War II first inspired some choreographers to convey or critique overseas wars through dance. Here are four different war ballets created in Australia and New Zealand over eight decades.
En Saga
En Saga was choreographed by Laurel Martyn and first performed by the Borovansky Ballet in Melbourne in 1941.
Martyn had grown up in a depressed post-first world war Australia. At the time of this ballet her fiancé, brother and fellow company members were fighting in World War II.
Set in 19th century Finland to Jean Sibelius’ rousing score, the story was inspired by the Australian home front.
En Saga opens with the women farming the land. The men return from war to some celebration, but many are physically and psychologically injured. As the ballet closes, the men are called to fight once more, and the women return to work the land. The cycle begins again.
Martyn adopts a Russian constructivist style – expressionless faces and mechanised patterns – which conjures passive, puppet-like characters. She also incorporates heavier-style Central European Expressionist dance, capturing the weight of war on the women left behind.
En Saga challenges our acceptance of the cycle of war and peace. Against a backdrop of patriotic war fever, Martyn wrote in her journal,
I hate it & cannot revel in it.
G’Day Digger
G’Day Digger, choreographed by Beth Dean for television in 1958, was a short humorous piece set in a pub.
Dean wanted to create a ballet reflecting contemporary life. The result has the feel of a pantomime.
Two larrikin soldiers back from fighting in Tobruk during the second world war – The Digger and his Mate – meet again in Sydney. They attempt to seduce May the Barmaid and her friend Sheila; have a brawl with the effeminate “bodgie” (the new youth masculinity of the 1950s); and are bemused by the local alcoholic.
The only “real men” in the picture are the returned soldiers. The other two exist counter to the homosocial masculinity of the Anzac digger; the women are objects participating in the masculine performance – which does lead to some lovely pas de deux (dance for two).
While popular with audiences, masculine anxieties were present in reviews, some finding it difficult reconcile the idea that soldiers could be represented by ballet dancers.
Critic Alexander Macdonald declared:
the sight of two uniformed diggers prancing to and fro, like a brace of fugitives from Holsworthy, made an impossible demand on the imagination.
1914
The Australian Ballet’s 1914 (1998) centres on the unlikely friendship between working-class Jim, wealthy Ashley and photographer Imogen. Like G’Day Digger, it includes a bar, larrikin behaviour and a brawl. But there the similarities end.
Choreographed by Stephen Baynes, the full-length ballet about the first world war was inspired by David Malouf’s 1982 novel Fly Away Peter.
The friends bond over a mutual admiration of birdlife in the coastal wetlands. Then comes the war: the men enlist and migrate to the other side of the world, like their birds; Imogen is left to face both absence and anguish. The rest of the company play supporting roles as friends, people on the street, soldiers and Jim’s bullying father.
Photo courtesy of The Australian Ballet. Artists of The Australian Ballet in Stephen Baynes 1914.
Photo Jim McFarlane, 1998
1914 embraces stillness and silence as emotional contrasts. The quiet joy of the opening scenes against the louder, exploding movements and sounds of the battlefront. Jim’s early open, sweeping arms, taking in the wonder of the world, against Imogen’s closed grieving ones in the final scenes. Naive jubilation at the news of the war against the solemn procession of ghosts after battle.
Death is absent in G’Day Digger; it haunts 1914.
Passchendaele
The centenary of the Gallipoli landings in 2015 led the Royal New Zealand Ballet to create a suite of four dances, Salute: Remembering World War I. Two were commissioned for the occasion, including Neil Ieremia’s short but powerful Passchendaele, with music by the New Zealand Army Band.
Ieremia was initially reluctant to create a dance about war. This only adds to the profundity of the piece.
No characters are singled out – the effects of the worst battle for casualties are shared equally by men and women, battlefront and homefront united in loss. Simple costuming in shades of grey intensify the sense of despair and dread, backdropped by a desolate landscape reddened by slaughter.
The piece is framed by the changing rhythms of war, from energetic strength to graceful laments. The men and women are both geographically separated and emotionally attached. The final scenes of women farewelling the dying, followed by the dreaded sound of three knocks on the front door, are simply heartbreaking.
Ieremia wanted to remind us of our humanity: the brutality of war can too easily destroy that. The power of dance conveys such emotional truths about war, and that’s certainly something to reflect on in our own times.
