After working as a classical dancer in the Australian Ballet company, Meryl Tankard was for a long time one of the mainstays of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. A leading performer in shows such as “Cafè Muller, 1980 and Walzer”, a formidable comic actress, the Australian Tankard, for Bausch, built her solos drawing inspiration from the most varied ideas, from childhood nursery rhymes to the sugary dialogues of old “pink” cinema, scattering her texts with nonsense and surreal humour. Meryl Tankard left the Wuppertal company in 1983 and returned to Sydney, where she founded her own dance-theatre group which she still directs. Her first show in Australia, “Echo Point” in 1984, received enthusiastic reviews in her homeland. Inspired by Egyptian paintings featured in an exhibition at the British Museum in the Australian National Gallery, Tankard has created a seductively atmospheric piece with “Nuti”. Choosing a limited number of basic movements for the five dancers, Tankard skillfully uses repetition to build a sequence of ritual motifs with a timeless universality, despite their specific ancient Egyptian origins.
The musical accompaniment by Collin Offord with flute, gongs, and a string instrument intensifies the action considerably, although the central element remains the design and photography by Regis Lansac.
The inspiration for the second piece (Kikimora) is the make-up created by Mikhail Larianov for Bronislava Nijinska, who played the witch Kikimora in Massine’s ballet “Contes Russes”.
In Russian folklore, Kikimora has a cruel sense of humor: she can be as small as a thumb or even invisible, and she creates frightening noises. Meryl Tankard offers a portrait of the ambiguous, sometimes even evil, witch, hidden behind a youthful innocence
National premiere
