After working as a classical dancer in the Australian Ballet company, Meryl Tankard was for a long time one of the highlights of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. A leading performer in shows such as Café Muller, 1980 and Waltz, and a formidable comic actress, the Australian Tankard, for Bausch, constructed her solos by drawing inspiration from a wide variety of cues, from childhood nursery rhymes to the sugary dialogues of the old 'pink' cinema, sprinkling her texts with non-sense 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 rave reviews at home.
Inspired by Egyptian paintings depicted in a British Museum exhibition at the Australian National Gallery, Tankard created a seductively atmospheric piece with 'Nuti'. He chose a limited number of basic movements for the five dancers. Tankard skilfully uses repetition to construct 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 considerably intensifies the action, although the central element remains Regis Lansac's design and photography.
The inspirational motif of 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 floklore, Kikimora has a cruel sense of humour: she can be as small as an inch or even invisible, and creates frightening noises. Meryl Tankard presents a portrait of the ambiguous, sometimes even evil witch, yet hidden behind a youthful innocence.
