Choreographer’s Note
When a certain celebrated dancer is photographed by a famous artist, his star takes off on an extraordinary trajectory even as those around him begin to fade. Why is it then that despite his depraved and dangerous behaviour his face and body remain stunningly pristine?
In Shades of Gray, I have relocated Oscar Wilde’s notorious Dorian Gray to the wildfire of the 60s, 70s, 80s – only the advent of the 90s reveals his truth -a tragic reality the Western world has chosen largely to ignore.
Not since Poppy (1978), based on the life and art of Jean Cocteau, or a decade later, After Venice, itself an early allegory on AIDS, have we at Sydney Dance Company embodied a plethora of factual characters, some treated fictionally at times, and woven them into a narrative tapestry that draws upon the power of dance to evoke, to stir and to reinforce.
The passage of time is under-scored by the changing face of dance, and is in effect an ode to the choreographic masters of three decades. In the 70s, we enjoyed the ultimate eclecticism in dance and saw it rise to new heights of popularity, remembered now as the ‘dance boom’. The 80s saw it savaged by a mysterious new disease, whose victims numbered many in the dance world to devastating effect. The 90s brought with it a new complacency and now, in the new Century, only the reality of the African plight reminds us that the global battle is just beginning.
Graeme Murphy, May 2004
Music Note
The score for Shades of Gray developed in some very interesting ways as a response to the storytelling within the work.
Firstly, the idea that there would be ‘performances within the performance’ immediately gave the work a distinct musical through-line. These five performances mark key moments in the history of modem dance from the late 60s through to the 90s. To be true to these periods, we have used existing music from the likes of John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and Graeme Koehne.
There also needed to be a theme for the Dorian character that worked in much the same way as the picture does in Wilde’s original story We chose Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night as the musical equivalent, and I set about creating gradually more distorted and disfigured echoes of this piece to mirror the decay of Dorian’s ‘Shades’ and thus his internal self.
In constructing music for all the other scenes we drew upon musical works that both mark the passing of time, and have some resonance to the themes of vanity and excess. Tricky, Grandmaster Flash, Donna Summer, Joy Divisio, Aphex Twin and many others have found their way into the score-some as quick flashes, others in longer sections. The scenes are linked together with recurring musical sections from George Crumb and Gyorgy Ligeti, which also serve to give shape to the overall score and provide a filmic thread for the unfolding drama.
The score as a whole becomes more fractured as the story evolves – it too, grows old and decays. Hopefully the overall effect is a score which is less like a musical accompaniment to a series of events, and more like a journey through a waking dream.
Paul Healy, May 2004