Sydney Dance selling fast

Press, 29 January 1986, Page 19

Sydney Dance selling fast

The fastest selling event of the Wellington’s International Festival of Arts in March is the performance by Sydney’s Graeme Murphy and his Sydney Dance Company. The choreographer with the international reputation is looking forward to the festival — but then he is enthusiastic about all his company’s performances.

The 20 dancers — there are 34 in the company, counting backstage workers — will bring a popular show from their repertoire to the capital city. It is “Some Rooms,” a full length work that Murphy choregraphed using four rooms as metaphors for the development of the adolescent. “There is the bedroom, bathroom, changing room and reading room. The

rooms are metaphors. The adolescent develops in the bedroom, to a sophistication in the bathroom, to a kind of maturity in the changing room to a spiritality in the reading room.”

The piece was created in 1981 and has been danced in New York and, to private audiences, in China.

Graeme Murphy has led the Sydney company for 10 years and calls the dancers his family. All the dancers who were in the company last year are back again. Most stay for a long time. “Just as well,” the choreographer says. “Most of the dances are built around particular people and when they leave they take the repertoire with them.”

The company has been

around for about 20 years and has undergone many metemorphoses from a contemporary company to a classical company to a schools performance group.

Graeme Murphy chooses to describe it now as a contemporary theatrical company.

Two days before he left Sydney this month to come to direct the choreographers’ and composers’ course being held in Christchurch, the company opened at a Sydney nightclub. “That gave them a chance to try new skills and to do things that they hadn’t done at the Opera House. Also to breathe in stale cigarette smoke and handle drunks but then those skills of reaching to the audience you take over into the Opera House.”

The dancers in the company are what Murphy calls an eclectic mix.

“They are all shapes and sizes, not all the same as some people’s idea of a dance company dictates. We have past principals of the Australian Ballet and probably some future principals.”

After the stint in Wellington for the festival the Sydney Dance Company will tour Australia, taking in Alice Springs and Darwin for the first time, tour Europe, do some film work and, in the winter, work on a new commissioned work with an Australian composer.

The group has already worked with Ivor Davies of Icehouse on an original score he wrote.

“That was great. We’d never done that sort of rock before?’