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Just
when his name seemed to be everywhere, suddenly he was gone.
Kristian Fredrikson, the designer of so many memorable productions
in theatre, dance, opera, film and television,
died on November 10, 2005,
at the end of a marathon year of designing the three great Tchaikovsky
ballets:
The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake,
in three different countries for three different companies.
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A
Legacy of Beauty
The
dance world will be a little less beautiful without designer Kristian Fredrikson
By Hilary Crampton
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While his passing
seemed sudden, Fredrikson knew his health was far from robust, but
his work was his passion. In a 1993 interview for the National Library
of Australia's Oral History Collection, he said: "I was willing
to die, it's madness, I know, but I used to say sometimes when I'd
been working hard at night and it was two o'clock in the morning
if I can only get this play on, I'll die happy." Indeed, there
are those who believe he had a hand in staging his own funeral when,
as the tributes flowed, a sudden storm and howling winds suddenly
transformed a sunny Sydney day into a dramatic interlude. He loved
a good theatrical effect.
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Fredrikson entered his profession by
an unlikely route. Showing evidence of a talent for writing
while still at school, he was offered a internship with the
newspaper in his hometown of Wellington, New Zealand. His
duties included reviewing theatre, music and dance. This led
to his fascination with theatre design. Recognizing journalism
was not for him, he joined a commercial art agency and began
sketching designs for his own interest. Through the good offices
of a friend, in the early 1960s he won his first commission
to design a production of A Night in Venice by Johann Strauss.
Its success led to other opportunities, including designing
The Winter Garden for the Royal New Zealand Ballet.
Fredrikson's formal training was minimal.
He enrolled in a short course in graphic design at the Wellington
School of Design, which exposed him to the work of English
designers such asDesmond Healey, Malcolm Pride, Leslie Hurry
and Oliver Messel. He became an ardent collector of magazines
and illustrations, beginning a lifetime habit of surrounding
himself with a plethora of books, records, knick-knacks and
other paraphernalia, anything that might prove a useful source
of information
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or inspiration. He always travelled with his "magic suitcase,"
out of which he would produce scraps of material, exquisite or bizarre,
that might form the basis for a costume or a colour scheme.
In the early 1960s, with all the bravado of youth, he left a message
asking to meet with Peggy van Praagh, then artistic director of the
newly formed Australian Ballet Company, which was about to tour New
Zealand. It says much for van
Praagh's dedication to nurturing emerging talent that she contacted
him, and within three months had invited him to Australia to design
Aurora's Wedding. While Fredrikson looked back on that early effort
with mock horror, it was the beginning of a truly illustrious career.
He gave full credit to van Praagh for discovering him. She has been,
he says, one of his greatest
influences.
Perhaps the fates were on his side. When Fredrikson first arrived
in Melbourne, Australia's professional performing arts scene was burgeoning.
He became resident designer for the Melbourne Theatre Company. Ultimately,
he created designs for the Sydney Theatre Company, the Melbourne Theatre
Company, Opera Australia, the state operas of both Western Australia
and South Australia, The Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company,
as well as the Royal New Zealand
Ballet and, more recently, the Houston Ballet. In those early years,
van Praagh - who became Dame van Praagh in 1970 - served as a mentor,
balancing compliment and criticism equally. "It's there, it's
coming," she would say. Finally, when he designed Coppélia
for The Australian Ballet in 1979, she had no comment - he had hit
the mark in designs that created, for her, exactly the right ambience
of fantasy and romance - the heady, hazy heat of a European harvest
festival with a touch
of gothic gloom for Dr. Coppélius' house. The costume bibles
held by The Australian Ballet's wardrobe department reveal the detail
and subtlety that underpin all of Fredrikson's designs. For Coppélia,
he set the scene in warm and earthy colours. The coloured sketches
were extremely detailed, showing all the trims on head-dresses, sleeves,
aprons and jackets. He
achieved effects by layering textures and colours, creating rich effects
with simple materials.
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In later years,
Fredrikson abandoned the use of colour in his design sketches,
preferring to respond to fabrics he found on shopping ventures
in preparation for each new production. He had a genius for
colour, happy to take risks in combinations that on close
view seemed highly questionable. This was never more evident
than in the iconoclastic production of Swan Lake for
The Australian Ballet, which he co-devised with choreographer
Graeme Murphy and Murphy's associate, Janet Vernon. Ostensibly
Acts I and III were set in monotones of cream and black respectively.
However, the costume bible shows how he cleverly underlaid
the costumes with a variety of surprising colours. The net
result, as the dancers swept about the stage, was a blur of
subtle colour that evoked the effects of the French Impressionist
painters.
Fredrikson and Graeme Murphy had collaborated on
some 15 productions, achieving a symbiotic working relationship.
"I can feel Graeme, I can feel where he's
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leaning," Fredrikson once said. "He
doesn't have to say it. And that's the art of true collaboration ."
The reconfiguring of this production of Swan Lake owed a great
deal to Fredrikson. The narrative revolves around the ménage
à trois of a naïve young princess marrying the heir to
a throne who was already embroiled in a relationship with a sophisticated
baroness. The distraught princess is relegated to an asylum, where
she retreats into an imaginary world of a
lake inhabited by serenely gliding swans. Fredrikson's capacity to
reinforce or carry forward a narrative through design elements is
epitomized in this production. The wedding dress in Act I, with its
voluminous train, entwines the Prince and the Princess and then divides
them. In Act II, she is wrapped, trembling, in a voluminous white
towel. She returns briefly to the court in Act III clad in a sheer
white wrap that emphasises her innocence and vulnerability. Finally,
in Act IV, she reappears in the wedding gown, wrapped cocoon-like
in its folds, only to decisively step out as an inky black swan, confident
at last in her decision to retreat into the dark recesses of the imaginary
lake. Each item serves to define her identity and reveal her
state of mind.
Such was his commitment to dramatic verity that in Act I, he inserted
a grey underlay for Odette's going-away outfit, foreshadowing her
descent into darkness, while in Act III, he inserted lighter colours
under the Baroness von Rothbart's glamorous black gown, signifying
the forthcoming public acceptance of her as the prince's paramour.
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Fredrikson conjures up
distinctive worlds, drawing audiences into a dramatic universe.
His designs for Murphy's Scheherazade won accolades worldwide.
In 1981, Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times wrote: "Mr.
Fredrikson is quite simply one of the finds of the season,
a designer all dance companies should grab. And the harem
he has created for Mr. Murphy is totally luminous. Inspired
by Gustav Klimt's variant of Art Nouveau, he has created see-through
and gold-trimmed robes for the four main dancers, who descend
from trapezes. Other figures glow like suspended oil lamps,
their gold headdresses and draperies illuminated by lighting
from below. "
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Because so much of his design was for opera or ballet, it is easy
to assume that Fredrikson favoured opulence. This was not always the
case. He was also capable of both humour and restraint. For Murphy's
Daphnis and Chlöe, the set consisted
of a simple ramp, the perfect setting for Cupid who, clad in minute
gold briefs, traversed the space on a skateboard. Again, his designs
for the Melbourne Theatre Company's Burke's Company consisted of a
bare stage, a dark sky and a metallic sun, epitomizing the harshness
of Australia's desert country. But in Tivoli, a collaborative project
combining the forces of The Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company,
he engaged in riotous play, devising sets and costumes that both celebrated
and satirized the extravagant turn of the century vaudeville pageants.
In recent years, Fredrikson resorted to a quieter palette - what he
referred to as his "grey" period. For The Australian Ballet's
2005 production of The Sleeping Beauty, he returned to his
love of colour, creating contrasting worlds of stark white for Carabosse's
cruel winter landscape, and jewel-bright colours redolent of the exotic
east for the court scenes.
Again he turned convention on its head, allowing only one tutu for
the Princess Aurora. The traditional fairies were reconceived as spirits,
and costumed in body-hugging unitards with barely visible gauze skirts.
The courtiers were garbed
in sari fabrics and housed in a gilded pavilion, while the nursery
was a jumble that included a topsy-turvy staircase, a giant cradle
and a menagerie of fanciful toys and pets.
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Despite his great gifts,
Fredrikson was often plagued with self-doubt when first confronting
a design commission. "You are alone," he said during
an interview with Dr. Michell Potter, Oral History Collection,
National Library of Australia. "It can only come out of
you - I become extraordinarily depressed. You think to yourself,
'I don't think I can do this, I haven't a clue.'" Dance
presented particular constraints, because of its highly physical
nature. As a designer, he needed to have some
understanding of the movements, taking into account the likely
stresses and strains upon the costumes, as well as being sensitive
to the choreographic line.
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While the many directors and choreographers with whom he worked regarded
him as a consummate collaborator, Fredrikson identified himself as
a hermit and a melancholic, preferring to bury himself away in his
apartment to devise his
magical worlds. But the wardrobe staff at The Australian Ballet said
he was unfailingly courteous and full of fun as he regaled them with
news and tales of the latest films he had viewed. DVDs were his latest
craze. He loved schlock movies as much as masterpieces, and all was
grist to his designer's mill. At The Australian Ballet he was regarded
as a family member.
Fredrikson won many awards, including six Australian Green Room awards,
an Australian Film Institute award, a Helpmann Award and four Erik
Design awards. In 1999, he received the Australian Dance Award for
Services to Dance.
In both Australia and New Zealand, his influence has been profound.
He taught at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art, and gave
willingly and generously of his time to aspiring designers and choreographers.
To be successful, he has said, aspiring designers must learn to "reach
into the depths of their imagination." A designer, he believed,
needed an encyclopedic knowledge of history and philosophy, and should
- at least to some degree - take on the mantle of director, choreographer
and performer, in order to create workable designs.
His loss will be widely felt. As David McAllister, artistic director
of The Australian Ballet, says: "The world will be a little less
beautiful now that we don't have Kristian to redesign it for us."
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"Ballet
Creole is the living dynamic that is Toronto and the new
Canadian hybrid
that's happening in the arts."
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Creole
Style
Toronto's Ballet Creole is Afro-Carribean inspired and totally Canadian
By Paula Citron
Ballet
Creole could only happen in a multicultural, multi-ethnic and
polyglot metropolis such as Toronto. Artistic Director
Patrick Parson was born in Trinidad. Associate Choreographer
Gabby Kamino is of Ukrainian descent and has a Japanese husband.
The 10-member company includes a mix of black and white dancers,
both Canadian-born and new Canadians. The
old countries of the latter are Mexico, Pakistan and five West
Indian islands. The five musicians of the Creole Musical Ensemble
are Trinidadian, Afro-German and Jewish. Of the board of directors,
five are black, while the four Caucasians are of English, Italian,
Irish and Jewish heritage. Says Parson, "Ballet Creole
is the living dynamic that is Toronto and the new Canadian hybrid
that's happening in the arts."
As a child, Parson was a keen participant in Trinidad and Tobago's
annual Best Village Festival, founded by former Prime Minister
Eric Williams to preserve the islands' unique cultural heritage.
Communities large and small compete against each other in traditional
performing arts, and it was this yearly gathering that first
instilled in Parson a strong sense of his Afro-Caribbean heritage
while honing his skills as a dancer, singer and drummer. He
began his formal training at the Caribbean School of Dance and
the Dance Academy of Trinidad and Tobago, where ballet was the
dominant vocabulary. He then
performed with Trinidad's famed Astor Johnson Repertory Dance
Theatre. When he was not on tour or teaching dance, he supplemented
his income as a junior supervisor with a telecommunications
company.
In 1988, Parson, then 29, made the decision to undertake formal
modern dance training to polish his technique, which brought
him to Toronto and the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. He never
went back home, and in 1990 founded Ballet
Creole. "I saw black dancers in ballet and contemporary
companies," he explains, "but there were no black
professional dance companies in a city where one-fi8fth of the
population is black. The time was right to break new ground."
Ballet Creole created a splash at Harbourfront's WOMAD (World
of Music and Dance) Festival in 1991, following up with a well-received
first season in 1992. The latter led to Ballet Creole being
part of the 1993 Premiere Dance Theatre Series at Harbourfront,
the most prestigious venue in the city. Parson's mainstream
obsession to distance himself from ghettoized dance and create
a contemporary professional black dance company had paid off.
Parson hates the word "fusion," preferring "creolization"
to describe the company's unique amalgam of many dance languages.
The anchor of Ballet Creole's training is the technique developed
by the influential Katherine Dunham, the great black pioneer
of American contemporary dance. Parson became a certified Dunham
teacher at her famed school in East St. Louis, Illinois, and
although he found Dunham only in recent years, her teachings
solved his problem of how to take dancers of many different
backgrounds and weld them together into an ensemble able to
perform his choreography.
In a conversation with three Ballet Creole dancers, the company's
salad-bowl roster becomes clear. Modern dancer Kathleen Pyper
fell in love with the company's very first performance, took
classes with Parson and joined Ballet Creole in
its second year. "It's all about diversity," she says,
"and that a white woman can be performing African-based
dance and not be accused of cultural appropriation."
Trinidadian-born Neketia Perez studied at Calgary's Decidedly
Jazz Danceworks, while Alejandra Valiente was schooled in ballet
in her native Mexico. Neither had modern dance training before
Ballet Creole. For Perez, it took a year for the Ballet Creole
style to click in, and that happened when she realized the training
was complementary and not in opposition to Afro-jazz and hip-hop.
It was less easy for Valiente. "There are no counts, no
symmetry, no logical directions," laments the dancer. "The
steps don't have names. Instead, you communicate through shapes,
fluidity and movement descriptions. It's about using space
and energy. Ballet is about outside lines, but with Patrick
you approach your feelings and the movement from the inside."
Kamino, a former member of the dance faculty at the University
of Waterloo, comes from the dance heritage of Judy Jarvis, Til
Thiele, Lawrence Gradus and New York's Milton Myers. What attracted
her to Ballet Creole was the energy.
"What makes the company strong is its repertory,"
she says. "Patrick brings in other choreographers, which
encourages the dancers to grow artistically." Kamino has
been associated with Ballet Creole for 12 years and has set
many works on the company.
For the great Myers, an icon with Alvin Ailey American Dance
Theatre as both a performer and teacher, Dancing Spirits was
also a break-out piece. Myers has been associated with Ballet
Creole for three years as both a faculty member
and choreographer. For his part, Parson expresses his philosophy
of choreography as being about life itself. His pieces on the
downside have portrayed the objectification of women (Erotica,
1999) or the violence that shapes modern society, from youth
gangs to 9/11 (Urban Griot/Toute Baghai, 2002). In contrast
is Saraka (1998), a joyous celebration of African culture that
weaves together eight ritual dances, each from a different country.
His most ambitious work is Soulful Messiah, created in 2002
and presented every Christmas season since. Set to legendary
American black singers performing a rhythm-and-blues version
of Handel's famous oratorio, the moving production attracts
sell-out crowds that cut across Toronto's demographic.
The company, headquartered in a former junior high school in
the city's West End, forms a mini-empire of its own. The community
side is based around Ballet Creole School of Performing Arts,
which offers a wide variety of classes to the public, young
and old, including a summer dance camp for children. The jewel
in the crown is the full-time, two-year Ballet Creole Professional
Training Programme, which educates audition-only students. There
is also Kids Creole, a youth performance group and an adult
drumming ensemble, Creole Drum-matix.
The company operates on an annual budget of $400,000 and has
no debt. Grants come from both the Toronto and Ontario Arts
Councils, but half its income derives from a heavy touring schedule,
particularly in schools, and its annual seasons in Toronto,
Hamilton and St. Catherines. Volunteers are its bulwark, such
as music teacher Anna Di Costanzo, who is vice-president of
the board and de facto office manager and archivist. "From
the beginning," she says, "Ballet Creole has been
a pioneer. It was Canada's first professional black dance company,
the first to start a full-time Afro-based professional dance
training programme and the first to bring Dunham technique to
Canada."
Jamaican-born board president Shirley Irving is another believer.
A textile curator and design historian, Irving says: "The
audience that used to come was mostly white, but we're attracting
more blacks in recent years. The black community is beginning
to understand that Ballet Creole represents them by doing something
important, that we represent a black aesthetic that is participating
in the creation of Canadian culture." <end>
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TABLE OF CONTENTS: Spring
2006 Issue [top]
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- Labour of Love: The late Kristian Fredrikson leaves behind a
spectacular, newly designed Swan Lake for Houston Ballet
by Marene Gustin
- Dance Consciousness: 2005 CORD explores the relationship between
dance and human rights
by Kena Herod
- MOPIX Picks: A recap of the Festival of Dance on Film &
Video 2005
by Paula Citron
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Departments
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- Commentaries from Vancouver, the Prairies, Montréal,
Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Britain, France, Italy, Russia
and Denmark.
- Reviews of Mantsoe, Les Grands Ballet Canadiens de Montréal,
The Kudelka-Taylor Project, Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Royal
New Zealand Ballet
- DVD Reviews
by Paul-James Dwyer
- Book Reviews
by Elizabeth Godley and Kaija Pepper
- Notebook
by Michael Crabb
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