Malcolm’s Fade Not was debuted by The Australian Ballet last month and featured a score by Lisa Cheney with choreography by Remi Wörtmeyer.
Journalists at the Sydney premiere wrote that the ballet used ”a poignant theme” (Sydney Morning Herald) to create “a moving piece in which the dance rose and fell with the tide of feeling” (The Daily Telegraph). National daily The Australian compared Remi Wortmeyer’s choreography with that of Kenneth MacMillan while the Australian Stage praised “librettist and eminent director Malcolm Rock” for his words and Lisa Cheney for her score that was “the sweetest swoon, enchanting”. It also asserted that Fade Not was “the most unexpected, non-conformist” work of the 2009 Australian Ballet Bodytorque season.
Michelle Potter of the Canberra Times summed it up best as “a courageous experiment in linking dancer and singer, movement and voice” with “an innate sense of clarity and harmony”. She wrote that the ballet was able to “grab the audience’s attention from the opening moment and hold it throughout … with a strongly focussed approach”. Many thanks to those critics who took the time to write about the show, which you can watch below.
With her final breath a mother evokes the life and love destined for her newborn daughter through a bittersweet lullaby.
