Queensland Ballet Young Artists review ★★★★★

Variety being the spice of life, the Linbury Theatre’s Next Generation Festival moved on from British hip-hop to Australian contemporary dance with the arrival of the dancers from Queensland Ballet’s Jett Parker Young Artists Programme.

The programme is a year-long apprenticeship for early career professionals. As Queensland Ballet director Li Cunxin put it in his onstage introduction: ‘we pay them a salary and give them intensive training to help them on their journey.’

It’s an international outfit, where the current cohort of 12 includes dancers from New Zealand, Canada and Portugal, as well as Australia. All have one thing in common: they are excellent dancers, most boasting one or more international distinctions, and all perform with vim and commitment.

For this mixed bill they were joined by two alumni of the programme, now full members of Queensland Ballet, who danced a pas de deux by the company’s associate choreographer Jack Lister. Entitled Perfect Strangers, it was performed by Heidi Freeman and Lewis Formby to an indie score mixed by the Swedish multi-instrumentalist producer SKOGSRÅ.

Dressed in lead grey and plunged in penumbra, the two dancers seemed to be robots placed side by side, performing jerky movements with arms and heads, faces absolutely expressionless, never really engaging with each other. It was interesting and meticulously danced, but not hugely engaging.

The full company performed two ensemble pieces to open and close the evening. The Appearance of Colour, by Royal New Zealand Ballet’s resident choreographer Loughlan Prior, is inspired by the first transmissions of colour television, symbolised by quite pretty light and digital effects.

Prior’s choreography is energetic, using the vocabulary of classical ballet, including pointe work, in a fast-moving, contemporary manner that particularly favours the group’s impressive men, although its various sections offer each dancer an opportunity to show off.

The final piece in the programme, Fallen, brought much-needed human emotion to what until then had been a competent but rather soul-less display. The work of Queensland Ballet resident choreographer Natalie Weir, set to music by Schubert including lieder from Winterreise, it is a highly physical piece with difficult partnering work, particularly hair-raising lifts.

It centres on one man whom we first see sitting on a chair, looking desolate. Slowly another man approaches and the two engage in an emotional pas de deux. They are joined by an ensemble of grey-clad couples, and later by a woman in a bright red dress, who seems to bring him consolation, only to move away.

I’m not entirely sure what it was about, but it the dancers made its steps and general atmosphere absorbing.

All three pieces were created for this group of Jette Parker Young Artists; they more than showed their competence in contemporary dance. A greater variation in styles, however, would have been welcome.