More than three years ago Robbie Ellis composed a piece of music called Feral. Eventually it found a home in the recordings archive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Young Originals Todd Corporation Young Composers Award.

Little did Ellis, who holds the 2012 Mozart Fellowship at Otago University, expect it would become the basis for a dance work by Royal New Zealand Ballet dancer and choreographer Jaered Glavin.

"I've dealt very little with choreographers. I have never really been able to figure out their language. Theatre is not foreign to me as a musician, but the dance world is. This is a really great experiment to get me into it."

Ellis and Glavin's collaboration is one of nine that feature in the show Leaps & Sounds in Wellington on Saturday. It's the first time the NZSO and the NZ Ballet have performed together in six years. The two shows are free and all 3500 tickets were snapped up within 24 hours.

Each choreographer chose from the archive music written by composers under the age of 25.

Glavin, who joined the company in 2008, hit the spotlight outside the dance world two years ago when he choreographed a tribute to Lady Gaga during an in-house workshop. A video of the dance was a YouTube hit.

Ellis met Glavin for the first time this week. Before that, their only communication had been via text chats on Facebook. Ellis says he was at least able to get some idea of Glavin's previous work, which included the Lady Gaga dance.

"I'd seen his Lady Gaga exploits and little bits of footage. I'm pretty happy. It's a combination of secure and confident, and optimistic that he's the right guy to choreograph my piece. I think our personalities match pretty well."

Feral won the Young Composers Competition orchestra choice prize in 2009. A programme note describes the piece as "the story of a creature that lives somewhere humans seldom go. His environment is dank and dark".

"The opening theme came to me as I was out and about walking," says Ellis, who was a double bassist for the National Youth Orchestra. "I wanted a particular sound, and the opening theme is played by the six lowest woodwind instruments  two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contra bassoon. They're not naturally particularly loud instruments but it's a real grunty sound, and I set the strings behind them. That's where the piece came out of and I kept writing from there."

Ellis says he wrote the piece specifically to enter the competition. "It was something I had put off for many years but finally buckled down and wrote something for it."

He says normally the competition provides an opportunity for young composers to get their pieces performed by the NZSO and it is then recorded onto a commemorative album, before residing in the archive. But it's hit or miss on whether a piece has a life beyond that.

Glavin says he was given the choice of works that he liked from seven years of the competition. Feral stuck out immediately. "I knew it instantly from even reading the title  'That sounds like me'. I listened to it and I loved the music  it was fabulous. It was so aggressive and really quirky."

Glavin had about six weeks to create the work and rehearse it with six dancers. "What's different about this is that normally I'd choose a piece of music that I like and know and listen to it for a while. It was kind of an interesting challenge working to something that might not have been anything that I particularly bonded with and I would have to change the way I work. But I was fortunate enough to really love what I found."

Glavin, who is from England, was a finalist in the Young British Dancer of the Year competition and has garnered a lot of praise as a dancer since joining the Royal NZ Ballet. He is dancing in another piece in the Leaps & Sounds show. But he's just as persistent in pursuing choreography.

"I've always liked the fact that it's like something you make. I like dancing obviously, but you get the opportunity to make something for people to see. It goes back to when I was really young. I just loved the whole stagecraft thing, watching the performance and the magic that they put onto the stage. That's what attracts me the most."

It's the same for Ellis who, while still a musician, is also satisfied by creating work that is then performed by others. "I'm too much of a jack-of-all instruments, master-of-none to really have buckled down and got really good on one instrument.

"In hindsight, I probably should have done a double-bass performance degree. I seem to have more of a producer's or a creator's overall eye to things. Although I'm happy to be a foot soldier and perform for other people, it's really only within my limitations.

"Right now I'm 'writing to write'. I'm getting through projects and I'm not over-thinking them too much. I'm not one of those tormented composer souls."

- © Fairfax NZ News

Comments