Two Feet
Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre
Created, Directed and Performed by Meryl Tankard
Visual Design by Regis Lansac
Costume Design by Dianne Bridson
Lighting Design by Toby Harding
Assistant Director Peggy Watson
The Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
10 February

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is not putting it too strongly to say that Meryl Tankard has been exhilarating audiences in Adelaide in the past year. Since taking over as Artistic Director of the now eponymous Australian Dance Theatre, Tankard, and her associate Regis Lansac, have taken the company from strength to strength. Performed at Womadelaide, on the lawns of Botanic Park, her whimsical Court of Flora immediately attracted attention for the Meryl Tankard ADT. Some of the repertoire -Nuti and Kikimora for instance- had already been seen elsewhere and been warmly received. But works like the free-spirited Furioso and the superbly judged Songs With Mara represent new triumphs.

Her latest solo performance, Two Feet, is by no means a new work. In fact she first presented it at the Expo in 1988. Since then Two Feet has had plenty of legs – seasons in Melbourne in the festival in 1992 and in Sydney in November last year.

But its placement in the Tankard ADT season in Adelaide seems particularly apt, giving as it does yet another glimpse of the range of her confident invention. After the ensemble’s youthful unruliness in Furioso and the lyrical erotics of Mara (including memorable work by Tankard herself), the focus on Tankard as soloist suddenly seems appropriate.

Especially since Two Feet is such a quirky blend of Unreliable Memoir and tragic biography. The two feet in question refer to the four feet of Mepsie and Olga. Mepsie is Tankard as Smiley, a little vegemite from 1957, discovering the pleasures and mocking the pretensions of dance teaching in Australia. Olga is Olga Spessivtzeva, leading dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, who toured Australia in 1936. By the mid-Forties she suffered a nervous collapse that kept her institutionalised until 1963. Olga’s morbid preoccupation with perfecting the role of Giselle led her to become, like her character, a prisoner of the dance.

Tankard’s opening vignette as a doll revolving in a music box establishes the thread of implicit criticism that runs through the work- that the study of ballet and its strictures while embodying the classical ideal can , like Chinese footbinding, become merely a cruel and disempowering fetish. In contrast to Olga’s exercises at the barre, emphasised by Regis Lansac’s projections of classical columns, we have Mepsie, Tankard as a young fry, learning the mysteries of the Shrimping Dance.

While Mepsie learns to tango in her mother’s banana boat high heels, Olga is moving further into the black forests. Mepsie’s concern about how to tie her hair at the eisteddfod is counterpointed by Olga’s mad Giselle. The two become entwined when Mepsie describes her love of torture, the exercises that will make her a perfect dancer. While this is comically portrayed it has a satiric, and in Olga’s case, a literal truth to it that is both questioned and vindicated by Mepsie’s frantic performance of the sacrifice from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Tankard’s blend of comedy, pathos and satire is not always clearly managed. Olga’s Ballet Russes style is ambiguously campy at times although there is no doubting the impact of the Finale.

After Tankard has sashayed in blue satins through Handel’s Largo, delivered a startling sketch of Mepsie’s Christmas Dinner- regurgitating a few secrets of the compleat dancer’s diet plan, and fluttered as a rose-coloured Pavlova nymph, she returns as Olga.

The extended finale, suffused with the painfully haunting theme from Giselle and the beautifully-paced slide sequences from Lansac, creates that distinctive Tankard after-image. The projections – of stringy birches and Magritte-like brick hourglasses- are reflected in a pool of water that covers the Playhouse stage. Red roses are strewn everywhere. Olga in a knee length white tutu struggles to perform at the barre, water skitters and plashes and we witness a soul drowning in an inch of water. Such a scene is a bee’s whisker from de trop – and there are dance afficionados who say it IS too much. Well not me. Meryl Tankard and Regis Lansac (and co-designers Dianne Bridson and Toby Harding) have real confidence and flair. Their work is so lucidly realised it is a pleasure to watch.

The Financial Review, February 4, 1994. (?)