The glittering ballet saved by the Country Women’s Association
Australian Ballet dancer Jill Ogai was unnerved at first by the soft clicks and tinkling sounds. “Can that be right...?” It was her costume; the ruby-crusted tendrils of its tiny red satin skirt jostled and clacked as she danced through the first rehearsal of Jewels, the thrilling three-act abstract ballet originally choreographed in 1967 by legendary George Balanchine for the New York Ballet.
Ogai’s heavily jewelled neck wreath was also slipping and moving, a little this way and that, over her decollete and shoulders as she leapt and spun. “I wondered, because, if that happens you might think [your costume] must be hitting into your partner?”
Dancers Benedicte Bemet (left), Jill Ogai (in red) and Sharni Spencer (in green) with volunteers Naomi Otton and Marsia Bergh.Credit: Simon Schluter
It wasn’t, but fair worry. Ogai, a senior artist with the company for 12 years and first principal dancer for Jewels’ second act, Rubies, is accustomed to costumes that are cunningly anchored, their bodices, tutus, straps and what-all gewgaws meticulously coutured, fastened not to budge a single distracting millimetre.
Dancers fly, in other words, not costumes. But this costume? This was a revelation. Designed half a century ago by renowned costumier and Balanchine collaborator Barbara Karinska, the original version of Ogai’s ruby replica was tricked out to tinkle and clack and spritz splintered light sparkles around the stage and into the audience.
“You can almost feel the light hitting you,” says Olgai. “The jewels across your chest make you use your shoulders in a different way and think about the [stage] lighting. It’s so clever, it makes it look like there are rubies just hanging in the air above you.”
Karinska’s costumes plug into the fizzy feels we all get from sparkly things and, ostensibly, into Balanchine’s original concept for Jewels. Despite some puzzling argy-bargy in historical records (Balanchine apparently once sighed, “The ballet had nothing to do with jewels; the dancers just dressed like jewels”) it’s widely understood he conceived it as a homage to the uber-glamorous Van Cleef & Arpels jewellery store in New York.
Whatever its genesis, the work has no narrative, just a thrilling sense of glamour and infectious energy that undulates in sync with each act’s choreography and score and, by all accounts, is as splendid to dance as it is to see.
Volunteers Naomi Otton and Marcia Bergh put the finished touches on dancer Benedicte Bemet’s dress.Credit: Simon Schluter
Principal dancer for Emeralds Sharni Spencer, for example, says she loves Balanchine’s “more French, very romantic” choreography, keyed to music by Gabriel Faure. Dancer Benedicte Bemet taps into the J-curve vitality of Diamonds, set to Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s score. “I love the way the pas de deux starts very simply, very regal, very subtle, then builds and builds and by the end, so much gusto.” In Rubies, set to Igor Stravinsky’s score; “There’s the most fabulous musicality,” says Ogai. “You can connect to that; there’s so much rhythm and nuance to the steps.”
“It’s really quite special,” says head of costume Musette Molyneaux of the ballet. “Like they’re in a jewelled box, all the elements working together; the choreography, the music, the staging, and all these jewels flickering, jewels dangling and flying around, and this sound as the [rubies] click together...”
Molyneaux says her task, to replicate Karinska’s evocative original costumes from scratch, ballooned into a complex year-long project. “There were no existing drawings. There were photos but no details, no colours, no fabrics ... and we wanted to be as true to the originals as possible. We felt a bit like custodians of a bit of history. We wanted them to be a homage [to Karinska’s designs] so as faithful to the originals as we could get. But it was going to be a challenge, very different from our usual process.”
Molyneaux researched photographs, films of performances, any flotsam of Jewels costumes she could plumb from the New York Ballet, from the internet, anywhere. She commissioned a design consultant, a former dancer with the New York Ballet recommended by its Balanchine Trust, and together they sent swatches, sketches, samples and checklists back and forth from her costume department at the Australian Ballet centre in Melbourne to a workshop in New York until they had a near-exact set of patterns and components: the green, red and white silk satin beginnings of 115 costumes for Jewels′ three acts, Emeralds, Rubies and Diamonds, plus 11 men’s underjackets and 36 intricate tiaras and head pieces.
But then, a reality check. Tens of thousands of gemstones, crystals, pearls, beads and braid were due to be meticulously hand-stitched, one tiny-tiny stitch at a time onto every costume in patterns true to Karinska’s original mapping. It was a gargantuan chore beyond Molyneaux’s workroom capacity. What she needed was a small army of skilled craftswomen, a sewing circle of volunteer couture petites-mains.
Six months into the costume project, she got them. Miraculously, Molyneaux’s solution materialised in a light-bulb moment with recently retired Australian Ballet costumier and gents’ cutter Marsia Bergh.
“We’d just been talking about the production and all the hand-sewing they were going to have to do,” Bergh recalls. “And I suddenly thought, Oh, I could do that! We could do that.” Bergh was an accomplished craftswoman herself, and just happened to be Rosanna branch president of an organisation bristling with others – the Country Women’s Association.
One FaceBook callout later and Molyneaux had her precious sewing circle, a mixed dozen (on some days, up to 20) of mostly CWA and Embroiderers Guild, Victoria members. They gathered with their work around the Australian Ballet’s boardroom table a few days each week, spreading out costume segments (later assembled in Molyneaux’s workroom), tulle patches (beading maps placed and stitched into position on the segments) and little pots of glittering crystals, pearls and beads.
“Some days a lot of chatter, some days you’d just get into the sewing zone; quiet,” Bergh says of the mesmerisingly pernickety, and more often than not, repetitive, work. “Some pieces would take a day to finish, some two hours, and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.”
One of the circle’s most enthusiastic craftswomen was retired cake decorator Naomi Otton, who sews exquisitely fine beading, reticella and drawn thread work as a hobby. She is also a card-carrying member of the Embroiderers Guild, renowned sticklers for perfect, daintily finished work. But on the Jewels sewing circle, Otton had to learn quickly there were many definitions of “fastidious” and “finished”. “You learn how NOT to frown upon knots for instance,” she says cheerfully. “In a lot of embroidery it’s considered careless to use a knot; there are [neater] ways of catching and working your thread back, but we got used to the back of our work looking messy.”
Australian Ballet costumes are also renowned for their longevity, according to Bergh, so sturdier construction is vital to compensate for the rough of backstage, multiple seasons, swaps and alterations for different dancers. “About 30 years is expected,” Bergh says. “They’re made to last. For example, those costumes in our (recent) production of Romeo and Juliet were made in the 1970s, same with the costumes for Don Quixote; those did get some of the flowers refreshed on the skirts though.”
For Otton, every day with the ballet brought new skills beyond the sedate embroidery hoop. How to hang on to and work a costume, for example, that is so laden with crystals, beads and braid it keeps slipping and sliding heavily out of your hands. Or, how to secure hundreds of tiny beads, one by one, each by two minuscule stitches plus a double microscopic knot, through so many layers of drill-backed satin; the only way she could pull her needle through was with pliers.
One lesson in particular Otton remembers more vividly than most. “This day, a girl held up one single pearl and said, ‘If one of these comes off on stage and a dancer treads on it in the middle of a performance, it could be career-ending.’” Otton laughs. “We were all shocked. ‘Let’s leave now!’ But then, ‘No, we’re going to do this, and none of my beads are ever coming off, ever, ever ...’”
Jewels opens for a limited season at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, June 29 - July 8, australianballet.com.au.
Tickets for a livestream on July 6 include recording available until July 20. australianballet.com.au/performances/live-on-ballet-tv