DANCE REVIEW : West Coast Debut of Sydney Troupe

Graeme Murphy is the Tasmanian devil of the dance world, the outrageous ballet choreographer whose pop routines defrosted ice-dancing champions Torvill and Dean on their first professional tour, who sent Cupid zooming on a skateboard in “Daphnis and Chloe” and who got a naked Tadzio all steamed up in “After Venice.”

Most of all, Murphy has made the Sydney Dance Company a hot ticket from New York to New Zealand. What a coup, then, for Stanford University to host the West Coast debut of his spectacularly glamorous and accomplished 21-member ensemble Monday in the campus’ Memorial Auditorium. No other California performances are scheduled.

Although it lacks the provocative stagecraft and startling sexual content of some of his earlier exports, Murphy’s “Shining” offers clear evidence of why he’s on top, Down Under. A full-evening ballet created two years ago to celebrate his 10th anniversary with the company, “Shining” represents a bold Australian expression of the yearning New Romanticism evident recently in everything from Paul Taylor’s Yankee “Sunset” to Glen Tetley’s Canadian “Alice” to Monnier-Duroure’s French “Mort de Rire.”

A sense of threat, of loss, hangs over all these works, but the young people who find one another take what they can get and make the most of it. In “Shining,” they manage to break through into a dawn of breathtaking physical communion: rhapsodic passages of massed, matched partnering that display Murphy’s gift for sweeping corps imagery. There’s even a suggestion in the surging group movement, with its rippling, mercurial arm motifs, of a union with the elements.

But “Shining” works backward in time from this joyous daybreak and leaves us in the night preceding it: a night of clenched confrontations and rigid enforcement of traditional male-female roles. (Even in the urgent duet for two men, Darren Spowart serves mostly as a ballerina-surrogate, Glen Murray as the “beard,” the porteur.) We obviously still have growing to do before we’re ready to fuse with one another--or with the sunrise.

The work is set to forceful music (on tape) by Karol Szymanowski: the First Violin Concerto for Act I (“Dawn”), the Fourth Symphony for Act III (“Night”) and “Mythes” for the long virtuosic duet (“Pre-Dawn”) linking them.

In this duet, there’s a moment when Alfred Williams removes his jacket and Andrea Toy takes off her toe shoes--the instant when their troubled relationship and “Shining” itself attempt to discard the constraints of the past and evolve toward that radiant new age that awaits them in the morning.

But, alas, Murphy’s vocabulary can’t make the transition palpable. He remains too hooked on inventing ghastly lifts that even this company can’t execute smoothly, too content to recycle conservative academic footwork. In or out of toe shoes, “Shining” stays inflexibly balletic, hidebound in its approach to steps and plastique. Driving, demanding and often dependent upon formal sequencing patterns, it depicts transcendence but never finds the new mode of dancing that will embody it.

Its most inventive section is a brief solo in Act I, that Murphy created for himself but which is currently danced by David Prudham: an intricate, fanciful jig full of the glee of a body asserting its freedom. It’s nice, but not nirvana.

In his late 30s, Murphy questions the old priorities of our culture, but not the old dance language he was taught. His work has vision and craft and emotion to spare, but not a new way of moving. And his theme demands nothing less.

Flawed as a statement but triumphant as a full-company showpiece, “Shining” benefits enormously from its elegant physical production: the glittering, gleaming formal wear by Jennifer Irwin, the lush, dramatic lighting by John Drummond Montgomery.

Most of all, it seizes the imagination through the scenic design of Andrew Carter: an open space partly encircled on the right by a curving, ramped walkway that becomes a coastline, the dance floor of a deserted nightclub and the edge of a formal esplanade as the ballet progresses or, rather, recedes through the evening.