A Ballet Dancer on Performing the Ambitious Kunstkamer

Kunstkamer is not your typical ballet. First there’s the eclectic music repertoire ranging from Beethoven to Janis Joplin. Then the set, created from imposing black walls that shift in form and function throughout the show. Finally, dancers must conquer challenging choreography and live singing on stage.

Created and first performed by the Nederlands Dans Theater, the ambitious work is a collaboration between four of the world’s most celebrated contemporary choreographers, Sol León, Paul Lightfoot, Crystal Pite and Marco Goecke and features 80 performers. Now Kunstkamer is coming to Australia, where The Australian Ballet will perform it for the first time outside the Netherlands.“It’s an unusual production in that it's not mixed works by different choreographers,” says Callum Linnane, principal artist with The Australian Ballet. “It's one work created by four different choreographers, which is quite amazing in itself.”

Roughly translated from its Dutch origin, ‘kunstkamer’ means “room of art” – a description Linnane says is apt. “Once the piece begins, it’s as if you are, in a way, looking into this cabinet or room of different artefacts.” He says each section conjures up different images or feelings – one reminds him of bugs, another fossils. “It really is just like a whole other world you get to experience for two and a half hours.”Linnane has a particular fondness for the production. Having started dance lessons at the age of seven, then ballet at the age of 11, he remembers seeing a performance by Nederlands Dans Theater at the age of 16. “They completely changed my life,” he says. “They blew my tiny mind apart”.

Linnane says the goal for this production isn’t simply to replicate what has come before. “It's not about doing it like NDT,” he says. “It's about doing it how The Australian Ballet will. We all have our own way of dancing, the same way we all have our own way of speaking, or writing.”

Joining The Australian Ballet in 2015, Linnane has rapidly progressed Coryphée, to soloist, to senior artist, and now to principal artist. “It’s where I wanted to join,” he says of the experience. “It's been great to be in a world-class ballet company in my home country. We're incredibly well looked after, and we’ve got one of the finest medical teams in the world. I've learned a lot not just about my craft and what ballet is about, but also how to take care of my body and how to manage injury.”

He also reflects on the experience of working with choreographers whose work has inspired him for years.. In Kunstkamer , Linnane will dance alongside The Australian Ballet’s artistic director David Hallberg, an opportunity that will unite the company on stage.. “I think everyone in the company is having to find a new way of dancing because the physicality is unknown to us,” he says. “It's not just learning a whole new work, it’s moulding a different physicality to our bodies so we can best represent what each of these four choreographers’ message is. That’s why it’s so ambitious. It's not enough to just be given a work and then do it, you really have to do a work justice. And because [this is] four of the world's greatest living choreographers in one show , there’s a lot to live up to in that regard. It's been a busy, all-hands-on-deck approach, which has been amazing. We're all pretty tired physically, but incredibly fulfilled creatively.”

See The Australian Ballet’s Kunstkamer at the Arts Centre in Melbourne, June 3–11. More details and book tickets.

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