The Royal New Zealand Ballet presents a spectacular trio of ballets for its 2024 winter season. Solace: Dance to feed your soul, in association with Ryman Healthcare, will light up stages in Wellington, Auckland, and Christchurch from 1 to 17 August.
Showcasing works by three of the world’s most innovative and celebrated artists, Wayne McGregor (Britain), Sarah Foster-Sproull (New Zealand) and Alice Topp (Australia), Solace brings two world premieres and a New Zealand premiere to the stage.
Solace delivers an awe-inspiring experience this winter, combining the creative genius of leading choreographers, composers, and designers. This season of reflection, beauty, and profound human connection, showcased through the artistry of dance, will be a highlight of the cultural calendar in 2024.
Duration: approximately 2 hours 10 minutes, with two 20-minute intervals.
PLEASE NOTE: a 30 minute lockout applies to the beginning of this performance. Theatre doors will remain closed for the entirety of INFRA (the opening piece) to minimise disruption for the audience and dancers. Please ensure you are seated well ahead of the performance beginning.
Each venue will be open from 1 hour 30min prior to the performance. The doors to the theatre will be open from 30 minutes before the start of the performance. Please ensure you leave enough time to account for travel, parking, any ticket collections and purchasing refreshments.
Tickets will not be refunded or exchanged in the event someone is locked out.
Britain’s Wayne McGregor is one of the most exciting choreographers on the world stage, and the New Zealand premiere of his Infra, created for London’s Royal Ballet in 2008, represents an artistic coup for the RNZB. Choreographed for an ensemble of twelve uniquely gifted dancers at the height of their powers, and set to a slowly drifting, soulful score by Max Richter, Infra is a profoundly moving meditation on the loneliness, connections and consolations that lie beneath the teeming surface of the city. Julian Opie’s mesmerising LED artwork echoes the constant movement of the dancers below as a steady stream of anonymous figures walk purposefully towards destinations that are forever unknown.
Choreographer in Residence Sarah Foster-Sproull (Despite the loss of small detail, Artemis Rising, Ultra Folly, The Autumn Ball) creates To Hold, her fifth work for the Royal New Zealand Ballet, collaborating closely with the dancers to create a ballet that takes a new look at the astonishing machine that is the human body: shape shifting, endlessly inventive and always greater than the sum of its parts. Music by Eden Mulholland generates a surging, primordial sense of ‘becoming’ in the work, pushing and pulling the dancers through the space with urgency and power.
Following the dazzling impact of her Aurum (Venus Rising, 2022) and Logos (Lightscapes, 2023), RNZB alumna and Resident Choreographer at The Australian Ballet Alice Topp creates High Tide, her first original work for the Royal New Zealand Ballet, inspired by the music of Icelandic multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds. High Tide is a tender depiction of the never-ending morphosis from birth to death and is inspired by the human condition: growing pains, growing apart and growing together and learning to love and live with the light and shade, youth and age, within us all.
Alice’s regular collaborator Jon Buswell, one of the Southern Hemisphere’s most distinguished and creative designers for dance, will again work with Alice to transform the stage into a living sculpture of light and shadow with the dancers as its heart and soul.
To Hold - Choreography
Sarah Foster-Sproull
To Hold - Music
Eden Mulholland
To Hold - Set & Lighting Design
Jon Buswell
To Hold - Costumes
Donna Jefferis
Infra - Concept, Direction & Choreography
Wayne McGregor - commissioned by The Royal Ballet
Infra - Music
Max Richter
Infra - Set Designs
Julian Opie
Infra - Costume Designs
Moritz Junge
Infra - Lighting Design
Lucy Carter
High Tide - Choreography
Alice Topp
High Tide - Music
Ólafur Arnalds
High Tide - Set & Lighting Design
Jon Buswell
High Tide - Costume Design
Alice Topp