Natalia Osipova in Meryl Tankard's Two Feet (photograph by Bill Cooper)

Over two acts, Two Feet tells the story of Mepsie, a sparky Aussie kid trying like crazy to perfect her work independent of her maddening teacher. She ties one foot to the opposite knee, learns to do a ‘Shrimping Dance’ with bucket and net, and flings her body into malformed pirouettes. Later, she staggers about in adult high heels as she tries to learn the Cha-Cha from a book. In sharp contrast, Two Feet traces the superlative talent and tragic decline of Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtzeva, universally acclaimed for her exquisitely soulful Giselle. On tour with the Imperial Russian Ballet in 1934, she walked out of Sydney’s Theatre Royal and into a life-changing nervous breakdown on a distant road in the bush. Spessivtzeva was herself obsessive and would religiously practise at the barre for an hour before a performance. After another breakdown, in 1943, she disappeared into an American asylum, as if anonymous. But in Two Feet she first appears suspended in the air as the beautiful Columbine, then at the barre, then centre stage as Giselle, and periodically as a cloaked, grey shadow walking across the stage.

In this new iteration of Two Feet, Osipova, a commanding principal of the Royal Ballet and a Giselle much in demand across the globe, dances Tankard’s roles. If Osipova was nervous on opening night, there was no sign of it, although it was hard, initially, for anyone who saw the original Two Feet to forget Tankard’s idiosyncratic sense of humour, and her exaggerated girlish outrage at her suffering for dance. But this was now Osipova’s show, and Tankard drew on stories of Osipova’s schoolgirl tricks – tying her leg to the bedpost overnight to stretch it, for example – for some of the comedy in act one. More delectable and affecting were two film passages: one of the child Osipova in her Russian ballet class, already achieving perfection, and old monochrome stage footage of a lissome Spessivtzeva performing Giselle’s mad scene.

A flurry of dances from ballets she danced for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes or for the Paris Opera followed, expanded by Lansac’s images flooding the back wall of the stage with imperial decorations, strips of glamour shots, and montages from old film. The act closed with clarion blasts of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the frantic dance of the chosen sacrificial virgin, a cathartic moment, and a precursor of what was to come.

Natalia Osipov in Meryl Tankard's Two Feet (photograph by Regis Lansac)

In act two, Osipova left youthful issues behind to represent the era of Olga’s fame, not in any purist sense, but symbolically, opening the act in a majestic solo, the ‘Blue Divertissement’, a tribute to dancer–choreographers Vaslav Nijinsky and his sister Bronislava, perhaps, or to the pioneering women of early Modern dance, from Isadora Duncan to Martha Graham. Dressed in a long split sheath of midnight blue, one oblique strap over one shoulder, Opisova made this dance a ritual of fall and recovery, of deep extension, torsion, and impeccable musicality to the ‘Largo’ from Handel’s Xerxes. A comical ‘Christmas Dinner’ episode devoted to fancifully decorated cakes, and to the fear of putting on a gram of weight, fell flat and unsettled the tone after the concentrated dignity of the ‘Blue Divertissement’.

Osipova’s performance became more and more clearly an act of dedication and abandonment to the potential dangers of dancing ‘badly’, and of acting from the gut and the heart. But she had already, early in act one, cemented into the viewer’s mind the intensity of Olga’s face at the barre, fixed in gloom or transformation, it was impossible to tell which. For some minutes Osipova revels in Olga’s fame in a variation on Anna Pavlova’s sugar-sweet Dragonfly solo set to Kreizler’s Schoene Rosemarin, but Olga’s mind  is elsewhere, and she scatters the stage with red roses, angrily, distraught, as rain begins to fall and flood around her, and she visibly begins to crumble out of her no longer possible exercises at the barre. To the last fragments of music from the graveyard act of Giselle, when her lover Albrecht must dance to death, she flies like a whirlwind into his music, before falling, shattered, to the floor.

Meryl Tankard as Olga Spessivtseva portrait in Two Feet (photograph by Regis Lansac, kindly donated by Mrs Slade to the Performing Arts Collection, Adelaide Festival Centre)

This was a magnificent performance from a ballerina who has a huge repertoire of Romantic and Classical ballets, and, in recent years, many theatrical challenges dancing the Royal Ballet’s great twentieth-century dramatic roles in Frederick Ashton’s A Month in the Country and Marguerite and Armand, Kenneth McMillan’s Mayerling, Manon, and Anastasia, and Wayne McGregor’s twenty-first-century contemporary ballet Woolf Works. During the curtain calls, Tankard looked as proud as Punch to have worked with such an artist and a good sport.

On another happy note, one must acknowledge Maina Gielgud, former artistic director of The Australian Ballet, for recognising the potential of Tankard and Osipa collaborating on Two Feet, and bringing them together. May it all happen again.

But why do some balletomanes and children persist on clapping in the middle of dark, upsetting or dramatic scenes? It is both unnecessary and disturbing to the tension building around a story or action. This is equally true for traditional ballets and for contemporary ones, and especially for dance theatre.

Two Feet, produced by the Adelaide Festival, was presented in the Adelaide Festival Theatre Dunstan Playhouse on March 1, 2, 3, and 5, 2019. Performance attended: March 1. 

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons.