James Drinkwater doesn't wait for opportunities. He creates them. His affability and enthusiasm means he is also good at creating friendships. So when opportunities and friends intersect in James Drinkwater's life, magic can happen.
He met Newcastle dancer, Belle Beasley. Having trained in ballet since she was three, Beasley did what William Dobell, Drinkwater and many other Hunter creatives had done, travelling overseas to further her knowledge and experience. She performed with the Dutch National Ballet and Zurich Ballet, then the West Australian Ballet, before finally returning home and being part of Catapult Dance in Newcastle.
Beasley recalls Drinkwater approaching her in May 2022 with his 'grand scheme' of a contemporary ballet, and him asking, 'How will I make this work?'.
"I was really excited by his proposition of using the structure and form of the classical ballet language to tell this uniquely Australian story," Beasley recalls.
"I think there are a lot of parallels between Dobell's story and the journey of classical ballet. There's this funny similarity in the way Dobell took classical tradition and turned it on its head, and we have the same possibility of taking the classical ballet language and turning it on its head and morphing it into something reflective of Dobell's time and our time."
With Newcastle being the community it is, Beasley recommended bringing in Skip Willcox, a fellow dancer and choreographer she had known since they were kids.
Willcox had also worked extensively in Europe before returning to Newcastle, with a reputation for being a gifted choreographer. What's more, this pair of lifelong friends seemed destined to be part of Dobell's story. Beasley had lived in Corlette Street, Cooks Hill; Willcox in adjoining Bull Street. Dobell had been born in 1899 in a house on the corner of Bull and Corlette streets.
"Skip and I are just so excited to interact with someone working in another discipline and another language," Beasley says.
"It's a chance to step outside the boundaries we normally work within or feel we have to adhere to."
"I just thought the idea and the concept was fantastic," says Willcox.
"It's something that hasn't been done before in the Hunter region."
The choreographers have assembled a troupe of four - Alexander Abbot, Allie Graham, and Strickland Young, along with Beasley - and two young dancers, Vinnie Drinkwater (the artist's nine-year-old son) and Matthew Mortimer, portraying Dobell as a boy and his friend. As for the older Dobell, he will be performed by the set and costume designer, and the instigator of this ballet: James Drinkwater. So that dance training wasn't in vain.
For the ballet's music, Drinkwater has dipped into his past. He contacted a musician he met during his rock band days in Melbourne. Joseph Franklin was playing bass guitar in a popular band called Dukes of Windsor, which toured with Dirty Pink Jeans.
"James was just a firecracker, he was hilarious," Franklin recalls.
The pair became great friends when Franklin's band moved to Berlin, and he was living just a street away from Drinkwater.
After Franklin returned to Australia, he developed a career and reputation as a performer and composer, creating music in a diverse range of styles, including contemporary jazz, but, as he describes it, "with no swing and no solos".
Out of the blue, Franklin received a call from his friend, talking about his ballet. The bass player was surprised - but not entirely.
"I heard him talk about a ballet 10 years ago. I feel like he said that, even in the Berlin days," Franklin says.
While he knew little about Dobell, Joseph Franklin loved what he was hearing, so he said 'yes'.
In turn, Drinkwater loved what he had been hearing of his friend's music and thought the freedom of contemporary jazz was ideal for what he imagined, and for giving the choreographers what they needed.
"As a listener, although it sounds like free form, there's this amazing groove," Drinkwater says of Franklin's music. "You feel it!"
The composer himself says the music employs a lot of rhythmic cycles and odd time signatures, "all these things that make it slightly unusual, but it's not too out there".
"Even when it's rhythmically complex, my intention is for it still to have a strong sense of pulse and flow," Franklin says.
Coming from a ballet background, Beasley has enjoyed working with Willcox to tease dance ideas out of the music.
"We'll have cues the dancers connect to, and in the spaces between there will be freedom," she explains. "Freedom to go with the flow."
"Composing a painting, it really is jazz," says Drinkwater. "You're going through this thing with all this training, but you're kind of throwing it out the door and bringing it back in when it's needed, and it's this riffing."
Visual music
HE may have found posterity with paint, but William Dobell had a passion for music.
If Dobell had completely followed his heart, we may well have been able to hear what he loved as well as see what he envisioned.
Dobell loved playing the piano and, by the accounts of those who heard him, he was a fine musician.
As a boy in Newcastle, he took piano lessons in a house on land now occupied by the cultural centre, and once the home of the city's art gallery - which exhibited Dobell's works.
He dreamed of being a professional musician. While he never pursued that, the piano held a prominent position in Dobell's life. In his Wangi Wangi cottage, a baby grand took up a fair chunk of the living area; the painting studio was out of sight, up steep stairs, on the second floor of the extension Dobell had tacked onto the house.
But music made its way up those stairs and onto the images Dobell created. The way he painted, with legato strokes and staccato flecks, often looks and feels musical, even operatic, and beautifully balletic. The sum of Dobell's strokes and gestures sings and dances. The painted board becomes a performance stage.
And so it is with Storm Approaching Wangi. This is a little painting that plays like a symphony, reverberating with sound and fury and movement. It is designed to be more than just looked at. Dobell wanted us to feel it.
The ballet's collaborators have been responding to that call, as they have shared sketches and sounds and ideas over the past few months, invoking and honouring Dobell, his art, and the place of much water he called home.
And just as Dobell did in his painting, the creative team is striving to get the feel right.
"Basically we're using the dancers, the movement and the rhythm to create a sense of his story without necessarily creating a super direct picture, I suppose," says Beasley.
"It's been a more abstract process, which has been so great for the movement.
"Between myself and Skip, there's been a lot of discussion of the kind of movement vocabulary that Dobell's gestural work provides us. It provides us this whole other movement vocabulary beside the classical language.
"You can see the physicality in his work, you can imagine the physicality it would have taken to create this work."
What's more, Joseph Franklin hopes the music plays into Dobell's life.
"Hopefully this music can convey some other artistic interpretation that ... can give feeling to some of that biographical content and another point of access to his life."
Creating history
DEEP in the historic Longworth Institute building in the heart of Newcastle, elements of Dobell's life and Drinkwater's dream are finding their feet on the time-seasoned hardwood floor. The creative team is in the one room together, rehearsing Storm Approaching Wangi and other Desires.
It is October 31, 2022. Halloween. While kids dressed as ghouls and witches prepare to go trick or treating outside, in here, the spirit of Bill Dobell is being not so much summoned as reimagined.
With the guidance of Belle Beasley and Skip Willcox, the troupe of dancers is enacting a sequence of moves. The dancers brush and stroke the air with their limbs. They scumble the space with their twisting torsos, creating a picture as ephemeral as it is beautiful.
At one point, as the dancers explore the urgent jazz music, Belle Beasley says, "We just need to find the new rhythm in that."
Which is what this ballet is all about. This group is finding new rhythms in the depiction of a life that ended more than half a century ago and yet continues to live through the marks made by that man.
Alexander Abbot is playing the role of the young/middle-aged William Dobell. During a break, Abbot quietly scribbles in a notebook, notating his thoughts about the artist's character, about who this man was, and charting how he will convey that through movement.
"I feel that makes my job easier," Abbot explains as he writes, before he looks up from the book and smiles. "And actions speak louder than words."
As well as providing the recorded music, Joseph Franklin will also be playing live during the performances. He will play a custom-made six-string acoustic bass, with a drum-like skin. But he also has an array of instruments with which to make sounds and rhythms.
His fingers riffle across a set of wooden chimes.
"It sounds gentle and super watery," Franklin says.
At a table, Drinkwater is sketching a costume idea for seamstress Gina Ermer, who is watching on as the lines form on the page.
Leaning against the huge room's walls are 14 panels that have been painted with spare slashes of colour by Drinkwater.
The number of panels correlates with the Stations of the Cross, which Drinkwater learnt about in his Catholic upbringing. In a way, Drinkwater muses, Dobell and his art were crucified during the Archibald controversy. But the religious allusion also refers to the "overriding presence" of the church in people's lives during Dobell's time.
As the dancers move in front of the panels, the slashes of colour seem to become animated, as if they are being brought to life. Drinkwater notes the marks look like figures in a crowd, watching Dobell. The design fits in with Drinkwater avoiding anything too literal.
"Whenever we get to something too obvious, we flip it and take it in a more abstract way," he explains, before gazing at the dancers in wonderment, as they bring another idea to life.
"It's a pinch-yourself moment."
- An excerpt from the catalogue essay Dancing in the storm with Dobell by Scott Bevan. Bevan is the author of Bill: The Life of William Dobell and The Lake.
Drinkwater's Dobell Ballet: Storm Approaching Wangi and Other Desires can be seen at Multi-Arts Pavilion (MAP mima) Lake Macquarie on Saturday, 7pm to 8pm, and Sunday, 5pm to 6pm.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? We've made it a whole lot easier for you to have your say. Our new comment platform requires only one log-in to access articles and to join the discussion on the Newcastle Herald website. Find out how to register so you can enjoy civil, friendly and engaging discussions. Sign up for a subscription here.
