Monday, October 29, 2012
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
Brutal Ballet - Sophisticated Mosh Ballet
Glissade. Pirouette. Sissonne. Windmill. Mosh. Head-banging
Mayhem.
OK, those last three are not strictly ballet terms but any
metal-head worth his or her salt would be familiar with them, as is Bridie
Mayfield; dancer and choreographer with Brisbane’s Brutal Ballet Company - the
only ballet company in Australia to dance classical ballet to heavy metal, and
one of only two ballet companies in the world to do so.
Currently on an Australian tour, the Brutal Ballet dancers
are throwing (delicate) shapes to Machine Head’s Unto The Locust. Bridie explains
this intriguing juxtaposition of ballet and metal as the realisation of a dream
she has long held.
“Having always wanted to dance to metal, and never really
having had the permission from the people around me - it sounds a bit
ridiculous when you’re thinking about metal – then I found out about Ballet
Devaire, who did dance to metal and I just thought that was fantastic that they
actually just did it and I told them what I thought and they asked me to
audition for the company; they’re in New York and I’m here and I couldn’t just
drop everything and go, so I thought I’d just start my own one because if I
waited around for some-one else to start one, that was never going to happen so
I thought I may as well do it myself.”
When I ask if she’s always been a metal-head, I get a
resoundingly positive “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and she explains how she was drawn to
the likes of KISS, Twisted Sister and Motley Crue when she was a young child, “…thinking
that was fantastic,”, happily admitting that “I didn’t actually
get into a bit more of the underground stuff
until I was a teenager.”
The Unto The Locust dance routine evolved out of an earlier
Brutal Ballet production of ‘Out of the Darkness’ but what drew you to the
Machine Head album? “For one thing, the album when I heard it was so classical
sounding.” I agree that it’s a damn fine album and she responds with an enthusiastic
“Oh! It’s just incredible!”. She continues “I’ve always had a bit of a thing
for Machine Head, and back when I actually had Brisbane dancers, there were
five of us – there’s only three at the moment – I put together a dance for Halo
[a track from Machine Head’s The Blackening album]. When Unto The Locust came
out, I really wanted to use it for something but I wasn’t quite sure what. So
after we did Out of the Darkness and I realised that these girls [dancers
Kendra Levy and Leia McVicker] were incredible and could do it, I decided I was
going to do it. Plus I’d seen Machine Head in LA right before we came back here
after Finland and I saw them at Soundwave a week later and [seeing them] twice
in one week was incredible. It really influenced the situation. But Locust is
just an amazing album, It’s just amazing and the guitar in it is incredible –
the dual guitars in it are unbelievable – and it just gives you a huge amount
of diversity to work with.”
Bridie recounts how they waited at the Brisbane Hi-Fi for
Machine Head and ended up giving an impromptu performance of Halo to an
appreciative (though slightly confused) crowd. “We put the song on and in about
a minute everyone started coming up and we actually did the dance in the
street, outside the Hi-Fi, in front of people from Hatebreed, Bleeding Through
and Phil Demmel, and Adam Duce [members of Machine Head] were there as well. It
was really full on and we finished this nine minute dance and they [Phil and
Adam] came over…we ended up doing it again and it was quite incredible but
artistically I realised that Machine Head opens up something completely
different when you dance to it. I think because Robb Flynn’s passion levels are
just so sky high that you just have to match it and I guess you end up
channelling that Machine Head passion through the dancing, and you kind of end
up going to a different place.”
Funnily enough Bridie didn’t recognise Phil as “I looked
over and saw this really long-haired guy and I was used to watching the Elegies
DVD where he had short hair so I didn’t realise it was him, and he actually
said he got quite emotional about it and shed a bit of a tear when we were
performing. Artistically, it means you’ve done something right.” It was a emotional
moment for Bridie too, though she adds “It was a little bit nerve-wracking and
a little bit exciting and it was just a relief to know what I’d done…they
weren’t gonna punch me in the face for ruining their song!”
Do you ever have copyright issues with bands or labels? “When
we did our first show to Dethklok, that was the big one, because bands are
generally quite happy for you to use their music but Dethklok is a bit of a
corporate outfit because it’s owned by Adult Swim, and it was in the cartoon
Metalocalypse first, so I had to get through a lot of red tape and I had to
speak to a lot of people in a lot of places around the world to get clearance.
It was like ‘What are you actually doing with the music?’ What are you going to
do with it?’ so in that regard, I had a lot of problems but otherwise bands are
fairly happy to see what we’ve done and they’re like ‘Wow! You’ve done what?!’
Jinxx from Black Veil Brides came into one of our rehearsals for Out of the
Darkness when we were in LA which was really exciting and he was just blown
away by what we did to a Black Veil Brides song, because we had one of those in
the show. He rushed home and rang his mum apparently! And he told the rest of
the guys and I met the rest of them when they came out for Soundwave.” She
found the reverse appreciation slightly bizarre; “It was just a bit strange
because I think they’re great and I was excited about meeting them so it kind
of turned on me a bit, although the bands are usually more than happy – they
all usually tell their mums! – it’s really funny! Angela Gossow sent a video of
something we’d done to Arch Enemy to her mum, and their mums think it’s great.”
Getting back to that whole ‘marriage of opposites’, do you
find that Brutal Ballet is shunned by both metal fans and ballet heads? “The
ballet people sneer at you but I think they just look for any reason to do that
so it didn’t really faze me. Metal heads have just been fantastic about it…[although]
there’ve been the few that just don’t think it’s brutal enough and we’re girls
and all of that but I think that real metal heads understand. There’s also the
thing where metal musicians are incredibly technically brilliant and as
dancers, in ballet especially, you have to be the same way and you have to be
technically perfect. There’s also that level where musicians I’ve met have an
understanding that dancers work really hard as well. There are a lot of
similarities and I don’t think you expect them to come from where they come
from, and those people that have an understanding of ballet can see that it
goes with metal fairly easily.”
So what are Brutal Ballet’s plans for the future? “I’ve
actually got a lot of things in my head about what I’d like to do. I’d love to
do something to Brendon Small’s Galakticon because that’s just such an amazing
album, but it’s there in the background, kind of waiting, and I‘d like to
actually do Dethballet again just so it’s done properly, the way I envisioned
it in the beginning. I’d love to do something to Dimmu Borgir; we’ve done a
couple of little single pieces to his work but to do a full ballet would be
pretty amazing. We were discussing doing a children’s ballet to DragonForce
because we did a dance to Through The Fire And Flames in Finland and we
finished the show on it; the idea about Out of the Darkness was to start with
some really dark brutal scary stuff and then end with the more light-hearted
stuff, so we did that and we sort of had anime costumes and we were doing a
battle on stage and it was very character driven, so we’re kind of throwing
that idea around. It might be fun – introducing some metal to the kiddies as
well!”
“I really love most metal and I like to dance to things that
are a real challenge; like Machine Head was a huge challenge, but if someone
threw Gorgoroth at me, I’d like to be able to say ‘Yep, we’ll dance to it’. There’s
a nice sort of middle-ground that I’d like to try with Black Label Society;
it’s a little bit bluesy, pubs and poles, and then there’s the other side which
has these beautiful guitars. We’ve actually done something to In This River but
that’s a slow one so it doesn’t really count!”
So with Kendra and Leia living overseas in California, how
does that work with rehearsals? “I video their parts because a lot of the
choreography I do, especially where metal is concerned, it’s divided into
different sections so one of us could be dancing to what the drums are doing,
one could be dancing to the guitars and one could be dancing to the vocals and
so then you sort of see the whole picture. Teaching everyone in the same room
does get a little bit confusing so it kind of works out but I video it and
email it to them, and they learn it from a video.” A week or so before the
actual tour starts, the Brutal Ballet Company all meet up in person to polish
the dances and Bridie adds “..and this week we’ve just been putting it all
together.”
After the Australian tour, the girls are off to England to
give the good folk of London a taste of what they’re about. And then? Well, the
world is their stage…
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Monday, October 1, 2012
On Pain Of Death - Year Naught Doom album review
http://metalasfuck.net/zine/reviews/2012/pain-death-year-naught-doom-handshake-inc
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