September 2024 sees the fiftieth anniversary of Peter Sculthorpe’s Rites of Passage – a dance work for the theatre that is among his most significant artistic statements and only one of two scenic works in his output.
Its first performance took place at Sydney Opera House in 1974, one year after the venue opened, with the Australian Opera Chorus and the Elizabethan Trust Sydney Orchestra, conducted by John Hopkins. The dancers were provided by the Australian Dance Theatre, with choreography by Jaap Flier. The work, which borrows its title from anthropologist Arnold van Gennep and text from Boethius, is concerned with the rituals that shape human lives: Birth, Initiation, Marriage, and Death, or Rebirth.
Dance plays a critical role in the stage action, which is based open patterns found in Australian totemic and ritual systems, with singers and dancers all masked. A six-minute dance sequence, with improvised elements, functions as an interlude in the silence preceding the work’s Fourth Chorale. Here Sculthorpe calls for silence, though suggests “If music should be felt to be necessary, then it must be aleatory; dancers could, for instance, move through hanging curtains of wood chimes, or walk across raised parts of the stage in which contact microphones have been concealed.” In the conclusive ‘Death’ section of the work, the skin drums, piano, and slit drum mirror the movements of the dancers in a 9-minute improvisatory sequence; the overall effect is of a hieratic, ritualistic atmosphere.
Rites of Passage was mounted again in 2009 at the Canberra International Music Festival, with Sculthorpe directing. One of only two Sculthorpe scores to have been specifically created for dance, the other was undoubtedly his most performed ballet, for Robert Helpmann’s acclaimed staging of the Sun Music orchestral cycle – performed over 100 times by The Australian Ballet in 1968-69, and a production which garnered worldwide attention for Sculthorpe’s music for the first time.
Numerous of his orchestral and chamber works have since received choreographic treatments including his guitar concerto Nourlangie, choreographed as Red Earth by Stanton Welch for The Australian Ballet (and revived by Houston Ballet). The celebrated orchestral work Earth Cry was choreographed by Adam Blanch for The Sky is Falling in 2017, for Sydney City Youth Ballet. Cathy Marston turned to Sculthorpe’s string orchestra work Port Essington in 1999 for her Royal Ballet Dance Bites Tour piece Tidelines.
Indeed, Sculthorpe’s music for strings has provided inspiration for several choreographers. Frances Rings used his String Quartet No.11, Djilile, and Songs of Sea and Sky in 2007 for Debris, created for the West Australian Ballet’s season in the Quarry Amphitheatre. Most recently, the second movement of Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No.8 was choreographed by Itzik Galili for Theaterhaus Stuttgart in 2018.