Green so close to blue it becomes sea green
Copland Dance Episodes
The Australian Ballet
Tuesday 23rd June, 2026
Regent Theatre, Melbourne
Choreography: Justin Peck
Music: Aaron Copland ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’, ‘Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo’, ‘Appalachian Spring’, ‘Billy the Kid’
Costume design: Ellen Warren
Set design: Jeffrey Gibson
Lighting design: Brandon Stirling Baker
Copland Dance Episodes was originally commissioned by New York City Ballet, premiere 26th January, 2023, David H. Koch Theater.
Flying Colours, my response to The Australian Ballet’s opening night of Copland Dance Episodes, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
Upon arrival, colour greets me, and how. A wall of colour and pattern by Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, it is joyous and intriguing, loaded and bright. Snaking up the two sides, in blue lettering, all caps, a tantalising premise: “The only way out is through”[i].
Hinting at the motion to come, a raft of orange triangles skitters across forest green. Where they meet a rosy pink, they bounce back in the direction they came, and conversely become lighter green on forest green. The optical illusion of these squadrons of kaleidoscopic triangles, on the drop curtain, refers to Gibson’s own practice, his Chocktaw and Cherokee heritage, Indigenous traditions, and his response to the familiar and patriotic music of Aaron Copland. It is also, fittingly, a happy note to sound on the opening night of The Australian Ballet’s premiere of Justin Peck’s Copland Dance Episodes, and the company’s farewell to the Regent Theatre before returning home to Arts Centre Melbourne at the end of the year. This is unmistakably a celebration. An invitation, as the synopsis encourages, to “shake off the cobwebs. Take your marks”[ii], the only way is through the colour wheel.
The lighting design by Brandon Stirling Baker focuses on the large central circle and in doing so the bands of concentric colour take turns in advancing and receding and make a convex and concave cone. For though there is rich history in the many, many layers, to me, they are all housed beneath the umbrella of colour theory. Presented over 73-minutes with no interval, the first of the 22 episodes is also titled The only way out is through, set to ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ (1942). From the quick-draw get-go, echoing the directional sensation of the cone, dancers, and music, grow together, before tumbling apart, only to reassemble and advance elsewhere. To Copland’s ‘Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo’ (1942), ‘Appalachian Spring’ (1944), and finally ‘Billy the Kid’ (1938), colours radiates before my eyes. To the morale boost of the music, I see Mary Gartside’s An Essay on Light and Shade, On Colours, and on Composition in General (1805). It is as if her watercolour and gouache blots have assembled on the stage in all their luminous variations of yellow, green, scarlet, and blue, in the form of 30 dancers. Her amorphous blots, some of the earliest known examples of colour abstraction, show each “tint at various degrees of saturation”, and it is this revelation I see in Peck’s choreography: the interplay of light and shadow. Gartside’s intention to “illustrate the harmonies and contrasting hues of the primary and secondary colours in a manner that was more organic”[iii] is suggested in every circular blooming of four, five, or more dancers. The impression on the white page of the stage is breath-taking.
True to both Gibson and Gartside, there is of course no one shade of green, and so we have pear green, neon green, jade green. Green so close to yellow it becomes lime green. Green so close to blue it becomes sea green. Green like malachite, that mineral consisting of hydrated basic copper carbonate. All in all, there is 60 distinct colours in the costumes designed by former dancer with the New York City Ballet (NYCB), Ellen Warren. Even when thrown into silhouette, a sense of the top and tail colours pinging about the stage remains. Each movement seeks to show this is how an arm sounds when it is raised, in all the different notes of green, and this is how blue feels in the ebb and flow. And when woven together, with light and shadow, look how it transforms again!
In the 17th episode, Round Table, in which six dancers — Cameron Holmes, Henry Berlin, Elijah Trevitt, Riley Lapham, Yummi Yamada, and Benedicte Bemet — form an inward facing circle, the optical illusion reaches its zenith. In various shades of acid lime and citrine, on top, and blue lavender and sea foam below, the dancers rotate clockwise and anti-clockwise, as if gears of poetry in motion. With the spotlight on the disc on which they appear to stand, through their unique movements they now make the circle appear to spin before my eyes. When each dancer lands at 6 o’clock, they perform a quick-spark solo before choosing if the gear will spin to the left or the right. The effect reminds me of a thaumatrope which allows your eyes to connect the images drawn on both sides of the paper through the fast act of spinning a paper disc. A new visual emerges as the pace increases, thanks to the multiple shadows each dancer casts on the stage. Softly lit from above, their shadows fan behind them and make a chorus of many.
From inward facing to outward, the dancers also look out to the audience, with Samara Merrick tucking in beneath the column at the foot of the stage, and in the 6th episode’s Phone Home, when the dancers extend one arm out to the theatre, one finger pointing skyward. Precious Adams’s in forest green and blush pink hops into frame and teeters on her supporting leg, purposefully wobbling like a heron in a pond in a playful moment extended in triplicate by three other dancers. In the foreground of the reflecting pool, four dancers sit at the foot of the stage, their legs in turn dangling into the orchestra pit. Similar to the colour palette, intentional moments of casual, off-kilter balance and leisurely nonchalance feel almost accidental. But, of course, none of it is. It is precision, and crispness personified, with every extension of the leg or arm hitting the corresponding note.
Beguiled by the light fizz of energy and joyful interactions between one another, the contrasting, slower, more poignant moments caught me unawares, so, too, the shifting states between Isobelle Dashwood and Jeremy Hargreaves as the principal Rodeo pair, and Merrick and Maxim Zenin as the Appalachian Spring pair.
In Merrick’s duet with Zenin, they both form two rings with their arms, and interlock with each other and in doing so make further visible their connection. Merrick appears to lay her ear upon his chest as if listening to his colour, resting her head for the briefest of spells. Then, with her hands upon his middle, she lifts herself from the ground and cycles mid-air with her legs. As if weightless, or swimming underwater, she propels herself and encircles his upper carriage. When they met again, in another fleeting pas de deux, he lifts her above and enables her to draw a diamond with her lower body. The shapes that appear in both the positive and negative are beguiling. So, too, those that are drawn in the silhouettes of Shadowboxer.
As dancers lean, push, and rotate off each other, a community has been forming, and together they send ripples of energy throughout the whole theatre. Throughout all 22 episodes, rolling one into the next, colours contract and expand. The dancers cluster together and as their arms branch outwards they resemble prominent anthers of a flower carrying pollen. Copeland Dance Episodes blooms and shines.
[i] “The narrative of my work, which has always been my drive, is my want to find unexpected places where I can mark presence and existence... When I started looking at Aaron Copland, these particular scores, the Americana, I thought, ‘I could twist this in so many ways. The time period of the ’30s and ’40s was not a good time for native people”. Jeffrey Gibson in interview, ‘New York City Ballet Takes a Modern Turn’, Jenna Adrian-Diaz, 26th January, 2023, Surface, https://www.surfacemag.com/articles/justin-peck-copland-dance-episodes-new-york-city-ballet, accessed 24th June, 2026.
[ii] Copland Dance Episodes, The Australian Ballet Melbourne program 2026, p. 16.
[iii] ‘The women who redefine colour’, Kelly Grovier, 13th April, 2022, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220401-the-women-who-redefined-colour, accessed 24th June, 2026.
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Image credit: Artists of The Australian Ballet in Justin Peck’s Copland Dance Episodes, by Kate Longley
