After three years of presenting contemporary twists on the classics Giselle, Romeo and Juliet and Coppelia – The Training Ground ballet ensemble in Canberra is taking a leap into the dark side.

Directors Bonnie Neate and Suzy Piani are embarking on what they call a more “conceptual” kind of ballet, based on a true-crime episode that Neate saw on TV one night. 

It was the case of 17-year-old Daniel LaPlante who, in 1986, initiated a reign of psychological terror by crawling inside the walls of a home in Massachusetts and “haunting” the family, later going on to murder a pregnant woman and her two children in the same town. 

It is the former episode that Neate and Piani have taken as the starting point for a new ballet, Wired, coming up at Erindale Theatre in early August with 18 elite dancers performing a full-length work that explores themes of deception, mistrust and paranoia. 

It will be the culmination of a rigorous six-month contemporary dance training program for advanced dancers from the ACT and surrounding areas. Some in the cast are regulars with The Training Ground, others are not.

In Wired, it’s not so much a matter of creating something scary, but of conceptualising the characters, Neate and Piani explain.

This grim story also allows them to play around with the video material, and, happily, videographers Trent Houssenloge and Chris Curran, of Cowboy Hat Films, join the team again.

The video material leans more towards animation, they say, as is the set built from scratch by Houssenloge and Curran after they all sat down and worked out how to physicalise the story of the man in the wall. There will be two walls.

“The video work and the live dancing will sync together,” they say. 

Neate and Piani are always very particular about ensuring that the music and sound elements match the narrative. This year, in a soundscape created by sound wizkid Ben Novak, from Erindale Theatre, there’ll be an eclectic mix of contemporary pop songs, some classical strings and special effects.

Neate and Piani have imagined a series of characters – the unnamed Watcher, performed not by a male but by Larina Bagic; the three housemates inside, Charlie Thompson as Leo, Jemima Paul as Greta and Emily McCoy as Tess, and Imogen Addison as the Scene Changer.

There is also an ensemble of 13 dancers who perform manifestations of the three characters inside the house, balanced carefully until the end of Act I, when they begin to merge with The Watcher. 

As Neate reveals, when Act II arrives, things take a turn for the worse, with a focus on people being terrorised psychologically.

This kind of conceptual drama provides new challenges for the two directors, as they work on reflecting in dance what happens in the mind.

“We find that we are taking a new path, a more interesting route than we have done before,” they say.

Wired, Erindale Theatre, August 2-3.

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