Australian Ballet 2016 season

Way back when Tim Burton was a much weirder filmmaker, my wee brother and I were unreasonably thrilled by the chaos engine of awfully bad behaviour that was Michael Keaton’s unhinged and unwashed demon, Betelgeuse.  The grotty stripe-suited monster ate up the 1988 film of not quite the same name – the studio figured folks would stay away unless the title was simplified to Beetlejuice. Named after the red supergiant star blazing ferociously in the constellation of Orion, some 600 light years from our solar system, Betelgeuse is an outcast from the hilariously bureaucratic afterlife, aka the Netherworld. Which leaves him preying on the naïve recently deceased, like sweet young couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), in an attempt to crowbar open the sort of ridiculous loophole the Greek gods are fond of. Say his – apparently too complex – name three times and he’ll be unleashed on the mortal coil once more.  But Betelgeuse’s sleazy attentions are soon distracted by Winona Ryder’s goth child Lydia, when she reluctantly moves into Adam and Barbara’s now-empty house with her dad, Charles (disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones), and his new squeeze, OTT sculptor Delia (fabulously demented goddess Catherine O’Hara). A smash hit, Beetlejuice is a wild and unruly thing writhing with unhinged ideas, from its stop-animated black and white sand worms to characters shrunk into a model of sleepy town Winter River, and on to the hilariously-depicted dead of the surreal...

Snakes have curled their way around mythology for millennia. Present in countless creation stories from Egyptian, Greek and Indian to Norse and First Nations cultures (including the Rainbow Serpent), the loaded symbolism of this coiled creature clasping its tail between its fangs – the ouroboros – evokes eternity.  Sometimes the serpent holds the world together. Other times, it’s a constricting chaos agent. Either way, the fireside nature of myths, oft-shared in storytelling sessions spun under the stars, is inherently unending, melding anew with each retelling. Tackled by everyone from Roman poets Virgil and Ovid to Canadian indie rockers Arcade Fire and Katee Robert’s queered novel, Midnight Ruin, the myth of Eurydice and her Orpheus finds new life in the hands of folk singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. Her eight Tony Award-winning smash-hit musical Hadestown began life as a sung-through community project before she turned it into a concept album, and then a Broadway smash with help from director Rachel Chavkin. In most Greek tales, Eurydice and her Orpheus are happily married, torn apart by a cruel twist of fate: a viper’s bite (sometimes while pursued by toxic dudebro Aristaeus), not even a malicious god in disguise. As she fades into the Underworld, ruled over by Hades and his niece/abducted wife Persephone (!!!), a desolate Orpheus, son of a musical muse, plays his lyre like her life depends on it. Descending into the abyss and crossing the River Styx, he makes a...