Robyn Hendricks, as Anna Karenina, and Callum Linanne, as Alexei Vronsky, entrance each other in the ballroom scene of the opening Act. Their pas de deux turns Tolstoian prose into live flesh and blood: words, that pierce the deep recesses of the heart, morph into dance.

Hendricks, Linanne, and Adam Bull as Alexei Karenin, subsequently strip each other’s souls bare, unfurling the dance sequence the trio unleash in the Karenin house. When is one person’s love another person’s property? By whom is commitment betrayed? Must fidelity to the heart spur vengeance? . . . A body of urgent questions encounters itself through that triumvirate of dancers, wrestling on a knife’s edge between repulsion and allure.

Hendricks’ solo dance inhabits Karenina, as Tolstoy’s hero plunges into the pit of despair, and clutches at the last vestiges of sanity on the brink of death. In the Karenin house, in Act II, Hendricks brings the cost of a woman caught in the claws of the property rights of a man, into stark clarity.

Bull’s and the male corps de ballet’s dance sequence, in Act II, reflects how Parliament works. The dancers clone politics into a machine. As Karenin, Bull is the voice crying in the wilderness of authoritarian uniformity. But the contrast between Karenin in politics and Karenin in the bedroom, strips human institutions of the masks behind which human hearts and their corruption hide.

This sequence eloquently confronts tried and tested norms, as cutting-edge contemporary choreography breaks through the net of expectation.

What defines the difference between how to act and how not to act? What demarcates the difference between how to be and how not to be? What identifies the difference between love and its counterfeits? . . . These, and a myriad of like Tolstoian questions, juxtapose Hendricks’ and Linnane’s two pas de deux sequences set in Italy, in Act II. Intimacy, beauty and affinity animate the first dance. Dissonance haunts the second, and we feel the fragile pathos of life.

When Vronsky leaves Anna, she implodes into deep despair. Hendricks captures this numb anguish with haunting vibrancy, heightened by the ghostly, emotive resonance of Metso-soprano Dimity Shepherd’s voice.

Yet, by holding her torment with utter sincerity, Anna is able to go on: to be, rather than not to be.

Anna finds the courage to secretly return to the Karenin house. She comes back to the son she had deserted for a life with Vronsky. The two broken hearts embrace: mother and son reconcile. Here, Hendricks’ humble, spellbinding connection, through the body language of dance, as she re-engages with the young abandoned boy, must surely melt even the most hardened heart.

Throughout the ballet, Benedicte Bemet, as Kitty Scherbatskaya, and Brett Chynoweth, as Konstantin Levin, are the vivid backlight that illumine the production with light, contrast and depth. They are the ballet’s vital, underpinning framework, imbuing the production with  timbre and texture, shadow and colour, dimension and breadth. 

The Australian Ballet’s corps de ballet supports the featured dancers, holds everything together, and injects the show with lifeblood.

The culminating, happy dance sequence, set in a wheatfield on the horizonless steppe, moves everyone into what psychologists term “disassociation”. To cope with an insufferable tragedy, one looks at the acute pain through a prism of mental distraction. Cognitively removed and emotionally displaced from the trauma, one reacts to it as if it has somehow been resolved.

When Karenin separated mother from child, he imparted the final, lethal blow. Anna suicides. What is at fault? Adultery? Abandonment of a child? Vengeance? Institutional heteronomy? . . . countless Tolstoian questions sensitively and bravely explored.

Artistic director: David Hallberg. Executive director: Libby Christie. Choreography by Yuri Possokhov. Score by Ilya Demutsky. Conductor: Nicolette Fraillon. Guest repetiteurs: Adam Blyde, Suzanne Lopez. Costumes and sets by Tom Pye. Lighting: David Finn. Projection design: Finn Ross. Salutes to all the dancers, artistic and production staff!

The Australian Ballet’s Anna Karenina is at the Sydney Opera House until 23 April 2022.