When the Australian Ballet announced its 2010 season in September 2009, one of the most appealing aspects of the year long program was the prospect of a tribute season called Peggy! The ‘Peggy’ of the title is of course the Australian Ballet’s inaugural artistic director, Dame Peggy van Praagh. The program features works with which she [...]

Michel Fokine choreographed and rehearsed his ballet Paganini in Australasia during the 1938-1939 tour by the Covent Garden Russian Ballet. He did not succumb to the suggestion, however, that the ballet be performed in practice clothes so that its world premiere could occur in Australia. He set this decision out in a letter to his [...]

‘The Oracle’: Meryl Tankard                
Spring Dance Season, Sydney Opera House, 16-20 October 2009
The Oracle, Meryl Tankard’s work set to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, is a triumph. A solo work for Paul White, who dances with astonishing physicality and intensity, it is an example of how affecting a work can be when the creative team has [...]

In a letter written on 11 May 1934 to his mother, Alice Essex, in London the dancer Harcourt Algeranoff wrote:
‘Nina Verchinina is engaged to an American. I believe a rich one’.
The letter was written from Barcelona where Algeranoff was performing with Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.
Read the full letter at: http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.ms-ms2376-1-433
For earlier [...]

The visit to Australia by the Dandré-Levitoff Russian Ballet between 1934 and 1935 has largely been overlooked by Australian dance writers. Coming after the second visit by Anna Pavlova in 1929 and before the momentous Monte Carlo Russian Ballet visit of 1936 -1937, it was much shorter than either of those two tours. It lasted just [...]