The one certainty that emerges from Martin del Amo’s latest work, Anatomy of an Afternoon, is that Paul White, the solo performer in the piece, is a very versatile dancer. Some aspects of his dancing remain constant no matter what the choreography―his muscular strength, his control over every small or large movement and the seamless [...]

Last June I received a query about a particular photo of Olga Spessivtseva. An exchange of emails resulted and it transpired that the enquirer was the son of Isabelle Stoughton, whose recollections of working for publisher and writer Cyril Beaumont were published by Dance Books late in 2011 under the title At the Sign of [...]

New York does December in its own inimitable way and one annual and memorable event is a season of George Balanchine’s Nutcracker performed at Lincoln Center by New York City Ballet. This year, however, you didn’t have to be in New York to see the production. It was filmed live on 13 December and relayed [...]

Graeme Murphy’s Romeo and Juliet for the Australian Ballet continues to generate discussion and mixed reviews, and I recently took a second look at it at a Sydney mid-season matinee performance. It is impossible to ignore the dominance of the scenic elements and the challenges of the constantly changing times and locations, and why [...]

Ronald Hynd’s Merry Widow has never been my favourite ballet. I dislike its nature as balletic operetta, with emphasis on the ‘etta’, and its stock comic characters and its silly story line with people hiding in and escaping from pavilions and so forth. And as I took my seat at the Sydney Opera House my [...]

New York City’s newly refurbished City Center theatre was the venue for American Ballet Theatre’s Fall season, a program of nine, one-act works by contemporary choreographers presented over a short period of a few days. Just three of those works, Alexei Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas, Demis Volpi’s Private Light and The Garden of Villandry choreographed by [...]

When I wrote unaffectionately about Alexei Ratmansky’s 2009 work for the Australian Ballet, a new version of the 1933 Massine ballet Scuola di ballo, I received some feedback from friend and colleague David Vaughan. David wrote that he wished I could see work made by Ratmansky for New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. [...]

This is an expanded version of my review first published in The Canberra Times, 17 September 2011, p. 30 under the title ‘Fluid postmodern take on a classic’.
In an interview published in the September issue of the Qantas inflight magazine, choreographer Graeme Murphy said of his new production of Swan Lake for the Australian Ballet [...]

Ros Warby’s Monumental has been around since 2006 but I had not seen it for one reason or another. So it was more than irritating to arrive at its showing during Spring Dance to be told that there was no program sheet. ‘Oh, it’s the last performance’, I was told. Well this is the digital [...]

Pina Bausch died quite suddenly in 2009. It was a shock to most in the dance world and was the occasion for an outpouring of recollections and writing of various kinds. Sydney’s Spring Dance program, now in its third year, made its contribution with almost its entire program devoted in some way or another to the [...]