Tatiana Stepanova, who arrived in Australia in December 1939 with the third of Colonel de Basil’s touring Ballets Russes companies — the Original Ballet Russe — died late last year in Florida. The company’s Australian debut was in Sydney on 30 December 1939 and on that night Stepanova danced in Les Sylphides and was partnered [...]

‘Mim’. A personal memoir of Marie Rambert: Brigitte Kelly (Alton: Dance Books, 2009). Available in Australia from Footprint Books or any good bookseller.
Marie Rambert, or Mim as she was familiarly known, brought her company, Ballet Rambert, to Australia in 1947. The company stayed until early 1949 and appeared in Adelaide, Brisbane, Broken Hill, Melbourne, Perth [...]

Dr Ewan Murray-Will (1899-1970) was by profession a dermatologist with a practice in Macquarie Street, Sydney. He studied medicine at Sydney University graduating in 1923 and followed that initial study with further work in Vienna and London. He was honorary dermatologist to a number of Sydney hospitals including Sydney Hospital, St Vincent’s Hospital and the [...]

Early in 1940 an article appeared in the magazine Australia. National Journal entitled ‘Ballet Business’. It was commissioned by the magazine’s editor Sydney Ure Smith, a great patron of Colonel de Basil’s touring Ballets Russes companies, and was written by Olga Philipoff. Philipoff came to Australia on the Ballets Russes tours as secretary to her [...]

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 [...]

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
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Michelle [...]

It was the photographer Max Dupain who referred to the Ballets Russes dancers who toured in Australia between 1936 and 1940 as ‘very interesting people, very interesting for Australia at that stage’ and who noted that they were ‘taken into the bosom of Sydney and feted and entertained’. Even a cursory glance at newspapers of [...]

‘Concord’ (Por vos muero, Scuola di ballo & Dyad 1929): The Australian Ballet, Melbourne, 21 August to 1 September 2009, State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre

Tzu-Chao Chou & Lana Jones in Dyad 1929. Photo: Jim McFarlane. Courtesy: The Australian Ballet
The Australian Ballet finally hit the jackpot! In the dying months of its four year long celebration [...]

David Lichine’s light-hearted Graduation Ball, an audience favourite over many years, had its world premiere in Sydney on 1 March 1940. Vicente García-Márquez, in his 1990 publication The Ballets Russes, gives some clues to the origins of the work, including notes on the rehearsal process, the development of the musical compilation and on the designs.
An [...]

Nina Verchinina, born in Moscow in 1910 and brought up in Shanghai and Paris, began her performing career in Paris in 1929 with the company of Ida Rubinstein. Throughout the 1930s she danced extensively with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo under various directors including René Blum, Léonide Massine and Colonel Wassily de Basil.
Verchinina came [...]