Liz Lea , ever engaged in new projects, has been commissioned by the Sydney-based AMPA (Academy of Music and Performing Arts) to create a new work for the dance students of the Academy for their upcoming end of year show, Euphoria. Lea’s work is called Promenade and will premiere on 5 December 2025.
Dancers from AMPA rehearsing for Promenade. Still from a rehearsal video
Watch below for an insight into the work.
Creative Australia Awards
Two dance artists, choreographer and director Kate Champion and dancer-choreographer Rosalind Crisp, have been honoured at the 2025 Creative Australia Awards held in Brisbane in November. Kate Champion received the Theatre Award and Rosalind Crisp the Dance Award.
Kate Champion, currently artistic director of Black Swan State Theatre Company in Perth, Western Australia, was honoured for ‘three decades contributing to Australian Performance’. Those decades include the founding of the much admired contemporary dance-theatre company Force Majeure in 2002, which she directed until 2015. Her credits extend across a variety of theatrical genres in addition to dance including opera, film, theatre and circus.
Rosalind Crisp was the recipient of the Dance Award. She founded Omeo Dance Studio in Sydney in 1996 and was invited to Paris in 2002, where she became Associate Artist at Atelier de Paris (2004–2014). She was awarded a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2015, and her work has toured nationally and internationally. She is currently commissioned by the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company.
Brief videos focusing on the awards are available online: Kate Champion at this link, Rosalind Crisp here.
Honouring Ana Gallardo Lobaina
My colleagues in Wellington, New Zealand, have let me know that on 19 November, His Excellency Luis Ernesto Morejón Rodríguez, Ambassador of Cuba to New Zealand, Cook Islands and Niue, was welcomed into the Royal New Zealand Ballet studios to honour principal artist Ana Gallardo Lobaina. His Excellency presented Ana, born and trained in Cuba, with an artwork by Cuban visual artist Yosvany Martínez Pérez. It is, I understand, a tradition in Cuba to honour artists who have made a significant input into the company with which they work. In presenting the award the Ambassador said:
Today, we are delighted to see a dancer born and trained in Cuba take her place among the principal figures of the Royal New Zealand Ballet, bringing her talent, sensitivity, and energy to this company. The recognition we are presenting to Ana today is a testament to her tireless work, unwavering perseverance, and artistic excellence.
I have greatly admired the dancing of Ana Gallardo Lobaina, in particular in Loughlan Prior’s production of The Firebird (2021), and the award is well deserved. For posts that feature the work of Ana Gallardo Lobaina on this website see this tag.
A similar honour will shortly be bestowed on Dr Elizabeth Dalman, AM. Elizabeth will be awarded the insignia of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Ambassador of France to Australia, His Excellency M. Pierre-André Imbert on 2 December at the Embassy of France in Canberra.
The award was established in 1957 to recognise eminent artists who have contributed significantly to furthering the arts in France and throughout the world. More after 2 December.
26 November 2025 (matinee). Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
The matinee of 26 November 2025 was not an outstanding presentation of David McAllister’s Sleeping Beauty. Not all of the main characters were danced with the outstanding technique we have come to expect from the Australian Ballet, nor was there the strong acting input a narrative ballet like Beauty needs. Benedicte Bemet as Aurora was, for example, not at her best as she attacked the demands of the choreography. A unfortunate aspect of the afternoon’s presentation.
On the other hand, Joseph Romancewic stood out as the English Prince. It is always such a pleasure to watch him perform. He never seems to be promoting himself but rather to be involved in aiding the unfolding of the narrative. I also enjoyed the performance of Hugo Dumapit as the Bluebird in his partnership with Lilla Harvey as Florine.
It is ten years since David McAllister’s production of The Sleeping Beauty was first seen in Australia. Since then I have seen live productions from Queensland Ballet, Royal New Zealand Ballet and Royal Czech Ballet as well Matthew Bourne’s reimagined version on film, and various as digital screenings especially from the Royal Ballet. Before that there were productions from the Australian Ballet from various choreographers/directors. I even had the privilege of writing a program note for the Australian Ballet’s 2005 production by Stanton Welch, which is available at this link. It just never gets easier to enjoy the McAllister production, mostly because of the design, or rather over design. Each time I see it I am taken aback.
Final scene of David McAllister’s production of The Sleeping Beauty. The Australian Ballet, 2015. Photo: Jeff Busby.
But this time I couldn’t help wondering, in particular, why the Garland Dance, a beautiful part of most productions, had to be so over-dressed. As delightful as is the image below, those costumes just take away from the choreography.
Dancer wearing the Garland Dance costume. Photographer not known.
Even though the work is discussed as opulent and even that, with its design, it looks back to the creation of the work in Russia in the 19th century, I’m not a 19th century Russian balletomane. For me this Sleeping Beauty is not, as stated on Instagram, ‘an unforgettable masterpiece of romance and magic’.
Michelle Potter, 28 November 2025
Featured image: Detail of a publicity image for the 2025 Australian Ballet presentation of The Sleeping Beauty. Photographer not known.
I attended this performance as a member of the general public. My ticket cost $234.
19 and 20 November, Te Whaea, Wellington reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
The NZSD end of year performance season has reverted to separate classical and contemporary programs alternating across a ten-day period.
The first night, classical program, opened with a suite of dances from La Sylphide, staged with care by Nadine Tyson (a former graduate of the School, dancer with RNZB, and a classical tutor on the faculty). The Sylph was danced by Kaiserin Darongsuwan (Mook) flirting gently with James, Hui Ho Yin (Mike) who performed with lively elevation. The 12 lyrical sylphs gave the realm of spirits in the forest at night a gentle atmosphere.
The Bournonville legacy from Denmark is a longstanding one in this country, thanks to Poul Gnatt’s founding of New Zealand Ballet in 1953 and the repertoire he introduced. It remains a vivacious and distinctive style within the balletic canon, challenging performers to harness the striking energy contained within the body, rather than striving for an extended alignment common to other styles of ballet. (A number of New Zealanders rose to international recognition for their mastery of the Bournonville style—Jon Trimmer, Patricia Rianne, Adrienne Matheson and Martin James leading them).
The second work, Curious Alchemy, is by Loughlan Prior (now a free-lance choreographer, following his earlier career dancing with RNZB, and also a graduate of the school). The style of movement in this piece is quirky with torsos and limbs moving in segmented isolations that certainly earn the first part of the work’s title. The choice of Beethoven and Saint-Saens compositions, set at unusually loud volume, made further contrast to the staccato moves of the four performers—Liezl Herrera, Ella Marshall, Lin Xi-Yuan (Ian) and Hiroki So.
Façade, choreographed by Jeffrey Tan, staged by Robert Mills, and set to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, is a pas de deux of emotional connection between the two performers, Ella Marshall and Lin Xi-Yuan (Ian). The rapport between them was strongly forged yet built to an unusual ending where the distance between them was emphasised and well-captured.
Esquisses, by Christopher Hampson, staged by Turid Revfeim, (also a graduate of the school, with a long and substantial career at RNZB and subsequently as director of Ballet Collective Aotearoa) is set to an energising (mainly piano) composition by Valentin-Alkan. Costume design is by Gary Harris, former director of RNZB who shared a spirited rapport with Hampson back in the day (Hampson’s Romeo & Juliet remains one of the strongest memories of the company’s powerful theatrical repertoire from that time).
The tutu design by Harris is striking and cleverly used, there is élan, cheeky humour and whimsy in the choreography throughout, designed specifically for young dancers, until the male solo adagio by Hui Ho Yin (Mike) emerges and becomes quite the most beautiful, musical and poetic highlight of the evening, an embryo of the art of dance.
The contemporary program the next evening had five works, all world premieres, so an altogether different energy in the venue. The opening piece titled You Cannot Make a Deal with a Tiger, choreographed by Riley Fitzgerald, should be renamed You Can Make a Deal with a Tiger, since that’s what the dancers seemed to achieve—facing the fear, finding support from another, putting up the fight and surviving, with an ending that echoed the opening image.
God is in the Room, by Tristan Carter, had a loopy zany vibe with smiling and playing games, making like animals, then moving to a frenetic sequences of shouting and group movement but not involving all individuals equally. Deliberate non-sequiturs in the movement, and quite random dress for individual dancers, underlined the program note ‘Energy never dies, it only transforms’.
Crybabies never Pelu, by ‘IsopeAkau’ola, draws on Tongan themes of resilience and support within a community. Pele is Tongan for ‘fold’ and the title here implies folding rather than breaking. The opening guitar sounds brought aural clarity to the line-up of black clad martial artists who used the discipline of stylised moves to get the dance up and running. The late great Futa Helu said that the Tongan definition of dance is ‘keeping time’—in that wonderful pun we can recognise here features of hand and foot movements from old Tongan ways of dancing, welded in to the new sequences for this focussed group dance that had gravitas, dignity and a contemplative quality to support a theme both contemporary and timeless.
Anatomy of Entanglement by Aitu Matsuda for a group of dancers clad in matching light and darker grey, explored the theme of the many moving parts within a larger entity, and had a compelling quality.
The Space Between, by Raewyn Hill, to an original score by Eden Mulholland, gave this two-program season the cadence and resolution it needed. A driving triple time beat was used as grounding for the sizeable group of dancers to build and grow beautiful waves of movement throughout the dance which became the great Waltz of Time. Some bars and some dancers alternated that waltz with a sarabande rhythm, still in triple time but with the accent instead on the second beat in each bar, keeping us mesmerised throughout…where will it go? where will it take us?
The work builds its strength as the entire cast stays on stage throughout. They became an entire community garbed in glorious colours, a dancer here and another there lifted aloft, to float or fly, then safely lowered to join the group, irresistibly happy dancers smiling, not because they’d been told to smile but simply because the work offered them such an uplifting quality of hope, and who’s to say that isn’t what graduating dancers need and deserve. It’s no surprise that Raewyn Hill, herself an illustrious graduate of this school in earlier times, came up with this treasure and it’s very good to see it sitting so well on these dancers.
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I am certainly not alone in the audience thinking that a single program combining classical and contemporary works, rather than setting them apart as separate realms, would allow the audience to see the fullness of the NZSD’s strengths, the range of professional opportunities awaiting the graduates, and enhance rather than isolate the ways in which all choreographers and dancers share the same goals of communicating themes and expressing moods and emotions through movement, albeit of differing styles.
It is clear that many of the graduates can look forward to fruitful and rewarding careers in dance, and we wish them all the very best in that.
21 November, 2025. Civic Theatre, Auckland reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
The program opens with the premiere of If There Ever Was a Time, choreographed by Neil Ieremia, artistic director of Black Grace, the company he founded in 1995, so the company is 30 years old and counting. Then follows Esplanade, choreographed by Paul Taylor for his New York dance company in 1975, so the choreography is 50 years old and counting.
Ieremia takes the stage at the start of the performance and addresses the audience with the skill of a Polynesian orator, a theme here, a thought there, his plans for the years to come, a joke, an aside, a wink, then a bombshell in the form of an epic poem … ‘just something I wrote in the dressing-room an hour ago…’ (yeah right) whereas its message, in truth, has been 40 years in the making.
Here is his program note in full since there’s no point in my paraphrasing it…
Iconsider myself a hopeful optimist. Like many Pacific Islanders, I was raised in the church, carried along by its stories, its hymns, its promises. I have been losing my religion for the last forty years. This work is my response to what I see as the weaponisation of faith, how religious and spiritual belief systems are used to steal from the poor, erase culture and indigenous knowing, shout down freedom of choice, and justify unimaginable brutality. It’s a pattern repeated throughout history and I imagine it will continue for as long as greedy hands keep rubbing together. So, if ever there was a time for rebellion, for action, for hope, for humanity, for love—it’s probably now
Echoing writings of author Albert Wendt, Ieremia is calling out Samoan churches in the home islands and in New Zealand, many of them known for the oppressive demands of tithes imposed on their congregations. There’s also the widespread perception that much-needed programs of health education and community welfare that the churches could lead are meantime woefully neglected. (Black Grace plans to support a new health programme to target the worryingly high rate of rheumatic fever in Pasifika children in New Zealand, a cause near to Ieremia’s heart, as it were).
The choreography opens with a centrestage pile of bodies that struggle to emerge from shadows, like some giant octopus slowly rising from ocean depths. A giant bright moon is suspended but doesn’t seem to shed much light on those below. A huge billowing cloud of cloth hangs above the stage. Will it open then descend to suffocate everything beneath it? There is loud and challenging drumming combined with rap-like singing that conveys urgency, but the texts are not easy to follow. The fast and furious pace of dancing is fuelled by this accompaniment, and the performers have to find phenomenal stamina to sustain long sequences of movement derived from break dance or martial arts, interlaced with cameo images referencing fragments of traditional Samoan dances that barely survive.
A young girl manically skips with an electric blue rope for what seems like a lifetime, but we have to imagine for ourselves what her story is. From left field in the shadowy background an unlikely quartet dances the cygnets from Swan Lake, with snatches of Tchaikovsky’s accompaniment hidden beneath and between layers of drum and song.
A couple longing to be together, to marry, are instead blindfolded, blocked and constrained by forces of family? society? church? all in the name of god knows what and he’s not telling.
A crowd of protestors wave an enormous banner, white with a central red cross held—so it’s now more than Polynesian religious denominations being called out, but has grown to reference a global emergency, putting up a desperate cry for help. Although not specifically detailed in the choreography, it doesn’t take much for us to be reminded of current infamous world ‘news’ (such as the recent image of Zelensky fronting up to a press conference when he had clearly spent all night weeping in despair. Well, wouldn’t you?). You don’t need reminders of what’s wrong in a too often brutal, selfish, greedy world where much human life seems to have lost sanctity, and the dollar is the only measure of value or worth. Was it ever thus? Will we ever, or never, be pulled along by love instead of by greed?
Ieremia’s choreography is a lament for all of that, and in case we think troubles only happen in a hemisphere well to the north of here, may I remind us that our Minister of Defence recently admitted that a New Zealand company is doing very well indeed with export trade of 3-D printed guns and she has no plans to intervene because their profits are up so it’s ‘better for the economy’. Would we export chemical warfare germs in test tubes if the profit was high enough? Is there no bottom line to shame? ‘Don’t be despondent, don’t be cynical, just get out there and vote,’ as Don McGlashan would say.
You’d think it would take more than a hopeful optimist to climb out from under all this, but Ieremia offers hints of resilience in shaping the motifs of siva, fa’ataupati and taualuga, Samoan traditional dances, that cadence the final sequence. So this uncompromising choreography is dark with a shaft of light. Will it be performed in 50 years time? How will it and the world be seen then?
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Before the performance, during the interval and after the performance there is throughout the theatre amplified continuous pumping beat ‘music’. Is this the company’s choice? or the theatre’s? muzak within the ticket price? We certainly don’t need it since our heads and hearts are quite full enough with what we witness on stage, the need to think about the themes, and what possible responses there could be to this call to action. Pull the plug on the muzak I say, it cancels thought and conversation.
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Esplanade is staged here by Richard Chen See who safeguards the legacy of Paul Taylor. Performed to Bach violin concertos, it allows the performers to surf on all the waves of rhythms Bach drew from the baroque dance repertoire. There’s walking and there’s running, lots of both, patterns and play, leaping and catching, with the joyously coloured costumes of the eight dancers contributing to that exuberance. It is a committed and spirited work that suits the company well.
The work is light with a shaft of dark. There’s a quiet theme of one group within the cast whose members are not quite so engaged. As the program note tells:
An adagio for a family whose members never touch reflects life’s sombre side…a woman standing tenderly atop her lover’s prone body suggests that love can hurt as well as soothe. The final section has dancers careering fearlessly across the stage… the littlest of them—the daughter who had not been acknowledged by her family—is left alone on stage, triumphant: the meek inheriting the earth.
That littlest dancer turns to face the audience, beams broadly and opens her arms wide as if to embrace us all. We are being assured that hopeful optimism is possible. I guess the rest is up to us.
12 November 2025 (matinee). Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
The Australian Ballet is looking spectacular, if the dancing in Prism is anything to go by—Prism is a triple bill, with works from Jerome Robbins (Glass Pieces), Stephanie Lake (Seven Days), and William Forsythe (Blake Works V. The Barre Project). At the performance I saw the standard of dancing was technically close to perfection. As well, for the most part, connections from stage to audience were engrossing and quite thrilling.
The program opened with Glass Pieces, a work made by Robbins in 1983 to Philip Glass’ music from Glassworks and the opera Akhnaten. Robbins, in addition to his work with George Balanchine and New York City Ballet, is well known for his choreography for musical theatre, especially West Side Story. The choreography for Glass Pieces appeared to me to reference both dance genres, musical theatre and ballet. It was bright and full of vitality.
The corps de ballet were constant reminders of Robbins’ musical theatre background as they moved across the stage, often in lines and often as shadows in a black light (lighting by Jennifer Tipton). But there were several stunning pas de deux scattered through the work, all of which showed up Robbins’ deep understanding of ballet technique and its overall appearance. I especially enjoyed the performance by two dancers that the handout referred to as ‘Soloist Couple 1’. They were on the occasion of my visit Larissa Kiyoto-Ward and Mason Lovegrove. But all couples danced beautifully and made exceptional use of their arms and upper body and the space around them.
As for Seven Days, it made me wonder, once again, why David Hallberg removed Alice Topp from the position of the company’s resident choreographer and gave the role to Stephanie Lake. Lake is a contemporary dance choreographer and has, rightly, made a name for herself as one of Australia’s best in the field of contemporary dance. But for me contemporary ballet is not the same as contemporary dance.
Lake’s choreography dismisses the basic features of the balletic language—and I am not necessarily referring to ‘steps’ but to the intrinsic way the body is held, that is the body shape and line that grows from the way the spine is held, the way the head balances on top of the spine, the role the pelvis plays, and so on. In a comment on the Australian Ballet’s website one dancer said of Seven Days that it ‘Breaks the classical form.’ It does but it also breaks the wider balletic form. And this on a company that has the word ‘ballet’ in its name.
At least Seven Days, despite its moments of shouting and tossing of chairs around the stage, was a step ahead of Lake’s 2024 production for the Australian Ballet, Circle Electric. It was, thankfully, shorter and used fewer dancers although there was repetition of the ‘Lake variety’, which I think needs a rethink.
In contrast to Seven Days, William Forsythe’s Blake Works V, danced to music by James Blake, looked just fabulous as a work of contemporary ballet. The project to which Blake Works V belongs was created during the pandemic of the early 2020s when dancers needed to keep training when regular methods were unavailable. They used domestic furniture of various kinds as a barre on which to keep up classroom activities.
The work included a number of inclusions that are often part of a Forsythe production. The front curtain might descend unexpectedly then rise again, visual effects, such as film clips, may appear, and the collaborative element is strong. In this production a film clip of hands moving on and off a traditional barre took centre stage at one point. Choreographically Blake Works V also showed off Forsythe’s exceptional choreography—clearly balletically based but innovatively so in terms of how different parts of the body bent, twisted, turned and related.
Listening again at what dancers said on the company website, there were words about Blake Works V such as ‘Makes the dancers push themselves.’ And, looking at the short video interview with William Forsythe (see below), it is great to watch the dancers in rehearsal and to listen to Forsythe’s intelligent discussion of his process.
It is such a pleasure too to take in the image, with its beautiful balletic line, used as the featured image on this post. That’s Forsythe! (And Lilla Harvey and Kate Longley of course).
