- Patricio Revé
As the Royal Ballet moves into its 2026-2027 season, I can’t help reflecting on how lucky we were to be able to watch Patricio Revé, now a principal dancer with the Royal, grow as an artist during his time with Queensland Ballet. But nor can I help feeling how much we will now miss him (unless of course we can pop over to London every so often!). Revé was dancing as a guest artist with the Royal Ballet for several months after leaving Queensland Ballet in mid 2025. It is hard not to wonder why this move happened. It was of course a critical time for Queensland Ballet and the question of why Revé and others moved on remains something of a closely guarded secret at the moment. But Revé was offered an appointment as a principal with the Royal Ballet in January 2026 with the appointment to begin officially with the 2026-2027 season.
Revé was a stalwart member of Queensland Ballet from 2018. How smart was Li Cunxin to bring him from Cuba to dance in Australia? His performances were always memorable, and the Royal Ballet’s appointment is Australia’s loss. For more about Patricio Revé on this website, follow this link.
Watch below, too, to see Revé dancing in Cuba in March 2026 with Marianela Nuñez in the Act III pas de deux from Don Quixote. If you can take your eyes off Revé and Nuñez, the corps de ballet dancers working upstage are worth watching. Their actions and poses are often somewhat rustic, especially those of the men seated upstage centre. Cuba has a different take on Don Quixote from what we have frequently seen in Australia.
- Beth Dean
Following on from my recent, brief item on Beth Dean in last month’s Dance diary, I received a comment from my colleague, Jennifer Shennan, about the role Dean had played in her life and as part of our dance history in general. The comment can be seen at the end of the Dance diary for June 2026.
Jennifer’s comment made me continue to think about what I had uncovered from the collection of items I discovered in the National Library of Australia’s manuscript collection. It was particularly interesting to read more of the background to Dean’s 1954 creation of Corroboree. She wrote of the role she, as a woman, needed to play during her participation in various Aboriginal ceremonies that led into her creation of her work:
Women do stay for certain periods of time, and when the bullroarers roar forth with the sound of thunder, we all ran out to a far distant stream bed which was dry, and we waited there while certain ceremonies were done, which showed blood or sacred red-ochre colourings or patterns that the women are not supposed to see because it would make then ill. It’s too strong a magic.
Dean’s husband, Victor Carell, was able to stay throughout the entire ceremony that Dean writes about and he was able to assist in the final outcome of the work. Dean herself danced the role of the boy initiate.
As I noted in my earlier discussion, it is totally fascinating material, provided we look at it as coming from the 1950s.
- Simone Forti (1935-2026)
Simone Forti, American dance innovator who worked with particular strength during the period that is now called postmodern, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 91 years. Forti briefly entered my academic life when I began research for my PhD, which focused on the visual artists, in particular Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who collaborated with Merce Cunningham. Forti, an Italian by birth, took classes at the Cunningham studio and there was introduced to the work of John Cage. Her background is documented in some detail on Wikipedia.
Vale!
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- Press for July 2026
– ‘Determined dancing on a knife’s edge.’ Review of Mettle, Quantum Leap Australia. CBR CityNews, 25 July 2026. Online at this link
Michelle Potter, 31 July 2026
Featured image: Patricio Revé in Rhapsody in Blue. Queensland Ballet, 2023. Photo: © David Kelly
