Paul Knobloch, former soloist with the Australian Ballet, is back in Australia briefly to visit his family and conduct master classes in Canberra. Knobloch left the Australian Ballet in 2009 to join Béjart Ballet Lausanne.
Knobloch counts dancing the opening night of a season in Paris, when he partnered Russian-born Daria Ivanova in Béjart’s Webern Opus 5, as the highlight of his career to date with Béjart Ballet Lausanne. He returns to Switzerland in September when Béjart Ballet Lausanne will begin working with Tokyo Ballet on a joint staging of Béjart’s version of Rite of Spring. Knobloch’s own work Valetta, commissioned by David McAllister for an Australian Ballet gala in 2007, will be on the program for the Australian Ballet School’s graduate exhibition in Melbourne this September.
Michelle Potter, 16 August 2010
Good to hear some news of Paul. And thanks for the photo. I am glad he is doing well at Bejart Ballet. I miss seeing him with our company. My last immediate memory is of his excellent partnering of Lucinda Dunn in the difficult Murphy Nutcracker pas de deux. And Valetta was a highly entertaining bon bon of a ballet. I heard from a friend that it suits the school’s students well. Apparently it had an outing at a Morning Melodies concert earlier this year.
And speaking of Webern Opus 5, I am missing a long line of Bejart works we used to see : Gaite Parisienne, Le Concours, Songs Of A Wayfarer, Four Last Songs, amongst others. I refuse to believe they were as bad as people now maintain !
Annoyingly at the moment I can’t lay my hands on my copy of Australian Ballet dancers of the early 1990s (probably) in ‘Four Last Songs’. But I remember it being quite beautifully performed. I’ll keep looking.
However, I have never been a great fan of Bejart’s work and I remember being in Lausanne once and watching a performance in a huge circus tent. The audience would have numbered several thousand and the entire tentful (except me and my partner and a couple of English people in front of us) stood at the end and cheered. I could never understand why as it seemed like a load of rubbish to me, to the extent that I can no longer even remember what ballet it was! Having said that, I have also seen Tokyo Ballet perform ‘Rite of Spring’ and it actually came close to working. I still would rather watch the Joffrey reconstruction or the Pina Bausch version but Bejart didn’t do too bad a job. Anyway, I suspect Maina mostly chose to have mounted on the Australian Ballet the more elegant of Bejart’s works and it is easy to be critical (in many situations not just that of the Australian Ballet) once the circus has left town!
I have a long-ish article about Paul due to be published shortly in ‘The Canberra Times’ so I was unable to pre-empt our conversation on this site. But it was good to catch up and to know that he is very proactive about staying in the dance profession in some way for the foreseeable future.
I will be interviewing him by phone tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to it!
Do let us all know if your interview will be available online.
Hi Michelle – I have reposted the interview with Paul recently published in Dance Informa Magazine on my website. The original link is at the bottom of the post as well:
http://gracedwards.wordpress.com/
Best,
Grace