Dance diary. May 2018
…work in youth dance. In addition, some of the country’s best contemporary companies make annual visits to Canberra and have been doing so for decades—Sydney Dance Company and Bangarra Dance Theatre for example. So the city can claim to have access to excellent dance throughout the year. But adult audiences need a bit of ballet and wish it would happen more than once every three years. Maybe a petition to have the national ballet company visit the…
Here today, gone tomorrow. Christina Gallea Roy
…for an account of the more than thirty years they spent leading an independent ballet company, International Ballet Caravan,* later Alexander Roy London Ballet Theatre. Christina Gallea and Alexander Roy in the grand pas de deux from Don Quixote. Photo: © Jenny Walton Those early sections of the book provide glimpses of some of the teachers and choreographers with whom they worked. From an Australian perspective, Gallea’s ongoing friendship and w…
Telstra Ballet in the Park. The Australian Ballet in Canberra
…awlins looks as though the balletic vocabulary is such a part of her very being that it is completely effortless, even during those demanding moments in Giselle’s variation where she travels backwards, upstage, executing a series of fast beats and relevés. King-Wall partnered her elegantly and his variation showed off his own fine beaten steps and elevation. I was also impressed by Juliet Burnett and Andrew Killian who danced the pas de deux from…
Who was Richard White?
…en published in recent years), Yeo had trained with Margaret Craske before coming to Australia. The Australian Women’s Weekly of 3 November 1934 tells us she was a ‘soloist from the Diaghileff Russian Ballet’ and ‘was also with the famous Anton Dolin Company’. The short Women’s Weekly story goes on to explain that she was ‘a fully accredited teacher of the Cecchetti method of the classical ballet—the method adopted by such famous dancers as Pavlov…
Galileo. Sydney Choreographic Ensemble
…any dance styles. The work was danced to a selection of music from Italian composers from around the period in which Galileo was working—Vivaldi, Corelli, Monteverdi and others—and was complemented by evocative lighting from Roderick van Gelder and remarkable video projections, which constantly changed shape yet remained consistent in content, from Marco Giani. Galileo cements Sydney Choreographic Ensemble as a company to watch and extends the str…
Dance diary. May 2020
…Australia’s oral history program The interview was only very recently put online, complete with a timed summary. The interview is rich in material about Ardell’s own career, at least in its early phases, as well as in Ardell’s observations about Gertrud Bodenwieser, for whom she danced and taught. Unfortunately a second session, which would have taken Ardell’s career into the 1980s and beyond did not eventuate. But what was recorded is well worth…
Dance diary. October 2023
…of Spring. Van Vechten remarked (and according to Christiansen this quote comes from Romola Nijinsky’s book Nijinsky): A young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he was labouring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion wa…
Coralie Hinkley (1922–2021)
…t Dance Group, she wrote, ‘The dancers represent the emaciated sculptural beings of Giacometti—and his conception of life—of man’s inability to communicate with his fellow man.’4 Poetry was also inspirational for her, going back to 1956 with Unknown Land and the work of Rex Ingamells. Musically, her taste was eclectic and she favoured Australian composers when she could, again going back to Unknown Land and John Antill. And, while the choreographe…
SandSong. Bangarra Dance Theatre
…silience began to emerge and by the end, as Rika Hamaguchi made her way around the stage, the anger and humiliation subsided as the dancers expressed their ties to kin and community. Rika Hamaguchi in the final scene from SandSong. Bangarra Dance Theatre, 2021. Photo © Daniel Boud Of the dancers, Beau Dean Riley Smith stood out throughout the show, as he has done for the past several years. While he did not play a specific character as he did, for…
Forklift. Kage
…ported the other two performers, who were on the roof, or the forks, on wooden pallets being lifted upwards, or some other impossible place on the forklift, round the space of Bay 17 at Carriageworks. Then I liked the surreptitious stealing of potato crisps that went on shortly after the opening as two performers, who seemed like anonymous bodies at that stage, crept up behind a startled forklift driver and slowly dipped a hand into her just-bough…