South African-born Robyn Hendricks is the newest principal dancer with the Australian Ballet, having been promoted to the position earlier this month. My most pleasant memory of Hendricks’ dancing is in Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain, in Canberra in 2013 partnered by Rudy Hawkes, and in Sydney this year partnered by Damian Smith. Congratulations to Stephen Page, artistic director of
Around this time of the year I always get a little nostalgic for Jacob’s Pillow. The 2016 Festival is in full swing. My nostalgia this year was heightened when, while looking for a version of an article I wrote for The Canberra Times back in 2005, I chanced upon the images below and above, taken at the Pillow in 2007, which
The death earlier in June of film maker Paul Cox sent me in search of a DVD copy of his film The diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky. The backstory is that Cox heard actor Paul Schofield on British radio reading from Nijinsky’s diaries (cahiers), which were first released in 1936 after having been rearranged and edited dramatically by Nijinsky’s wife, Romola.1 From that moment Cox
4 June 2016, Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre In 2003 the story of Li Cunxin’s remarkable journey from a village in Shandong province in rural China to the world stage was published as Mao’s last dancer. The story was subsequently made into a film and then written as a children’s book, The Peasant Prince. Now it has become a theatre work for children
One of the unfortunate consequences of the Federal Government’s so-called ‘efficiency dividends’, which have been forced on our cultural institutions over more years than I care to count, has been the demise of the National Library of Australia’s quarterly print publication, The National Library of Australia Magazine. The current issue, June 2016, is the last that will be printed. The
Since seeing Stephen Baynes’ production of Swan Lake, first in 2012 and more recently in its revival of 2016, I have been thinking frequently about the nature of the character of von Rothbart, ‘an evil geni’, according to the cast lists of the earliest Russian productions. After reading on the Australian Ballet’s website that, in the Baynes Swan Lake, Rothbart
27 May 2016, Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane Derek Deane made his Strictly Gershwin for English National Ballet in 2008 when it was shown in London’s cavernous Royal Albert Hall. I have to admit I wondered how it would look on Queensland Ballet in the rather more confined space of Brisbane’s Lyric Theatre. Well I need not have worried.
Reviewed by Jennifer Shennan The New Zealand Dance Company’s Lumina has just toured to five centres in the north island—one performance in Whangarei, in Mahurangi, Napier, Wellington, New Plymouth—after a premiere season last year of the same program in its home base, Auckland, and appearances earlier this year at the Holland Dance Festival—where incidentally Black Grace also performed. The company has
Ruth Galene, who has died in Sydney aged 87, had an extraordinarily diverse career in dance. Born Ruth Helfgott in Berlin of Polish-Jewish parents, she came to Australia in 1938. The family settled in Sydney and Ruth’s first formal dance experience was with Viennese émigré, Gertrud Bodenwieser. After a successful audition, when she wore, as she recalled, a white silk dress
It is devastating news that Ausdance National will no longer receive operational funding from the Australia Council to continue its very significant activities in dance advocacy and support, activities that it has pursued with such commitment for close to forty years. A link to the press release from Neil Roach, acting CEO of Ausdance National, is here. In the press