The Johnston Collection, Melbourne I was surprised to be contacted earlier this month by the curator of the Johnston Collection, Melbourne. David McAllister, artistic director of the Australian Ballet, will be a guest curator there in the first part of 2014 and will be adding some Australian Ballet costumes to the rooms of Fairhall, the house in which the collection of
Compliments of the season to all those who have accessed my website, and especially to those who have added so much with their comments. I look forward to your continued patronage in the coming year. It has been a terrific year so far in Canberra as the city has celebrated its centenary, and I have also been fortunate to have seen some
14 December 2019, Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House My thoughts on David Hallberg’s guest appearance with the Australian Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella were posted on DanceTabs on 16 December 2013. Below is the text. The DanceTabs link is still available and includes 11 comments that were made on the story by readers. The DanceTabs text (without comments) is reposted below. When
7 December 2013 (matinee), Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House Taking a second look at Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella was something of a swings and roundabouts experience. The gains were special, the losses of course a little disappointing. Seeing Leanne Stojmenov as Cinderella and Daniel Gaudiello as the Prince after they had performed those roles over and over in Melbourne and
With Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella now playing a Sydney season with the Australian Ballet, it was a delight to hear that in 2014 Sharmill Films will be screening Ratmansky’s Lost Illusions, a work based on the novel by Honoré de Balzac and made in 2011 for the Bolshoi Ballet. It opens at cinemas around the country on 29 March 2014. I am, however, also looking
16 November 2013 (matinee), Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House I was startled to see, when looking at the Australian Ballet’s website to check the casting for my Sydney subscription performance of Paquita and La Sylphide, that Paquita was advertised as a Romantic ballet—’the last flowering of the Romantic ballet’. Elsewhere on the website the program was described as ‘the first
Earlier this year Rafael Bonachela choreographed a work to Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony for his Sydney Dance Company. As a result, a few questions and comments arose on various websites about the use of this music for dance. Then, more recently, the Dancing Times carried letters about Walter Gore’s ballet Simple Symphony (danced to the Britten score) with some questions
Exciting news for Hannah O’Neill and her many fans around the world. O’Neill has just performed brilliantly in the annual Paris Opera Ballet concours and has been promoted to coryphée. This is an astonishing achievement given that she was accepted into the company as a life member only three months ago. For an interesting article on the concours by Roslyn Sulcas writing in
2 November 2013, Palais Garnier, Paris Triple bill programs can be mixed experiences. The Paris Opera Ballet’s recent program, with works by Saburo Teshigawara, Trisha Brown and Jiří Kylián, was a case in point: three choreographers from three very different backgrounds dealing in very different ways with the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, the spaces in
5 November 2013, Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, South Bank, London Bargehouse is a four-storey warehouse named as it is because, apparently, it used to store the royal barge of James 1. Now it is a an exhibition site and between 25 October and 10 November the home of Ecocentrix, an exhibition focusing on indigeneity in the present day. ‘Performance and provocation in our times’