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’
31 October 2013, Théâtre des Champs Élysées, Paris It was, apparently, the wish of Chinese concert pianist, Lang Lang, to stage a dance project in which a group of sixteen dancers from Houston Ballet would perform with him in Paris. Lang Lang was credited with the ‘artistic conception’ of the show in which he played a selection of works by
It was a pleasure to catch up with Stephanie Burridge in Canberra in early October. Currently a permanent resident of Singapore, Burridge was back in Canberra to work with GOLD, Canberra Dance Theatre’s group of performers over the age of 55. As the longest serving former director of Canberra Dance Theatre, Burridge was invited to return to restage a work
Laurel Martyn, one of Australia’s most eminent dancers, choreographers and dance educators, has died in Melbourne on 16 October, three years short of her 100th birthday. Born in Toowoomba, Queensland, as Laurel Gill, Martyn received her early dance training with Kathleen Hamilton in Toowoomba and Marjorie Hollinshed in Brisbane and in 1933 left Australia for further training. In England she studied
In September I continued my interviewing program for the National Film and Sound Archive’s Heath Ledger Young Artists Oral History Project with two interviews with graduating students from the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA). Tim Rutty, seen above rehearsing an aerial rope routine, is specialising in aerials and has his eye on work with Circa. Laura Kmetko, featured on NICA’s 2014