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Australian Ballet

Oscar 

The Australian Ballet
by
16 September 2024
Arriving at the Oscar première on 13 September felt like attending an Oscars ceremony. The foyers of Melbourne’s historic Regent Theatre were filled with artists, journalists, photographers, politicians, dauntingly tall drag queens, and streams of gay couples who may have been first-timers at the ballet. ... (read more)

Don Quixote 

The Australian Ballet
by
17 March 2023
The opening night of The Australian Ballet’s 2023 season, commencing with Rudolf Nureyev’s unforgettable Don Quixote, was like a joyous homecoming to all sectors of the audience, from rusted-on subscribers to some of Australia’s most gifted ballerinas, and a host of people who quickly absorbed the vitality of Marius Petipa’s 1872 ballet, which Nureyev loved. ... (read more)

Beyond 40 by Jeff Busby (photographer) & A Collector's Book of Australian Dance by Michelle Potter

by
April 2003, no. 250

Here are two sumptuously produced keepsakes serving very different purposes. Beyond 40 describes itself as ‘Forty Years of Dreams’, but actually offers one year’s worth of images that the Australian Ballet want to project. A Collector’s Book of Australian Dance, on the other hand, for all its unintoxicating title, comes much closer to being a book of dreamings.

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When Sergei Diaghilev staged The Sleeping Princess at the Alhambra Theatre, London, in 1921, he hoped to prove that classical ballet could be as popular as the outrageously glamorous West End hit, Chu Chin Chow, which ran for five years. Diaghilev invited the brilliant colourist Leon Bakst to design sets and costumes equal to those of the orig ...

At the closing performance of the Borovansky Ballet in 1961, Peggy van Praagh stepped onstage and spoke about the importance of founding an Australian ballet company. Harold Holt, the serving federal treasurer, went backstage to pledge his personal support. Van Praagh’s celebrated history as a dancer and director overseas made her the perfect candidate to run such a company.

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PANACHE. Both in its literal meaning (a plume of feathers) and its more familiar extended one, the term might have been invented for stage critic extraordinaire Kenneth Tynan as plausibly as for Robert Helpmann, one of last century’s most flamboyant and versatile stage practitioners. The illegitimate Tynan’s middle name was Peacock (the surname of his Birmingham father). Helpmann (born plain Robert Murray Helpman – one ‘n’ – in Mount Gambier, South Australia) will always be associated with the lyrebird, nominal subject and central symbol of perhaps his most original creative achievement, The Display, the dance-drama he choreographed for the Australian Ballet in 1964. In looks, each was very striking – and strikingly alike, though Helpmann was eighteen years older than Tynan, and their common resemblance (below as well as above the neck) was more to some exotic, sinuous reptile than to any species of bird.

... (read more)