Dance
No twentieth-century male ballet dancer has sparked as much adulation and scholarly investigation as Vaslav Nijinsky. Graduating from the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg at eighteen, this sexually ambiguous, rather remote man, became the darling of Russia's principal ballerinas ...
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To open its Melbourne winter season, The Australian Ballet has invited the handsome and talented Houston Ballet to make its Australian début in Romeo and Juliet by Houston's Australian artistic director, Stanton Welch. After reaching leading soloist and resident choreographer status in ...
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How appropriate that Queensland Ballet is playing A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 400th anniversary year of William Shakespeare's death. This is not the Royal Ballet's production by Frederick Ashton for London's 1964 celebrations of the Bard's birth but a co-production with the Royal ...
... (read more)Nelken (Carnations): Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch (Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016) ★★★★★
Over decades of productions in the Festival Theatre, I can recall a handful of experiences that resulted in immediate, unprompted, and collective standing ovations, beginning with the unforgettable journey that was Richard Wherrett's epic staging of Nicholas Nickleby (1983). Pina Bausch's ...
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Performances by Batsheva Dance Company involve more than movement and choreography. Behind each production is a philosophy, markedly different from the vocabulary, tics, and motifs we expect from choreographers. Ohad Naharin has introduced a revolutionary aspect to the company ...
... (read more)Lee Christofis reviews 'The Sleeping Beauty' (Australian Ballet)
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 ...
Unsurprisingly, each of Sylvie Guillem’s six performances of Life in Progress in the Sydney leg of a world tour sold out. She will soon retire as a dancer after thirty-nine remarkable years. Unsurprisingly too, her program was edgy and contained two brand new works. Sylvie Guillem doesn’t rest on her laurels, and this wasn’t an anthology of her ‘great ...
Ben Brooker reviews 'Black Diggers' (Queensland Theatre Company) and 'Rotunda' (New Zealand Dance Company)
Black Diggers (
), written by Tom Wright, directed by Wesley Enoch, and produced by the Queensland Theatre Company, received its world première at the 2014 Sydney Festival in January. Then, the full clamour of Australia’s more than $400 m ...
The world première in Perth of a new work from a Broome-based performance company was an event of considerable note. Twenty-one years of productions made in West Arnhem Land and then in Broome turns conventional wisdoms upside down in Australian terms. Many people still hold that sophisticated cultural work is made in cities and that regional or remote places yield ...
Walter Spies by John Stowell & Brown Boys and Rice Queens by Eng-Beng Lim
