Lee Christofis
Lee Christofis is a Melbourne-based writer on dance and associated arts. From 2006 to 2013 he was Curator of Dance at the National Library of Australia.
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. By twenty he was the love object and protégé of Sergei Diaghilev, the alchemist who concocted the Ballets Russ ... (read more)
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 Australia, Welch joined Houston Ballet in 2003. He will always be remembered here for revolutionising balletic e ... (read more)
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 New Zealand Ballet, which successfully staged the world première last year. The choreographer is Liam Scarlett, d ... (read more)
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 original 1890 St Petersburg production, choreographed by Ma ... (read more)
Reading Andrew Montana’s new biography of Loudon Sainthill leaves one imagining how much the artist would have achieved without his lover, amanuensis, and entrepreneur, Harry Tatlock Miller. Lovers for some thirty-four years, they seem destined to achieve remarkable things together. Well into his project Montana realised that he could not tell Sainthill’s story without Miller’s, and so Fanta ... (read more)