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.
The Royal New Zealand Ballet’s world première of The Piano: The Ballet, inspired by Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning film The Piano (1993), began the company’s program for 2018. It is the second ballet on the subject by Jiří and Otto Bubeníček, former and highly decorated principal dancers at Hamburg Ballet. Their first was a one-act work for Ballet Dortmund in 2014. Its success encouraged ... (read more)
Ballet at the Quarry, West Australian Ballet’s summer season, is eagerly anticipated by dance aficionados and the wider public alike, and this year’s program has drawn full houses and standing ovations. The Milky Way of the season’s title represents one of the most significant moves that Aurelian Scannella, the company’s artistic director, has made since arriving in Perth five years ago. T ... (read more)
Australian Dance Theatre, the nation’s longest continuing modern dance company, was born in 1965, during the so-called Dunstan renaissance of Adelaide. Elizabeth Cameron Dalman, a dancer and teacher influenced by five transformative years in Europe, and Leslie White, a dancer and teacher trained at the Royal Ballet School, were its instigators. Combining ballet techniques with those of American ... (read more)
The Australian première of Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, created on the Royal Ballet’s brightest talents, was one of the happiest nights of ballet on record. It boosted The Australian Ballet’s small repertoire of full-length narratives in which all the elements, from the grandest costume to the smallest choreographic detail, come together to create a fresh and u ... (read more)
Britain’s illustrious Royal Ballet has brought extraordinary gifts to QPAC audiences in Brisbane this year: two huge, exciting ballets which, in different ways, are game-changers in the creation of full-length narrative ballets. They are Woolf Works (★★★★) by the company’s resident choreographer, Wayne McGregor, and The Winter’s Tale (★★★★★), by his predecessor and company ... (read more)
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), about a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island during a nuclear war, has been adapted for radio, stage, and screen. Acclaimed theatre director Peter Brook’s austere, 1963 black-and-white film, with a superb cast, is by far the best and only authentic one of three screen adaptations to date. Stage versions by Nigel Williams (1996) a ... (read more)
The Australian Ballet opened its first 2017 Melbourne season looking like a new creature – mature, chic, and serious, ready to tackle any challenges choreographers placed in its path.
Squander and Glory, a dramatic world première for The Australian Ballet by alumnus and resident choreographer Timothy Harbour, provides the centrepiece of Faster. Two British works book-end the program: Faster (f ... (read more)
The idea of visiting Paris in January to see six exhibitions and two repeats in five days may seem excessive to some people, but Paris’s museum offerings this northern winter were so impressive it was impossible to resist. At Frank Gehry’s lofty Fondation Louis Vuitton, hordes lined up, day and night, in temperatures of five below, to see Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection from Russi ... (read more)
In November 2016, former principal dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko entered the Bolshoi Ballet studios in Moscow to begin retraining for the stage. He had recently been released from prison for instigating an attack on his artistic director, Sergey Filin, in January 2013. Dmitrichenko’s plan went awry when his henchman, Yuri Zarutsky, decided to throw battery acid in Filin’s face, virtually blinding ... (read more)