IT is not a great surprise that Lucinda Dunn has chosen to retire from The Australian Ballet next month, but it is a great loss. While she has had some recent injuries and has been selecting her repertoire carefully, these are not unusual circumstances when a dancer has had as lengthy a career as Dunn’s. And when she has been on stage she has been peerless. Her brilliant technique makes her a strong artist, but never a cold one. She flows like liquid gold: there is sensual warmth and radiance in her dancing, along with stage-filling grandeur that serves whatever she is dancing and makes it important. It is never self-serving.

But after 23 years with the AB as its longest reigning ballerina, Dunn, 40, has decided it is time to go – the fact that her older daughter, Claudia, is five is surely relevant, and Dunn and her husband Danilo Radojevic also have a two-year-old daughter, Ava.

Dunn opens in Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon in Melbourne tonight and will farewell the stage at the end of the Sydney season of this ballet. She made her debut in the role only last month, in Brisbane, taking on new challenges to the end. (When The Australian Ballet last staged Manon, in 2008, Dunn was on maternity leave.)

Releasing the news of Dunn’s retirement yesterday AB artistic director David McAllister said Dunn had been “a shining beacon of The Australian Ballet – a true ballerina”. She was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia at the beginning of this year for service to the performing arts through ballet.

She will continue this service next year when, on January 1, she becomes artistic director of the highly regarded Tanya Pearson Classical Coaching Academy and Sydney City Youth Ballet. Dunn studied with Mrs Pearson from the age of 13. Mrs Pearson will be known as Founder and continue her presence at the academy.

Dunn said in a statement yesterday she hoped to “enrich and challenge” the academy’s students, which she surely will.

I have watched Dunn for her entire career, seeing her progress from being an exceptionally promising young dancer with killer technical gifts in her earliest days to the great artist she is today. At the risk of sounding like Woody Allan’s Zelig (although I hope not quite as colourless), I have been present at many of her most important performances and milestones, including the lunch in 2001 at which she was promoted to principal, and the glorious Aurora she gave to huge acclaim in Tokyo in 2007 in Stanton Welch’s production of Sleeping Beauty, partnered by Robert Curran.

Curran – how we miss him! – was promoted to principal the same day, and I will never forget Dunn’s happiness at his elevation as well as her own.

How quickly it goes.

Dunn gives her final performance with the AB on April 23 at the Sydney Opera House.