In what has become a tradition at The Australian Ballet, Robyn Hendricks was promoted on stage on Friday in Melbourne to the highest rank of principal artist. She was elevated by artistic director David McAllister after dancing Odette-Odile in Stephen Baynes’s production of Swan Lake. Hendricks joined the AB in 2005, became a soloist in 2011 and was named a senior artist only last year. She is South African-born and trained at The Australian Ballet School in Melbourne.

Hendricks brings the number of principal artists to 10, five men and five women. The AB currently lists 77 company members. Its goal is to have a complement of 85.

Hendricks danced Gamzatti in Stanton Welch’s La Bayadère in 2014 and Aurora in McAllister’s The Sleeping Beauty last year, the role that won her promotion to senior artist late last year. At the time I wrote that Hendricks’s Aurora “was a slightly mysterious young woman in whom you could see the queen she is destined to be. The watchfulness and engagement with her suitors created a whole, interesting, individual character and the elegance and quiet sophistication of her dancing spoke of great things ahead”.

Another key moment last year was her glowing performance in the company premiere of Ashton’s Symphonic Variations and this year in the Vitesse program Hendricks was superb in the slow movement of Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse. In Symphony in C, which paired the one-act Balanchine ballet with a group of divertissements, she was transcendent in the pas de deux from Wheeldon’s After the Rain, which she danced with Damien Smith, the Australian-born former principal artist with San Francisco Ballet who was making a nostalgic trip back home.

As I wrote then, “AB senior artist – and surely very soon a principal – Robyn Hendricks and Australian-born guest Damian Smith quietly distilled the complexities of love. Smith, who retired from San Francisco Ballet in 2014 after a long and shining career, brought the gravitas and weight of a long, deep association with the role and Hendricks was outstandingly luxurious, mysterious and unknowable.”