Lyric Theatre, Brisbane, October 23 and October 24 It is something of an understatement to say Greg Horsman knows The Sleeping Beauty well. Not only was it the first ballet he saw, the one that made him want to be a dancer, it was a key role for him. Among the stages on which he…
Category: Dance
Francesco Ventriglia and Royal New Zealand Ballet
A year into his artistic directorship, Francesco Ventriglia talks about his goals for Royal New Zealand Ballet and his first program for the company “My life is where I can have a theatre, where I can have dancers, where I can have a space to express my creativity. I don’t care if it’s Milan or…
Triptych
Sydney Dance Company with ACO2 and Katie Noonan. Roslyn Packer Theatre Walsh Bay, Sydney, September 29. BENJAMIN Britten was in his 20s when he wrote the three works to which Rafael Bonachela responds so ardently in Triptych. Innocence, desire, joy, playfulness and sensuality all have their role in the music and the evocation of the…
François Chaignaud, Ken Unsworth and Australian Dance Artists
Dumy Moyi, Carriageworks, Sydney, September 30; Departures, Ken Unsworth Studio, Sydney, October 1. In the recent exhibition of dance and the moving image 24 Frames per Second, staged beautifully and expansively at Sydney’s Carriageworks, I kept returning to one work. It was François Chaignaud’s The Sweetest Choice, a suite of five films, each eight or nine…
Into the woods
Melbourne, September 15 THE Australian Ballet and its audiences have a great deal invested in David McAllister’s new Sleeping Beauty, in both senses of the word. The first is financial: this Beauty cost more than $2 million to produce and 70 per cent of its financing was provided by ballet-lovers. The program lists hundreds of…
Sylvie Guillem: Life in Progress
Sydney Opera House, August 19. LET’S not talk in the past tense about Sylvie Guillem. She may be on her farewell tour but she is still one of the greatest of the greats. Until December, when she calls it quits, she is still a dancer and still a superstar. At 50 she leaves the stage…
Robert Curran attracts $US1 million gift for Louisville Ballet
IN his first year as artistic director of Louisville Ballet, in the US state of Kentucky, former Australian Ballet principal dancer Robert Curran has attracted a donation of $US1 million to the company. It is believed to be the largest gift received from an individual donor in the company’s 63-year history, says Louisville Ballet director…
On View: Live Portraits
Performance Space at Carriageworks, Sydney, July 17 HOW can we know the dancer from the dance, asked W.B. Yeats. It’s a question embedded in Sue Healey’s absorbing On View: Live Portraits, a piece that incorporates the moving image, live performance and, for 10 minutes at the beginning, the dancer as museum object. When the doors to…
The sweetest choice
CARRIAGEWORKS is Sydney’s other great secular cathedral. This vast late-19th century industrial space, originally built as railway workshops to make train carriages for the growing city, is less than a decade old as a centre for contemporary arts and doesn’t have the instant-recognition factor of the Sydney Opera House, but it, too, is awe-inspiring in…
Flying high
Queensland Performing Arts Centre, June 26. TREY McIntyre is a prolific American choreographer who has made more than 100 works – he is only 45 – and is widely known and admired in the US. When he announced last year he was closing his Trey McIntyre Project as a fulltime ensemble to concentrate on a…
