The Australian Ballet National Tour, Wollongong, July 25, 2025

Whenever I am within cooee of a venue for The Australian Ballet’s regional tour I will be there. Port Macquarie, 2023; Newcastle, 2024; Wollongong, 2025. Other places in other years too. I recall a rather long drive to Bathurst eons ago and a Giselle at The Concourse in Sydney’s Chatswood.  I note that TAB now calls this…

Oscar. Choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon. The Australian Ballet, Melbourne, September 13, 2024. Sydney, November 8, 2024.

Can something be simultaneously too much and not enough? That was the case for Oscar Wilde in his tumultuous, ill-fated, on-off relationship with the mercurial Lord Alfred Douglas and it’s the case with Oscar, Christopher Wheeldon’s new full-length work for The Australian Ballet. The extraordinarily rich score by Joby Talbot and Wheeldon’s abundant storytelling gifts join…

Instruments of Dance, The Australian Ballet, Sydney Opera House, November 10, 2022

Australian audiences know Wayne McGregor from Dyad 1929, made in 2009 as part of The Australian Ballet’s Ballets Russes celebration; Chroma, choreographed in 2006 and brought into the repertoire in 2014; and Infra, staged by TAB in 2017 but dating from 2008. Obsidian Tear, the opening work in the Instruments of Dance triple bill, is not that Wayne McGregor. Absent…

New York Dialects, The Australian Ballet

Sydney Opera House, April 6 and 21, 2021 The Australian Ballet returned to the stage in February with Summertime at the Ballet – a Melbourne-only gala celebration after last year’s disappointments. New York Dialects was something else entirely; a manifesto really. This was new artistic director David Hallberg saying this is me and this is where I…