As David McAllister announced his last full season as artistic director of The Australian Ballet, the company formally launched its search for McAllister’s successor. McAllister retires in December of next year after 20 years at the helm but will have significant input into the 2021 program. The new director is not expected to start until…
Tag: Alexei Ratmansky
Natalia Osipova’s Pure Dance, Sydney
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, August 29. Natalia Osipova is the most arresting classical dancer of her generation. Others may have an inner fire that burns brightly but she has a furnace. Osipova is incandescent. For the past six years she has made The Royal Ballet her base and that company’s foundational commitment to story-telling…
Hallberg’s date with Beauty
Just before Christmas David Hallberg made his debut as Franz in Coppélia with The Australian Ballet at the Sydney Opera House. It marked his return to the stage after a two-and-a-half year absence due to injury, a year of which was spent in rehabilitation with the AB’s medical team in Melbourne. He danced four performances…
David Hallberg to return to the ballet stage in The Australian Ballet’s Coppélia
AFTER a long recuperation after injury, American danseur noble David Hallberg will return to the ballet stage in December – in a place and a part not many would have anticipated. Hallberg will appear with The Australian Ballet during its Sydney Opera House pre-Christmas season, dancing the sunny, wayward Franz in Coppélia. It will be…
Thrills and spills: the year in dance
We’ll get to the year’s most interesting work and dancers shortly but 2015 was also notable for offstage developments, particularly at Australia’s three leading classical companies, The Australian Ballet, Queensland Ballet and West Australian Ballet. So let’s begin there. OFFSTAGE The national company At The Australian Ballet, David McAllister became the company’s longest-serving artistic director, surpassing…
Beauty in the eye of the beholder
Revelations in New York, stars made at The Australian Ballet, Alina Cojocaru in Brisbane and more … The Australian Ballet dubbed its 2015 season A Year of Beauty. Giselle, Swan Lake, Cinderella and Frederick Ashton’s The Dream were on the program, lovely ballets all, but essentially teasers for the main event – the new Sleeping…
Everything old is new again
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, May 29 and May 30. WHEN Serge Diaghilev decided to stage The Sleeping Beauty in London the monumental Russian Imperial-era ballet was not an obvious stablemate for the modernist dance works he had introduced with his Ballets Russes. But Diaghilev had his reasons. There was Tchaikovsky’s music, which he admired…
In which I fail to stop my list at 10
THIS year I saw more than 200 performances and, over the past week or so, have written about the people, plays, operas, dance works and musicals that spoke to me most strongly. Now I cull the list to 14 – just because that’s how it turned out – and a supplementary, the last being something…
Top 10 in dance for 2014
DANCE is my great passion but this year there wasn’t a huge amount to bowl me over.Certainly I saw plenty of fine dancing – when does one not? – but in classical ballet there were few new works of substance. Well, none actually. There were pleasing new versions of existing ballets, although they didn’t quite…
‘A time of renewal’
Maina Gielgud, artistic director of The Australian Ballet from 1983 to 1997, is in Sydney preparing to restage her acclaimed 1986 production of Giselle, last performed by the company in 2008. It will premiere in Melbourne on March 13, 2015, with seasons to follow in Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide. In a frank and lively conversation…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 