Sydney City Youth Ballet with the SYO Philharmonic. The Concourse, Chatswood, Sydney. September 23. The room is always full of hope and desire when student performers take to the stage, particularly if they are dancers or classical musicians. Some will have started as young as four or five and certainly by eight or nine. In…
Tag: Queensland Ballet
Don Quixote, West Australian Ballet
His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, May 11 and 12. Don Quixote is all fluff and high spirits. Based glancingly on the Cervantes novel, the ballet foregrounds the romance between Kitri, an innkeeper’s daughter, and the impecunious barber Basilio. Kitri’s father would prefer her to marry money, which turns up in the form of Gamache, a fool….
Swan Lake, Queensland Ballet
Queensland Performing Arts Centre, May 5. Queensland Ballet’s Swan Lake had a 42nd Street quality on opening night as junior company member Joel Woellner was chosen to dance Prince Siegfried alongside the seasoned Odette-Odile of QB principal artist – and former top-ranked star at the National Ballet of Cuba – Yanela Piñera. Piñera has presence…
Raw, Queensland Ballet
Works by Liam Scarlett, Greg Horsman and Christopher Bruce. Queensland Ballet, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, March 17. Death comes to us all eventually but does it have to come so cruelly and so soon to so many? Christopher Bruce’s Ghost Dances was made in 1981 in response to human rights abuses in Pinochet’s Chile…
Bespoke, Queensland Ballet
Brisbane Powerhouse, February 10. Bespoke is a new-choreography program that shows Queensland Ballet moving up yet another gear and broadening its horizons. So far in Li Cunxin’s artistic directorship new contemporary work on the schedule has either fallen into the annual triple bill, of which there is always only one (although none in 2015), or…
Li Cunxin extends his Queensland Ballet tenure and Liam Scarlett joins as artistic associate
IN October Queensland Ballet announced that artistic director Li Cunxin had signed on for another four years, doubtless much to the relief of the QB board. Li succeeded François Klaus in July 2012 and in his first four years has transformed a lacklustre company into one of significant growth, steadily increasing artistic standards and apparently…
Lest We Forget, Queensland Ballet
Queensland Performing Arts Centre, July 29. The Andrews Sisters style is all honey, sunshine and an irresistible life force, even when there’s a touch of wistfulness in the lyrics. No wonder the trio was so popular with US troops during World War II. The silken close harmonies, bouncy syncopations and light-on-the-feet melodies were made to…
Character building: dance isn’t only for the young
The received wisdom is that ballet is strictly a young person’s game. When a classical dancer gets near or just beyond 40 there is much marveling at their longevity and conjecture about what they will do when they retire. There are always exceptions, of course. Think of the wondrous Alessandra Ferri, who on June 23…
About last week … April 2-8
In the week just gone I went again to The Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake, this time to see Lana Jones as O/O. I’ll wait until I’ve seen Natasha Kusch – coming up at the Saturday matinee – before I embark on a full discussion of Stephen Baynes’s production and the key exponents. In the meantime…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Queensland Ballet, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, April 1. The second act of Liam Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins with deliciously controlled chaos. At the behest of Oberon, lord of the forest and fairies, Puck has got busy with magic love dust. The result is instantaneous passion for whoever is first seen, complicated by…
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