QPAC International Series, Brisbane, June 27 and June 29 The Bolshoi’s pairing of Yuri Grigorovich’s Spartacus and George Balanchine’s Jewels could not be more fascinating. They were made only a year apart, in 1968 and 1967 respectively, and come from the hands of men with a common lineage but different destinies. Their shared birthplace tells the story. Grigorovich…
Tag: Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Woolf Works, The Royal Ballet
Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, June 29. Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works is a monumental act of artistic daring, claiming for dance the right, and the ability, to bring one of the great voices in English literature to the stage. The translation from printed word to wordless movement is of necessity very free but…
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…
Ladies in Black
Queensland Theatre Company, Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, November 19 BY the end of Ladies in Black its sweet, gawky duckling of a heroine has been transformed into a soignée swan, and in just six weeks. Why, without her glasses and with her hair up, young Lisa Miles is quite a looker. Goodbye school, hello world….
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…
Heart untouched; soul unshaken
Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, August 28. KEVIN McKenzie’s version of Swan Lake for American Ballet Theatre is a medieval fairy tale of transformation. A woman is turned into a swan. An evil lake-dwelling sorcerer becomes a devastatingly attractive nobleman in the blink of an eye. Two lovers die by drowning but moments…
Affecting ardour
Queensland Ballet, Lyric Theatre, Brisbane, June 27 KENNETH MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet is big in every way. At street level testosterone-fuelled gangs jostle and fight in the marketplace, revelling in their ancient grudge, as Shakespeare called it. Inside the great house of Lord Capulet the tumult is even greater, but is within the hearts of…
‘This is for the little brown girls’
ON March 26 this year American Ballet Theatre soloist Misty Copeland told website blacknews.com that “I would love to be Odette-Odile in Swan Lake one day. I think that would be the ultimate role.” Copeland will get her wish when ABT visits Brisbane in late August and early September. At a date yet to be…
ABT is Brisbane-bound
ONE way of looking at the repertoire for American Ballet Theatre’s Brisbane visit in August and September – its first to Australia – is with absolute pragmatism: there’s Swan Lake, of course, which is for many audience members the ballet gold standard, and there’s a triple bill made up of pieces the company is currently…
The Bolshoi in Brisbane
Le Corsaire, May 30; The Bright Stream, June 7. Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane. THERE is no more interesting, influential or thoughtful choreographer working in classical ballet than Alexei Ratmansky and Brisbane was fortunate to see two distinctly different examples of his art in its sell-out Bolshoi Ballet season. And what a pleasure it was…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 