Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, August 28. When Queensland Ballet staged Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 2014 the then-small company took a huge risk, although one mitigated by bringing in superstars Carlos Acosta, Tamara Rojo and Steven McRae to partner QB principal artists. The gamble paid off. The season was a record-breaking success and, more importantly,…
Tag: Steven McRae
The Winter’s Tale, The Royal Ballet
Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, July 5. The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s wondrously strange, knotty late works. The pitfalls are many but so are the rewards. Compassion, contrition, forgiveness for great wrongs and reconciliation are its towering themes. Dance gives direct access to such heart-stirring emotions, or does at its best….
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…
Liam Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream arrives in Brisbane
There wouldn’t be too many 29-year-old men who know exactly where they are going to be in five years. Not in a general sense, as in being pretty sure about being promoted, or settling down with a partner and children, but precisely, literally. As in a date, a place, a specific task. Liam Scarlett does. We…
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…
Naming names: looking back on 2014
I’VE avoided making neat lists of 10 of this and 10 of that in my survey of 2014, which is good when it comes to the individuals who made the deepest impression on me. I decided not to divide the names by art form or vocation. There are dancers, opera singers, actors, actresses, directors and…
Rojo, McRae, Acosta at QB
Queensland Ballet, Brisbane, June 27, July 1,2,3 ROMEO and Juliet was a success in every possible way for Queensland Ballet, starting with the very fact of its presence in Brisbane. Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet is the gold standard for dance versions of Shakespeare’s play and is monumental, needing much larger forces than QB can ordinarily summon….
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…
Cojocaru and Kobborg
WHEN Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg join The Australian Ballet in Sydney for two performances of Manon in April it will be their first appearance with an Australian company, but their second time in Australia together and Cojocaru’s third visit. She danced in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Hamburg Ballet in Brisbane in 2012. In…
The year ahead
And coming up in 2014 … LAST year it was easy to point to the events in dance one thought would be unmissable (not so very many) and theatre (vast amounts). Mostly performances and productions delivered pretty much what one thought they would and moments of transcendence were few, but I guess they always are….
deborah jones: FollowSpot 