It’s been known for some time that Queensland Ballet is in financial difficulty. This week we discovered it is in the process of cutting staff from behind the scenes and within its company of about 60 dancers. It’s a heartbreaking reversal of fortune for the company remade and substantially expanded under the artistic directorship of…
Tag: The Royal Ballet
Romeo & Juliet. Queensland Ballet. Lyric Theatre, QPAC, Brisbane, March 22 and 26, 2025
It’s all change at Queensland Ballet. Again. The company is far from being the only arts organisation experiencing some turmoil – here’s looking at you, Opera Australia – but every company’s woes are its own. These are interesting times as QB continues to regroup after the retirement of transformational artistic director Li Cunxin. Li left…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Scarlett). Queensland Ballet, Playhouse, Brisbane, April 16, 2024
There is a great deal of joy in Liam Scarlett’s deliciously funny, sensual A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And – always – a great deal of sadness that his life was so short. Yesterday, April 16, was the third anniversary of his death. He was just 35 and the maker of many one-act works for major companies…
David Hallberg named next artistic director of The Australian Ballet
On December 4 last year David Hallberg tweeted that he’d loved revisiting The Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House but “there is a very good chance it was my last”. And so it probably was. Today the 37-year-old American superstar was announced as the next artistic director of The Australian Ballet – its eighth….
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…
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…
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…
A new generation rises to the challenge
Sydney Opera House, April 29. THE Australian Ballet’s first staging of Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations alongside revivals of his coolly mysterious Monotones II and lucid, delightful one-act version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is well overdue. Ashton’s choreography hasn’t surfaced at the AB since 2004 (the last time La Fille mal gardée was presented) and…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 