In her biography of Robert Helpmann, Robert Helpmann: A Servant of Art, Anna Bemrose describes how Helpmann, then artistic director of The Australian Ballet, was grilled by the Industries As…
Queensland Performing Arts Centre, May 26. You win some and you lose some. Queensland Ballet is a co-producer of Carlos Acosta's Carmen with The Royal Ballet and Texas Ballet Theater, whi…
Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney, May 15. This one is all about the dancers. It's about how, to the audience, they look, feel and taste. How astonishing they are in form and function. How magni…
Sydney Opera House, April 6 (evening) and 11 (matinee). It would have been the easiest thing in the world to give Graeme Murphy a conventional gala to celebrate his 50 years of association w…
Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, March 16. La Bayadère is a difficult ballet to take seriously in the 21st century and Queensland Ballet's new production does it few favours. D…
Split, Lucy Guerin Inc. AC Main Arts Theatre, Adelaide. March 3. Memorial, Brink Productions, Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, March 3. The opening weekend of this year's Adelaide Festival, the …
Biographies of the new intake at Royal New Zealand Ballet are now on the website after last year's bruising and very public exodus of a large number of dancers. There are currently 32 dancer…
Michael Clark Company, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, January 30. In the first part of Michael Clark's gorgeous triptych of dances there's an image of quiet, deep reverence enacted by tw…
Ghenoa Gela won the biennial Keir Choreographic Award in 2016 with a work infused with her Torres Strait Islander heritage while posing resonant questions about meanings inherent in or impos…
Sydney Festival, Carriageworks, January 6 Heather Mitchell is one of the great treasures of the Australian stage and any chance to see her must be grabbed eagerly, as proved to be the case e…
My first Artist of the Year, in 2015, was operatic mezzo, cabaret sensation, music-theatre star and all-round fine human being Jacqueline Dark. Last year I went for a large, disparate group …
What possessed the Board of Royal New Zealand Ballet to assert in its statement of December 15 that 42% of the dancers are either New Zealanders or trained in New Zealand and that next ye…
Royal New Zealand Ballet today announced it has commissioned an independent review of its employment processes. This follows two weeks of intense scrutiny about dancer turnover, opportunitie…
On Monday Royal New Zealand Ballet's Board of Trustees chair Steven Fyfe put out a statement addressing concerns raised over the past two weeks about the company. In a lengthy official respo…
The party to mark Royal New Zealand Ballet's 60th anniversary was in full swing at Wellington's St James Theatre when the earthquake struck. The special matinee performance of Swan Lake on J…
Carriageworks, Sydney, November 30. What a great night of dance – all of it brand spanking new, performed by some of the best movers on the planet and offered to the public at $35 a ti…
It's always been Royal New Zealand Ballet's fate to have a certain amount of churn. It's a small country a long way from the big ballet centres of the world. When dancers leave, artistic dir…
On Friday, when I wrote the piece below, it was understood that no 2017 graduates of the New Zealand School of Dance had been offered positions for 2018 with Royal New Zealand Ballet. The sc…
Royal New Zealand Ballet artistic director Patricia Barker will preside over a significantly different group of dancers next year from those the American inherited when she was appointed to …
The Sleeping Beauty. The Australian Ballet, Capitol Theatre, Sydney, November 22. With her unstinting advocacy for greater diversity in ballet, Misty Copeland's fame extends well beyond the …
Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney. October 5. Sydney Dance Company artistic director Rafael Bonachela clearly adores 2 One Another. Made in 2012, it was revived in 2013, 2014 and 2015, is much t…
Yang Liping Contemporary Dance. Brisbane Festival, September 27. Melbourne Festival until October 8. Yang Liping's exquisite Under Siege is like the richest of sauces, distilled and reduc…
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, part…
Hayes Theatre Co, Sydney, September 19. "I shall be remembered," cries Charlie Guiteau as he dances his way to the scaffold, singing a plaintive hymn of his own devising. Charlie who? Histor…
His Majesty's Theatre, Perth, September 14. Northern Ballet's artistic director David Nixon is an old and highly successful hand at creating narrative ballets but he gave himself a tough ass…