We are thrilled to invite our Friends to Meet the New Dancers after two years.
Please join us and be introduced to the 20 very special dancers who have been invited to dance with the Company in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
A member of The Australian Ballet staff will host an informative Q&A with a dancer representing each year, including Belle Urwin, a former FAB Australian Ballet School Scholarship recipient, and Hugo Dumapit, whose mother is a long-term Friends member.
With Sydney Harbour as our backdrop, enjoy champagne and canapes in the iconic Sydney Opera House Northern Foyer, and celebrate our future dancers of The Australian Ballet.
Tickets for Meet the New Dancers are available 11am Thursday 24 March. Due to catering requirements, please RSVP no later Monday 18 April. Don’t miss out!
The final dress rehearsal for the Celebration Gala, featuring grand classical showpieces, thrilling contemporary excerpts, perennial favourites and more, will be on Wednesday 24 November, 7pm at Sydney Opera House.
The Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director, David Hallberg, has curated this exhilarating celebration of his dancers’ artistry and commitment to maintaining the highest standards over the past 18 months.
The Sydney program will feature excerpts from classical favourites such as Swan Lake, The Merry Widow, Anna Karenina and The Nutcracker; lovers of modern work will revel in contemporary pas de deux from revered 20th-century choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, British wunderkind Wayne McGregor and the company’s resident choreographer, Alice Topp.
Tickets for the final dress rehearsal of The Australian Ballet’s Celebration Gala, are on sale now! BOOK
IN ACCORDANCE WITH GOVERNMENT RESTRICTIONS proof of full COVID-19 vaccination or valid medical exemption will be required for anyone over the age of sixteen to attend this dress rehearsal.
In 2017, Elizabeth Toohey accepted David McAllister’s invitation to become a Ballet Mistress and Repetiteur of The Australian Ballet, a vocation near and dear to heart. Earlier this year Elizabeth joined The Friends Chairperson Greg Khoury, to talk about her role in nurturing the company’s dancers, as well as details on her long standing friendship with former Artistic Director David McAllister AC.
Click below to listen.
Over the last two years The Australian Ballet has worked with ABC TV on an exciting series that charts the Company’s history. And We Danced reveals the key moments that shaped The Australian Ballet, and tells the story of the people whose passion and dedication continue to drive the Company forward today. Featuring rarely seen footage from The Australian Ballet’s archive, the series also delves into what has made The Ballet so uniquely Australian.
Australia’s fever for ballet began in the early 20th century with the arrival of the Ballet Russes, who inspired the establishment of Australia’s first professional ballet company – the Borovansky Ballet. Despite outstanding success with audiences, the life of the company was short lived. It wasn’t until the arrival and foresight of British dancer Peggy van Praagh – who took over the sinking company – that the future of ballet in the country looked up.
A successful campaign to government in 1964 led to the establishment of Australia’s first professional dance company: The Australian Ballet. The company’s debut of adored classic Swan Lake was a resounding success, but the early decades were far from smooth sailing. A failed tour to New Zealand, over-worked dancers and industrial action threatened the fledgling company as it tried to carve out its own unique cultural identity.
The early seventies saw the celebrated arrival of a new mode of contemporary dance and the company’s iconic production of Rudolph Nureyev’s Don Quixote, an extravaganza that would herald the greatest ballet film of all time.
Episode 2, Act 2 1980 – 1999
In the 1980s, The Australian Ballet’s audience was broader than ever before. But the long simmering tensions between belt-tightening and creative risk were about to come to a head. In 1981 the dancers staged an iconic strike, demanding to be paid according to skill and rank.
Shortly after, the artistic appointment of British dancer Maina Gielgud finally brought together the creative and business sides of the company. What followed was a harmonious period of rebuilding and a focus on cultivating the company’s many young dancers, such as David McAllister, Steven Heathcote, Elizabeth Toohey and Fiona Tonkin.
Inspired by the company’s youth, the early nineties saw daring, sexy and provocative ballets that pushed the limits of physicality and tradition. Spartacus, and Stanton Welch’s Divergence showed a new edge and revolutionised the ballet’s public image.
The period also saw the arrival of Australia’s most highly regarded choreographer Graeme Murphy and the company’s first collaboration with choreographer Stephen Page of Bangarra Dance Company.
Ross Stretton took over the artistic direction in 1997. Remote and reclusive, his approach was not endeared by some, though no one could deny his artistic strengths. By the end of the decade, the repertoire was becoming increasingly contemporary, increasingly Australian and increasingly risky.
Episode 3, Act 1 2000 – 2020
In the third and final episode of And We Danced, The Australian Ballet enters the new millennium with a bold creative appointment. Fresh from the dancer’s ranks and with no prior leadership experience, David McAllister became artistic director of The Australian Ballet in 2001.
His daring first commission was Graeme Murphy’s adaptation of Swan Lake, inspired by the love triangle between Princess Diana, Prince Charles and Camilla. It was an unprecedented success, becoming a signature piece for the company and securing the future of the company in McAllister’s hands.
Further collaborations with Stephen Page and Bangarra Dance Company, and the recruitment of Ella Halvelka, The Australian Ballet’s first Indigenous dancer, cemented the company’s commitment to represent a diversity of stories and cultures that reflect Australian society more widely.
With success of large-scale crowd-pleasers such as Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty alongside more experimental works it appeared that the balance between financial viability and creative risk had been struck.
After twenty years at the helm of the company, McAllister propelled The Australian Ballet into the 21st century on and off the stage. In 2021, ballet’s popularity is as great as ever. With the recent appointment of international superstar David Hallberg as the eighth Artistic Director the ballet looks forward to a new future as one of our preeminent cultural institutions.
The final dress rehearsal for New York Dialects, The Australian Ballet’s return to the stage in 2021.
This triple bill is David Hallberg’s first program as Artistic Director and features two revered classics from George Balanchine, the great game-changer of ballet, with a brand-new creation from a 21st-century innovator.
Serenade Balanchine’s deeply rooted knowledge of Russian classicism grounded his inspired deviations from it, which galvanised modern dance. Serenade, considered one of the greatest works of the 20th century, was the first work he made on American dancers. The poetry of women in long ice-blue tutus moving in unison to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C has a simplicity and purity still breathtaking today.
The Four Temperaments If Serenade is Balanchine at his most lyrical, The Four Temperaments is the epitome of his stark neo-classical style: dancers in black and white leotards and tights performing stripped-back ballet steps skewed in unexpected directions. The score, which Balanchine commissioned from Paul Hindemith, was inspired by the medieval notion that four ‘humours’ govern personality type; it is both sparse and luscious as it explores each of those temperaments.
Watermark Pam Tanowitz, from a contemporary dance background, has created work for major ballet companies, including New York City Ballet and The Royal Ballet, as well as for the hallowed modern-dance companies of Martha Graham and Paul Taylor. She will bring her vision for ensemble choreography and her fresh approach to gender roles to a work using the male dancers of The Australian Ballet. The Pulitzer-prize winning composer Caroline Shaw will extend her concerto Watermark as a partner to Tanowitz’s exciting creative vision.
Tickets on sale from Thursday 4 March. For more information, please click here
