Dance Australia

THIS issue carries the second part of colleague Nina Levy’s series on “mature” dancers. It is both edifying and exhilarating to learn how these dancers regard their artform. They represent a huge shift in attitudes over recent years to older people d

SYDNEY Dance Company (SDC) is starting 2020 with a bang: with the renowned choreographer William Forsythe. The company will perform his N.N.N.N., a work that presents the mind in four parts, represented by four dancers. The same program will feature

“DANCERS are made to be on-stage,” said West Australian Ballet’s artistic director Aurélien Scannella at the company’s 2020 launch, and his program for next year certainly reflects that sentiment, with the company introducing a sixth season to its an

Ensuring dancers’ safety is easier in a controlled environment such as the stage or a dance studio but what if they are dancing in an unstructured space such as outdoors at an event? Harlequin Floors are partnering with the Royal Academy of Dance Aus

THE Queensland Ballet is opening 2020 with a gala to celebrate its 60th anniversary. Company dancers will be joined by international stars, performing a program featuring excerpts from some of the QB’s best loved ballets created under the direction o

THE 2020 Adelaide Festival is presenting two landmark but very different contemporary dance programs. One is Lyon Opera Ballet from France which, despite its name, is a contemporary dance company, directed by Yorgos Loukos. The company is presenting

LIZ LEA (49) is a performer, choreographer and producer, based in Canberra. Her dance training began with ballet classes at age seven (she made her stage debut as a mouse), later training with Carol O’Connell in Manly (Sydney, NSW), before completing

IF there was one word Amy Hollingsworth might use to describe her plans, it would be “ambitious”. Or, given two: “incredibly ambitious”. Appointed as the new artistic director of Expressions earlier this year, Hollingsworth is bursting with ideas. S

THE Houston Ballet Academy in the US is holding auditions for its Summer Intensive Program in Australia in 2020. Founded in 1955, Houston Ballet Academy is under the direction of Australian Stanton Welch (AM) and Academy Director Melissa Bowman. Sinc

THE Style of Movement: Fashion and Dance is a stunning collection of 250 photographs which brings together a celebrated dance photographer duo in sumptuous combination with some of the world’s top fashion designers and leading ballet dancers, such as

CAN you imagine creating the costumes for 6000 individual performers? Or just one costume for a horse? Well, those are the sorts of brief Australian designer Janet Hine has filled. Whether for theatre, film, TV or huge arena spectaculars, Hine has do

ONE of the Marshall government’s first acts when it was elected in South Australia in 2018 was to effectively dismantle Arts South Australia and to disperse its responsibilities to other departments. Arts funding was cut by $4.9 million in 2018-19, w

TOBIAH Booth-Remmers is an independent dance creator and performer. Where are you from and where did you train? I was born in Victoria but moved to South Australia with my family when I was 10 years old. I studied at the Adelaide College of the Arts

WHEN he was only 12 years old, Rhys Kosakowski was one of the original four Billy Elliots in the Australian premiere of the musical in Sydney in 2007. He even won a Helpmann Award for Best Actor – not a bad way to start a career. By the time he finis

Where are you from? Brisbane. Where did you undertake your full-time training? Jason Coleman’s Ministry of Dance in Melbourne. What level of education had you attained before beginning your full-time training? OP3 from Brisbane State High School. CST

MELBOURNE-BORN Liam studied at the Australian Conservatoire of Ballet under Christine Walsh and Ricardo Ella and then later at the English National Ballet School. His training taught him the importance of hard work and of “pushing himself on a daily

In 2019, Dance Australia, in collaboration of the Sydney Opera House and the Australian Ballet, initiated the first Emerging Female Classical Choreographer project, in recognition that the women choreographers in the ballet world are a rarity. From a

WAIT, do not go away! Think of movies and great roles like Spartacus and Dracula. Ballet similarly requires the gladiator and vampire, like Kirk Douglas and Gary Oldman, to inspire and scare our audiences. Or maybe you prefer playing romantic charact

AMONG the many responsibilities and obligations of a dance school are the music licensing fees. Most music is subject to copyright, even if it is just being played via a phone for a class in a church hall, and indeed few teachers would deny the music

IT is a rare and proud achievement for any school to have a pupil accepted into the Royal Ballet in London. It is even more astonishing, then, to have three dancing with that prestigious institution. Yet Alegria Dance Studios in Sydney has achieved j

COMMUNAL Table, presented by the Brisbane Festival at The Joinery in September, was a carefully crafted performance experience by Dancenorth that was designed to challenge our increasingly connected but disengaged world with its celebration and shari

THIS program [held at the Concourse Theatre on September 27], beginning with a défilé honouring the late Dame Margaret Scott, the school’s founding director who died this year, was sometimes poignant but mostly exhilarating. Simon Dow, a resident cho

THE 2019 Melbourne Festival presented some substantial dance offerings with quite a few recent local works being restaged. These included the wonderful duet Split choreographed by Lucy Guerin which has toured extensively since its launch in 2017 and

WEST Australian Ballet first performed this visually beautiful production of Giselle in 2014. A traditional interpretation remaining true to the work’s 1841 origins, it is a quintessential Romantic ballet set in both human and metaphysical worlds, an

My experience comes from a career as a professional dancer. I graduated from the Australian Ballet School (ABS) and started dancing with Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) in Adelaide before moving on to dance with Leigh Warren and Dancers as well as Out

I have a degree in Ballet Pedagogy (Vaganova) from the Munich University of Music Performing Arts and I also hold teaching qualifications in the Australian Conservatoire of Ballet syllabus (now Ballet Conservatoire syllabus) along with relevant VET t

Tatiana Pevneva’s Russian Vaganova Ballet expertise found the perfect fit when she joined the Charlesworth Ballet Institute in Perth, WA, in 2004. Pevneva studied ballet at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St Petersburg for nine years followed by a pro

QUEENSLAND Ballet Academy was rejoicing on all fronts at the opening night of its inaugural Gala. As well as celebrating the talents of its cohort, the Academy was also revelling in the success of its one-day fundraising campaign to support the fit-o

92 YOUNG dancers were selected to compete in the 2019 Brisbane International Contemporary Dance (BICD) Prix, which took place in Brisbane, September 29 – October 4. This is the second time the event has run. The event saw contestants take part in a w

NOT that long ago, it was standard wisdom that dancers – and all athletes – should “keep warm” immediately after exercise. Following a work-out – such as class or a performance – dancers would rug up in their woollies. Cold was the enemy – it meant s

JACK Riley found his way into dance through martial arts. Since graduating from the Victorian College of Arts in 2016, he has performed with a number of companies and has presented two major works of his own – Contact in Canberra (QL2 Theatre) and Me