The Australian Ballet has returned to America after a fifteen-year absence. The United States is the last port of call on a series of tours that has taken the troupe of sixty dancers from London to Leningrad, from Athens to Singapore, and which marks an important new extension of the internationalism that has characterized ballet in Australia from its inception.
The fabled ballerinas who toured Australia in the early years of this century began the succession of international performers on Australian stages that grew to include regular visits by companies from around the world. Each tour left behind another dancer - usually two - and, through those dancers, a network of schools and companies developed across Australia built directly upon the great European ballet foundations, with the Australian Ballet in Melbourne as the de facto national ensemble. The difference between the company's current tour and its last American visit, when Dame Margot Fonteyn headlined Ronald Hynd's Merry Widow, shows how the Australian Ballet today has rewritten its international birth right.
This time the company itself is the star, and the tour's repertory is showcasing them in an aptly international setting. The headliner is ballet's best-traveled heroine, Giselle. A French variation on a German legend, the nineteenth-century romantic classic has been enhanced by the legion of legendary performers who have danced the ballet's lead roles, Giselle and Albrecht, since the Paris premiere in 1841. The Australian Ballet's Giselle will feature four separate couples as the star-crossed lovers in a staging by company artistic director Maina Gielgud. Gielgud learned both Giselle's story and style from Sir Anton Dolin, one of this century's foremost Al-brechts.
International variety also characterizes the other works in the repertory, both of which are new to contemporary American audiences. In fact, the distance between the two is as clear as their common bond, the international language of ballet: one is a narrative drama, the other an abstract suite. The Australians are presenting the American premiere of Hungarian choreographer Laszlo Seregis' Spartacus, set to the fiery Prokofiev score, as well as the first American performances of Serge Lifar' s Suite en blanc since the debut tour of the Paris Opera Ballet in 1948. Again, the stagings go right to their international source. During her performance career, Gielgud learned Suite en blanc from Lifar and danced every role in it, from corpse de ballet to ballerina.
The Australian Ballet was born out of stellar traditions. Its first artistic director was the late Dame Peggy van Praagh, one of the key figures in the development of Britain's Royal Ballet. Combining artists from an earlier troupe, the Borovansky Ballet, and young dancers trained in Australia, the company debuted in Swan Lake on November 2, 1962, led by ballerina Sonia Arova and the great Danish danseur Erik Bruhn. The first performance also included aspiring Australians who would go on to become the leading lights of Australian ballet, among them Marilyn Jones and Garth Welch (whose son, Stanton, is today one of the company's most promising young dancers, as well as a choreographer in the making).
The repertory van Praagh developed for her company included ballets by the most influential of twentieth-century choreographers, including George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, and John Cranko. In 1964, she was joined in
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