I saw Flora at its premiere in Melbourne in March and was struck anew by the breadth of artistic director David Hallberg's vision for The Australian Ballet. Hallberg's counterpart at B…
Championed by a former chief medical officer, Lifeline is both a musical following Alexander Fleming's discovery of the first antibiotic and a warning about the threat of superbugs in the pr…
Code of Conduct is pungently sited on the 20th floor of a Brisbane office block. Look out the windows and a shiny city full of possibilities beckons; inside it's all concrete, low ceil…
Sybylla Melvyn blazes like a comet in the night sky, although one with a path that can't be predicted with any accuracy whatsoever. Sybylla is an agent of chaos, crashing her way towards a l…
It goes without saying creating new work is always a gamble. When it's staged as part of a major festival the stakes are even higher. The show has to compete with much more seasoned fare. Od…
You hear it a lot in foyers. "A short show's a good show" we cry before heading into the auditorium. It's shorthand, if you will, for the knowledge that we don't be detained too long if a te…
The Broadway performer shot to fame without a safety net in The Greatest Showman. The resulting public scrutiny was painful, she says, but it was the ideal grounding to step into the shoes o…
The contemporary triple bill Prism starts its Sydney season on November 7, after which, just for something completely different, The Australian Ballet will dive back into David McAllis…
Two years ago I was at the 2023 Brisbane Festival to see Salamander, the astonishing dance-theatre-visual arts piece by British choreographer and director Maxine Doyle with an extraordinary …
Sydney Dance Company's INDance, now in its fourth year, is a small festival that presents already existing " although relatively new " works in SDC's black-box Neilson Studio. It's a pick'n'…
Tchaikovsky was "charmed and captivated" when asked to write the music for The Sleeping Beauty by the director of the Imperial Theatres, Ivan Vsevolozhsky. Audiences have felt the s…
Whenever I am within cooee of a venue for The Australian Ballet's regional tour I will be there. Port Macquarie, 2023; Newcastle, 2024; Wollongong, 2025. Other places in other years too. I r…
You don't go back to a ballet again and again just to see the ballet. You go to see what different artists make of that ballet (same with opera; same with theatre). An alternative cast bring…
Queensland Performing Arts Centre is celebrating its 40th anniversary by giving out the presents. Free screenings of Ballet Preljocaj's contemporary Swan Lake, which had a season just …
There's a vibrant spirit of renewal at Canada's Alberta Ballet, the Calgary-based company that next year celebrates its 60th anniversary. Artistic director Francesco Ventriglia has been i…
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 o…
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…
The stars were out and so was the moon. The audience gathered, as always, on the terraces at City Beach's Quarry Amphitheatre with the traditional picnic baskets and wine to hand. The dancer…
If you want to sum up the thrust of Karen Pearlman's witty new short film in one piece of advice it's this: women, whatever you do, do not gaze wistfully through a window. This passive…
The author discusses his story "My Friend Pinocchio."
Queensland Ballet has chosen Ivan Gil-Ortega to be its next artistic director. The Spanish-born international artist will be the company's seventh AD. He will start in February after a perio…
Obviously we're not precisely at the opera. If so, the doors would have been shut against all-comers at the scheduled start time and there wouldn't be all these people standing around in the…
It's been a few years since I've done a year's-best list. Everyone loves a list, including me, and it's fun to see what others found memorable. But while I'm always happy to share my opinion…
My agent and friend Rochelle Stevens, who ran her own successful literary agency for 40 years, has died of cancer, aged 73. Rochelle represented writers and directors in screenwriting, radio…
Can something be simultaneously too much and not enough? That was the case for Oscar Wilde in his tumultuous, ill-fated, on-off relationship with the mercurial Lord Alfred Douglas and it's t…