★★★★★ Thanks to Yolande Yorke-Edgell and her company, Robert Cohan was able to continue creating dance works for performance up until his death in January this year at the age of 95...
Tag - Robert Helpmann
The Frederick Ashton Foundation marked its tenth anniversary with an evening of rarely performed Ashton pieces and a specially commissioned film, Frederick Ashton: Links in the Chain, by Lynn Wake.
Valerie Lawson on an important series, by WildBear Entertainment, excavating Australian Ballet's past and what's happening now for the company, with all the complications of Covid-19.
★★★★✰ The Royal Ballet's current production of The Sleeping Beauty, dating back to 2006, is a homage to Ninette de Valois and her faith that Marius Petipa's Imperial Russian ballet should be the flagship of her British company.
Although Valerie Lawson's context is wide-ranging, she brings individuals into focus with personal details, shining a spotlight onto their roles in Australian dance history. Lavishly illustrated with photographs from Australian archives, her book gives vivid life to long-gone personalities.
★★★★✰ The Royal Ballet did themselves a lot of good with the last new bill of the season - a one-off celebration of Margot Fonteyn. There was much to be reminded of and be proud of.
★★★★✰ As if an Ashton rarity weren’t reason enough to catch this program, there was also the presence of Marcelo Gomes, former much-admired principal dancer from American Ballet Theatre, to recommend it.
★★★★✰ The Merry Widow is Robert Helpmann’s great gift to the Australian Ballet. It premiered in November 1975 and has been staged more than 400 times since.
February's masterclass, the fifth in the series, featured choreography from the start and end of Frederick Ashton's tenure as artistic director of the Royal Ballet, 1963-1969.
★★★✰✰ If you remember the 1948 film, the plot is easy to follow. If you don’t, and can’t pick up the references to ballets, a printed scenario would be helpful, as would job-descriptions of the characters...
David Drew, for 56 years a member of The Royal Ballet, has died after a long battle with illness. He described himself as one of a ‘bridge generation’ of dancers. The longevity of his career meant that he worked with many figures from the Ballets Russees – but also taught many dancers and choreographers working today.
After the long famine, Ashton’s ballets made a welcome return this week with the company’s triple bill under the umbrella title, The Dream.
Both nights that I attended were blessed with an exquisite Cinderella. Gillian Murphy gave this production a beating heart with her tenderly expressive and incisive performance...
Gillian Lynne has made Helpmann and Benthall's wartime collaboration into a gutsy dramatic ballet, probably with more choreography than Helpmann attempted.
Birmingham Royal Ballet – La Fin du jour, Miracle in the Gorbals, Flowers of the Forest – Birmingham
See these thoughts as a heads up and, ultimately, encouragement to Londoners to go and see an interesting bill...
To fully enjoy Ashton, one has to be willing to acquiesce to one’s own softer impulses, a sense of wonder and perhaps a little nostalgia, and to surrender the loveliness of small things.
Eighty years after Robert Helpmann left Australia and joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet company, a Royal Ballet School symposium celebrated his achievements as a man of the theatre.
This Cinderella, the hotly anticipated centerpiece of the Australian Ballet’s 2013 season, is sensationally, luxuriantly, and extravagantly beautiful...
Obscurer corners of early British ballet are connected in the exhibition 'An Outbreak of Talent', at the Fry gallery in Saffron Walden, Essex until June 30 2013.
It was a program that harkened back to the big international Galas of previous years, as well as a nice reference to the company’s first years, when artists including Sonia Arova, Erik Bruhn, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev guest-starred.