By Deborah Jones The Australian Ballet’s Celebration Gala at the Sydney Opera House was greeted with unbridled enthusiasm by an audience starved for dance. End-of-year Sydney performances of Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet and Ratmansky’s Harlequinade had been cancelled, a big blow to the company following the wipe-out of its earlier programming in Melbourne, where it
By Deborah Jones In 1964, social critic and academic Donald Horne wrote a book about Australia called The Lucky Country, a term he did not intend as a compliment. It was more dumb luck than anything more elevated that enabled the nation’s success, he argued. The phrase, however, caught on here and is used by
By Deborah Jones David McAllister’s final year as The Australian Ballet’s longest-serving artistic director did not run to plan. In March, the company was only days into its Melbourne season when COVID-19 closed theatres. Soon, the rest of McAllister’s swan-song program was scrapped — not the ideal way to celebrate 20 years at the helm