Brolga 34 an Australian journal about dance

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In This Article

Editorial

by Alan Brissenden AM

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Australian Ballet’s first performance, and a popular hit of the 1962 premiere season was Rex Reid’s Melbourne Cup, which drew on the country’s most famous social sporting event for its story and setting. Jordan Vincent has investigated the surprising facts connecting Reid’s new work with a second Cup ballet, and what she writes about her discoveries is both entertaining and informative. The national company’s recent seasons have celebrated the visits of Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes to Australia, and their social and artistic impact on this country is undergoing reassessment.

Art historian Andrew Montana adds another dimension to this new evaluation with his discussion of the designs the young Australian artist Loudon Sainthill made for ballets by the strikingly beautiful Russian ballerina Nina Verchinina. The story of this collaboration, and the fate of Verchinina as choreographer will intrigue anyone interested in gender studies, apart from the worlds of art and ballet.

Rodney Stenning Edgecombe looks for a new genre within ballet itself, making connections between other musical forms and such works as The Merry Widow, which is part of the Australian Ballet’s 2011 season. Reaching back into the history of ballet and opera, in a thought-provoking essay he proposes a new term, ‘Ballet Lyrique’. 

John Meehan and Marilyn Rowe as Count Danilo and Hanna Glawari in the premiere season of The Merry Widow (1975). Photo: David Parker Courtesy: The Australian Ballet

Few places could be further from The Merry Widow’s glamorous Maxim’s than the red dust and spinifex of central Australia, but that is where Mary Elizabeth Anderson takes us with her account of Tess de Quincey’s experiments in Bodyweather training, place-based performance-making and documentation at Hamilton Downs, an old cattle station and youth camp about 100 kilometres beyond Alice Springs, bringing us into the 21st century.

I hope you will find the variety and historical stretch of this issue of Brolga stimulating and satisfying. It is good to be able to welcome authors from South Africa and the United States to its pages. My thanks to all the contributors, to our designer, David Bonsall, and to everyone who helped with the illustrations.

Articles

The two Cups of 1962: the dancing horses of The Australian Ballet and the National Theatre

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere season of The Australian Ballet's Melbourne Cup, choreographed by Rex Reid. Melbourne Cup was a popular hit of 1962 and the ballet drew on the country’s most famous social sporting event for its story and setting. Jordan Vincent has investigated the surprising facts connecting Reid’s work with a second ballet on the same subject by Melbourne's National Theatre, titled Cup Fever: a fantasy on The Cup.