Source : the age
In a program that brings together the old and new, The Australian Ballet is digging into its archives and bringing back a long-missed favourite, with Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella returning to the stage after a 47-year absence.
“I wanted to bring back the works that made [their] mark in this company and had decades long of runs,” says artistic director David Hallberg. “Cinderella is one of the great classics of the balletic repertoire. The score is unbelievably rich. And choreographically, I think Ashton’s version is very true to the story.” Ashton’s style, Hallberg adds, is “very specific and very demanding for dancers”.
Another returning classic is Hallberg’s reimagining of Swan Lake, which premiered in 2023. Three years later, Hallberg says there will be some tweaks with set and costume design, and emphasises the importance of going back to familiar works, of not keeping them static.
“The danger is that it becomes a museum piece, and that’s honestly my biggest fear with a work like Swan is that it just becomes something we roll out, something we perform for audiences that love ballet or maybe are seeing ballet for the first time, and then we call it a day … Swan Lake needs to be assessed for today’s audiences,” he says.
“I think the most blatant kind of evolution of bringing Swan Lake into today’s time is that technique in ballet has evolved. The legs are higher. There are more pyrotechnics in technique, and I don’t say that as a negative. I say that as dancers are jumping higher, the jumps have refined, the turns have refined, and so therefore, the choreography remains as it was, but I think it’s being executed to a greater standard.”
One of the more recent works featured in the upcoming program is a return season of Kunstkamer, a modern, critically acclaimed non-narrative work with music that moves from Janis Joplin to Beethoven. In 2022, The Australian Ballet was the first company to perform it outside of the Netherlands, and ever since, Hallberg – who had a cameo role in that season, which he will not be reprising – has been asked when it will be returning.
“On the one hand, it’s great to keep people’s memory of seeing a world. Live performance is ephemeral, alive, but I also have to listen to audiences’ tastes, and Kunstkamer is the one ballet that people continually ask to bring back to the stage.”
The 2027 program will also feature the Australian debut of Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling, a three-act ballet that premiered in 1978 that tells the true story of the events leading to the death of Austria’s Crown Prince Rudolf, and Mixed Bill: Modern Masters which brings together works by George Balanchine, William Forsythe and Jerome Robbins. As part of Modern Masters, Sydney and Melbourne will each see an additional Balanchine work – Kammermusik No. 2 in Melbourne and Ballet Imperial in Sydney.
Cinderella will premiere in Adelaide – with music performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Earlier this year The Australian Ballet faced criticism for their use of recorded music for its regional tours, including for a performance in Adelaide. Asked about the response to this, Hallberg says, “recorded music has always been at our on our national tours for 40 years, and so in truth, the question of live music is never in question at The Australian Ballet. We continue to have a fruitful relationship with all of our live orchestras, and the formula of using live music to our ballets has never and will never be in question.”
For Melbourne audiences, 2027 marks the ballet’s return to the newly refurbished and newly renamed Ian Potter State Theatre. The ballet has previously pointed to the forced relocation to the Regent theatre as a factor in its budget deficit – $4.7 million in 2025. Asked if the return to the State Theatre will help address the deficit, Hallberg says: “I’m not one to speak of budgets, but I think the repertoire will certainly bring in the audiences that we’re hoping to bring in.”
The reopening also means that the company can be more bold in its programming. “With moving in back into the State Theatre, the ballets have been chosen for this size of the stage that we’re going back to. We’re immensely excited to be back home. It does feel like home, and the repertoire is big. It’s really bold, and it’s I think a true example of what we’re capable of being.
“I feel like season ’27 is finally a season that we can spread ourselves at full capacity – at full flight. We’re spreading our wings as an organisation, as a company, as artists, as dancers on stage, at our fullest – and I think ’27 the repertoire really exemplifies this company in its most ambitious.”
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