Future direction of Queensland Ballet.

After two years at the helm of Queensland Ballet, I feel I have a clear understanding of the challenges and difficulties, as well as the advantages, that Australia offers to the dance scene.

This understanding confirms my determination to implement a long-term policy to raise the Company to a truly international standard.

To understand my approach, let’s look first at the international ballet scene.

Most major regional centres in Europe (Dresden, Dusseldorf, Antwerp, Stuttgart) have good companies which rely on repertoire created outside the company, and there are quite a lot of companies in the world working on this model. They offer good performances without being particularly influential in the larger ballet world.

The most influential European companies are all under the direction of a choreographer. They include companies in major cities such as Frankfurt (Forsythe), Hamburg (Neumeier), NDT (Jiri Kylian), and Madrid (Nacho Duarto). However, they also include companies in small cities such as Wuppertal (Pina Bausch).

The other type of leading companies in the world are the historically famous ones such as the Paris Opera, the Kirov, and more recently, the American Ballet Theatre (Balanchine). They produce such fine dancers that even when they are not choreographically in a creative period, the excellence of the dancers influences the rest of the dance world. Apart from this, their link with the past has great value for anyone who cares to see it.

The situation in Australia is very different.

First, there is The Australian Ballet which is comparable in size to the companies in major regional centres in Europe mentioned above. Like them, its is a good company which relies on externally created repertoire. Unlike them, however, it is unique in serving Australia’s two largest cities on a regular basis. (In Europe, there would be a second company, just as large, based in Sydney).

The advantage of serving two cities is the financial one resulting from a large audience. However, this comes at a price for the profession, because the company is obliged to deliver more performances than any other comparable company in the world to my knowledge.

The result is long seasons of the same program which tends to push a lot of dancers to stop before they reach their full potential. In Europe, a lot of dancers change companies; in Australia they retire young. Years of effort are then prematurely lost, making it difficult to hire mature dancers.

Second, there are two other ballet companies (West Australian Ballet and Queensland Ballet). While considered major organisations in Australia, these are comparable in size to small European companies which traditionally have the main task of backing the opera in small and medium sized theatres with about 16 to 18 dancers. These include companies in cities like Gratz in Austria, or Oldenburg and Münchenglatbach in Germany. In size, they are definitely less important than companies in cities like Wiesbaden, Essen, Hanover, Geneva, Zurich, Mühlhausen, or Marseilles.

In contemporary dance, Graham Murphy’s Sydney Dance Company is a typical choreographer’s company with 16 dancers. However, I believe it is pushed by commercial necessity to perform unduly long seasons of the same program.

In addition, there are the small contemporary companies with between seven and ten dancers. These include Dance North, Leigh Warren and Dancers, Chunky Move, and Expressions. At present there is an explosion all over the world of this kind of choreographic theatre. For example Switzerland with a population of only 6 million has 48 such companies - they have become the norm rather than the exception.

Apart from these, Australia has Bangarra. Its fusion of aboriginal and western dance styles is unique in the world, but the number of dancers it employs remains small.

Together, these companies can only provide professional employment for approximately 130 dancers.

With Australia’s population of 18 million inhabitants, one of the first consequences of this is that we have few choreographers as, in the great majority of cases, to be able to choreograph one has to be able to dance reasonably well. Choreographers cannot be created simply through a system of grants.

Music, by contrast, offers many more opportunities. For example there are easily 150 positions for professional classical musicians in Brisbane alone.

A second problem confronting dance in Australia is that the audience is not very large.

This situation is not always helped by the presentation of works conceived with the taste of critics rather than audiences in mind, or by lacklustre performances of traditional ballets which only serve to confirm the worst fear of a great part of the Australian male population, that ballet is an effeminate art.

Third, dance in Australia has now become an academic discipline. While it is encouraging to see the art form receive this recognition, academic institutions by definition are conservative, tending to support what is established, rather than anticipating or leading the next movement.

A fourth issue that confronts dance is that well meaning art organisations sometimes appear to think that the arts can be helped by simply organising the ‘fireworks’ of a festival. While such celebrations do bring work for a while, they are not a real investment in the arts as it needs years of clear artistic direction to get a top orchestra, theatre or ballet company.

The fifth problem is to find good dancers, especially males.

It requires seven years to learn how to dance, and a minimum of three years on stage to start to be a good soloist, provided there is talent and a nurturing environment. In Australia, the principal dance training organisation is the Australian Ballet School. It is a good school which to date has had the advantage of attracting the most talented bodies in the country. It is, however, almost the only source of professional dancers for The Australian Ballet, West Australian Ballet, Queensland Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, and the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

Rarely do mature dancers from Australian companies change company, and some of the best private schools encourage their most talented pupils to go to Europe.

Universities in Australia concentrate on contemporary dance which means that their graduates are rarely in a position to find work in companies which require a high level of classical training.

The nett result of these problems is that I find myself as the head of a major ballet company with little funding, few dancers, a relatively small audience, no possibility of inviting foreign dancers to join the Company for any length of time, a group of critics who stress the need for Australian product, but few good Australian choreographers.

In these circumstances, I see three clear goals.

The primary goal is to develop a strong public following without alienating those who already support us. Such a public ultimately will trust the company even with programs they are not familiar with.

The key is to provide annually a wide range of programs with appeal to many different public tastes, both in Brisbane and in regional centres.

For a large part of the audience, for instance, it is the brilliance of the dancing and convincing acting which are the most important. For others, different aspects of performance are important. For example the International Gala appeals through opening a window on the rest of the dance world; vis-à-vis programs enable audiences to get very close to the dancers and to further develop their understanding of dance; the Australian choreographer’s program enables audiences to appreciate the varied skills of the Company and to see the dancers working in unfamiliar but exciting and different ways.

The second goal is to ensure the best quality dancing, for without good dancing there cannot be any serious success.

As dancers in Australia are generally recruited straight out of schools, there is no other means of doing this than through coaching and teaching them well, and providing them with challenges, diversity of roles, and a manageable and appropriate range of performance opportunities.

Teaching, training, and giving the right role at the right time are essential and consequently it takes many years to produce a professional dance artist.

The third goal is the development of choreographers.

I hope to find potential choreographers within the company and to help them with the technical aspects of this craft. Further, the Professional Year will become progressively a two year course, the second part of the second year being increasingly oriented towards choreography and creation. This will give us a core of young dancers who can act as a tool for young choreographers and experimental works.

In addition, once the company has a large enough repertoire of successful works to give us a little breathing space financially, I would like to be able to work on choreography that interests me. In other words, I would like to experiment myself.

Further down the line it would be nice to be able to import choreography from Europe.