Future direction of Queensland Ballet.

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.