“These are sort of crazy, possessed birds,” milliner Richard Nylon explains as he finishes work on his elaborate headpieces for the production. “They don’t cruise around on a mystic lake waiting for their prince to come along. They’re more fierce than that.”

Nylon’s creations – you couldn’t call them hats – are famously fierce too. Each piece reflects the imagination and innovation that have helped established him as one of Australia’s most talented milliners.

Developed in association with The Australian Ballet and premiering at the Melbourne Festival in October, Aviary was inspired by French composer Olivier Messiaen’s musical explorations of birdsong in his Catalogue d’oiseaux (1958). It’s a sumptuous celebration of spectacle and display, incorporating the skills of a team of artists, including Toni Maticevski (costume design) Gavin Brown (curtain design) and Matthew Bird (nest design).

And shining forth dazzlingly from amongst this bowerbird’s nest of talent are Nylon’s spellbinding headpieces.

The millinery designs for Aviary reflect each act’s distinct personality. “Act 1 probably alludes the most to classical ballet,” Nylon says, referring to the symmetrical, black-and-white palette that is distantly reminiscent of Swan Lake. “Yeah, it’s sort of like Baron von Rothbart on steroids, some of it,” he says with a laugh.

The black-and-white colour scheme is interspersed with silver, an inspiration Nylon drew directly from the bowerbird’s nest. “There’s mirrors on the headpieces, because they like shiny things,” he says. “Also, it’s about vanity and preening.”

The second act is built around the persona of the flamboyant dandy. For these pieces, Nylon creates elaborate moustaches and beards using feathers. “I just think it’s fun, and it’s gotta be funny as well,” he says. “There’s parts of this ballet that are actually quite humorous.”

In the final act, Nylon interweaves his own characteristic creative accents into a design based on the traditional headpieces worn by Papua New Guinean tribesmen. Nylon’s versions are imbued with such life you almost believe they could flap away at the end of the show.

These ideas — discipline and routine — are at the core of The Creative Habit. This is an excellent, practical handbook written for artists working in all creative fields, but because it draws so closely on the world Tharp knows best, dancers in particular will get a lot out of it.

Using examples from her experience as a dancer and choreographer across stage and film, she imparts the lessons she’s learned during her 45-year career. As the title suggests, Tharp’s secret to being a successful working artist is to make creativity a habit.

Tharp has an impressive ability to get her ideas across to a broad audience. She is an articulate writer, with an ability to make intelligent, vivid connections between ideas. With Tharp, everything relates back to dance. And dance, of course, relates to everything.

At the end of every chapter, there’s a section called ‘Exercises’, but they’re presented in such a way that they also work as reflective asides. There is no pressure to do this book as a “course” of any kind. Rather, the exercises get you thinking about your own practice. There are some tips for getting yourself out of creative ruts and soldiering on through both success and failure, and through it all Tharp’s smart and sharp attitude shines through.

Full of anecdotes — there is one whole section describing how much Tharp learned during the development and staging of her Billy Joel ballet, Movin’ Out — and teeming with practical advice, The Creative Habit is a highly readable book. Whether you’re in a creative rut, or you’re just interested to peek inside the mind of one of America’s greatest choreographers, this book is for you.

The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life
By Twyla Tharp
Simon and Schuster

The link between burlesque and ballet today isn’t immediately obvious, but it can be agreed that both art forms pursue beauty of form and movement. However, ballet and burlesque also actually share a history – most interestingly in that many of the most well-known burlesque dancers from the 1860s onwards started out as classically trained ballet dancers themselves.

In Victorian England, being a ballet dancer was not considered a proper vocation for a woman. The lowly status of the average ballet dancer in society, combined with the other very real dangers of being a dancer in 19th century England and Europe – the illness, the poverty and the risk of tutus catching on fire – made the profession quite unappealing. So it’s not surprising that some turned their highly trained classical skills to other more lucrative things.

Lydia Thompson was one of the first to move from ballet into the bawdier world of burlesque. Thompson had been a part of the corps de ballet at Her Majesty’s Theatre, but when she took her vaudeville show British Blondes to America in the 1860s, she was an instant hit.

Burlesque dancers were also called ‘fan dancers’. Like the famous Sally Rand, these dancers incorporated fans, as well as some of the other more graceful and feminine movements of ballet, into their routines.

Today’s burlesque performers also still incorporate dance into their routines. Poster girl of the ‘new burlesque’, Dita von Teese, endured rigorous classical ballet training until she was a teenager, just like many of the early burlesque performers. Her performances regularly feature her dancing en pointe.

“Ballet is my favorite (form of dance),” von Teese has said. “I’m just a big fan of the beauty of ballet, and the fact that it’s so feminine. There isn’t one ugly move in ballet. If you snap a picture anywhere you’re going to have perfect body lines; really feminine, beautiful body shapes.”

Closer to home, when the ‘Spanish’ dancer Lola Montez toured Australia during the 1850s gold rush, she made a huge impression. Vaudeville and burlesque dancers such as Montez familiarised local audiences with the performing arts, and paved the way for ballet’s immense popularity in the early 20^th century.

Baker was African-American, born in St Louis, Missouri. She was 16 when she started performing on the streets of her hometown, but moved to New York a few years later to become a chorus girl on Broadway. In October 1925 she performed in La Revue nègre at the Théatre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. With her partner Joe Alex, she danced a pas de deux called Danse Sauvage. Josephine Baker was an instant hit.

Contemporary critic Pierre de Régnier described watching her perform the Danse Sauvage:

“She is in constant motion, her body writhing like a snake or more precisely like a dipping saxophone. Music seems to pour from her body. She grimaces, crosses her eyes, wiggles disjointedly, does a split and finally crawls off the stage stiff-legged, her rump higher than her head, like a young giraffe.”

The Théatre des Champs-Élysées had been the scene of the famous 1913 premiere of the Rite of Spring. But interestingly, a review in Vogue from 1925 stated that “the Negro … dances better than Nijinsky”.

A few months later, Baker had a show at the Folies Bergère and she was also taking ballet classes with Balanchine. She had swiftly become one of France’s most famous, important and beloved performers.

Writer Philip M Ward explains how her improvisations transgressed the conventions of choreographed dance. “Where European dancers showed the front, presenting the body as a unified line, Baker contrived to move different parts of her body to different rhythms,” he says. “Most shocking to dance purists, she used her backside, shaking it, as one of her biographers says, as though it were an instrument.”

Fortunately, many of her routines have been archived and Baker’s remarkable style can still be admired. With movements as syncopated and frenzied as wild fire, Josephine Baker was always in control.

Hepburn’s approach to fashion reflected her Funny Face character’s views about dance; it, too, was an expression and a release. And, fittingly, Hepburn’s style in turn relied on dance for inspiration. By popularising the cigarette pants and ballet flats she had simply felt comfortable in all her life, she influenced generations of women and made an indelible mark on the fashion world.

Hepburn started her career as a dancer, training in London with Marie Rambert after World War II. She went on, of course, to find fame as an actress and a humanitarian, but she retained a dancer’s poise, posture and grace her whole life.

While her collaboration with Hubert de Givenchy is legendary – in Hepburn, he found a muse for his cinched waists and full skirts – she is also remembered for the black Capri pants and Salvatore Ferragamo ballet flats made famous in Funny Face. These emphasised her dancer’s physique, and sent women the world over into a terpsichorean-style frenzy they still haven’t recovered from. (Just witness the enduring popularity of ballet flats.)

With her vivid style and incomparable elegance, Audrey Hepburn truly is the patron style saint of ballerinas.

The Bobby Dazzler! exhibition, currently showing at the Arts Centre, marks the centenary of Helpmann’s birth. Wandering through the rich and varied items on display you get a great sense of the dancer as a man, the man as a dancer. Photos, posters, theatre programmes, costumes and films paint a portrait of a brilliant and agile performer.

Helpmann was a student of Anna Pavlova and Ninette de Valois and starred in many films, including 1948’s The Red Shoes. He partnered Margot Fonteyn, and had a great friendship with Katharine Hepburn. The exhibition includes a hilarious photo of Hepburn and Helpmann at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane, on their 1955 Old Vic tour to Australia, both smiling cheesily and cuddling koalas.

Another highlight is the lyrebird mask worn in The Display, the 1964 ballet Helpmann choreographed for The Australian Ballet. Look also for an action figure of him as the Child Catcher in the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, alongside the actual coat he wore in the film.

The hour I spent there was crowded, with people drawn in by the costumes and especially by the 1990 film by Don Featherstone. It may be worth coming to the exhibition to see this illuminating 54-minute documentary alone. Bobby Dazzler! is an unmissable exhibition for ballet fans.

At the Arts Centre Gallery 1 until 6 June

Kathleen Gorham and Barry Kitcher in The Display - photographer unknown