The word ‘burlesque’ originally referred to a certain type of vaudevillian stage show, but these days the word is most often used to describe a form of striptease dance.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Uninhibited, exotic and spontaneous, Josephine Baker (1906-1975) swept through the landscape of 20th century dance like a wild, booty-shaking tornado. From the moment she arrived in Paris in 1925, she electrified French audiences with her signature piece — the jaw dropping ‘Banana Dance‘, in which she wore little else except for a skirt made out of bananas.

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.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Australian Ballet’s 2009 tribute to Sergei Diaghilev, Firebird and Other Legends, included Mikhail Fokine’s Petrouchka which premiered in Paris on 13 June 1911 with Nijinsky in the role of the fairground puppet who loses his heart to the empty-headed ballerina doll and is killed by the jealous blackamoor.

With Igor Stravinksy’s astonishing music and Alexandre Benois’ designs – the setting is Admiralty Square in St Petersburg during the Butter Week, a riotous holiday time before the strict 40 days of Lent – the ballet quickly established itself as a masterpiece.  Colonel de Basil’s companies brought Petrouchka to Australia in 1936, 1938 and 1940 with such brilliant stars as Igor Yousskevitch and Yurek Shabelevsky in the title role and Helene Kirsova and Irina Baronova as the doll.  Edouard Borovansky, who had stayed in Australia after the 1938-39 tour and formed the Borovansky Ballet, produced it in 1951 with designs by William Constable and Miro Zloch and Peggy Sager as the puppet and the doll. Read the rest of this entry »

In the almost 50 years The Australian Ballet has been rehearsing, touring and performing, there’s invariably been a photographer on the sidelines.

Filed away in the archives of The Australian Ballet and beyond are tens of thousands of images, taken in dressing rooms, rehearsal studios, theatres, and on tour ­– backdrops are as magnificent as the Great Wall of China, as humble as the Ballet’s first home, a disused ladies college, and as unexpected as the ocean floor of Coogee Beach.

As our 50th birthday in 2012 draws closer, we’ll be sharing some of the best images on Behind Ballet, many of which have never been published before.

The question is, what’s your favourite image of The Australian Ballet? Leave a comment below!

Image:  Artists of The Australian Ballet in The Lady and the Fool, 1962. Photography by Darryl Smythe.

On 25 October 1934 an exceptionally talented but troubled woman stepped onto the platform at Sydney’s Central Railway Station. It was unusually cold that month for a city on the fringe of summer and Olga Spessivtseva felt the chill of a southerly wind bite into her fragile body. The tiny ballerina told the press on her arrival in the city: “I am not much weight, eh?”

She wore a severely cut wool flannel suit and around her shoulders a fox stole, complete with bushy tail, head, and paws. Waiting on the platform was the photographer Sam Hood who was then working for the Labor Daily. He coaxed a small smile from the Russian star.

Spessivtseva was visiting Australia as the principal ballerina of the Dandre-Levitoff Russian Ballet, formed by Victor Dandre (the de facto husband of Anna Pavlova) and the impresario Alexander Levitoff. The two men had assembled a troupe of 36 dancers for a tour of South Africa, followed by performances in South-East Asia, and Australia where they performed in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne before a final season in Perth, January 1935. Read the rest of this entry »

Figure skaters carve pirouettes into a frozen-over swan lake and Catherine Littlefield, dressed in mittens, a fur coat, and blanket, stands by. She’s watching intently and scribbling notes in preparation for her production of ballet-infused ice skating, It Happens on Ice.

Littlefield had been pushing ballet’s boundaries for years, but her two-act It Happens on Ice was out of the ordinary for pointe shoe purists in 1940.  After staging The Sleeping Beauty in 1937 – complete with 100 dancers and 85 musicians – she put dancers on bicycles in American Jubilee and her droll satire Ladies’ Better Dresses poked fun at America’s fashion industry.

It Happens on Ice was a commercial project for Littlefield while she took a hiatus from choreographing for American ballet companies. However, she applied the same enthusiasm to the winter spectacular as she did to her previous works. Littlefield was initially nervous about replacing dancers’ pointe shoes with ice skates in her staging of Swan Lake in the first act, and with good reason, too. She quickly realised that the combination of basic ballet steps and slippery ice could turn the dancers into a pile of fractures, dislocations and torn ligaments. Ballet positions would be lost in the whip-fast spins or, worse, enforcing the basic port de bras on an ice dancer mid-air would result in a crash landing. Littlefield made certain her dancers were conscious of elegant ballet lines, group composition, and able to adapt their spins into ballet turns and their jumps into long ballet leaps.

The second act in It Happens On Ice captured Littlefield’s knack for comedy. So What Goes, a riotous send-up about a day on the old skating pond, featured naughty boys tripping up sunny pig-tailed girls, gliding governesses and young lovers drawing a perfect figure eight. 

In his article about It Happens on Ice, Walter Terry of the New York Herald Tribune commented: “You will be convinced, I think, that Catherine Littlefield is becoming a theatre figure of the first rank, a girl who is leaving her mark in the revue, in the ballet, and on ice.” And he was right. Catherine Littlefield went on to become a pioneering force in American ballet, ice dancing, and was one of the first inductees into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance.

Image: Betty Aikinson makes a turn during the butterfly appearing in It Happens on Ice at the Radio City’s Center Theater, circa 1941

Ruth St Denis is my new everything-icon. She was a true bohemian, a pioneer in modern dance whose approach lay somewhere between the Grecian fluidity of Isadora Duncan, the stylised intensity of Martha Graham and the improvisational flounces of Kate Bush. St Denis was the first solo dancer to introduce a style and aesthetic inspired by Egyptian, East Asian and Indian rituals to an unsuspecting Western audience. Her dances embody visions inspired by figures of divinity. Detractors may argue about the idea of a white woman appropriating sacred dances from the east, but St Denis never lay claims to authenticity. The same argument can be applied today when we look at how pop music and fashion adopt religious iconography. Read the rest of this entry »

Born on a sheep station in South Australia in 1909, Sir Robert Helpmann was one of Australia’s most legendary performers. He was an actor, a choreographer, and the director of plays, operas and musicals, but he was a dancer first and foremost.

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