25 January 2010
By Isabel Dunstan
filed under Coppélia, Peggy
Swanilda, the leading lady in the fairytale favourite Coppélia, is traditionally a breakthrough role for a dancer on the rise. She’s fierce, funny, and does ‘the robot’ pretty convincingly. When Swanilda’s fiancé Franz falls in love with a mysterious dancing doll, she doesn’t let him off lightly. Behind closed doors, Swanilda stealthily changes places with the doll and, with stiff, jerky movements, fools everyone. Coppélia was Dame Peggy van Praagh’s all-time favourite ballet and in The Australian Ballet’s 1990 souvenir programme, she explained where her love of performing Swanilda began.
“Ever since the early forties, Coppélia seems to have been a part of my life. I did not expect to dance Swanilda when I first joined the Sadler’s Wells (now Royal) Ballet in 1941. I was not even the understudy for this role. In June 1942, London was subjected to severe air raids. One of the company’s ballerinas, Mary Honer, was at the Café de Paris when it received a direct hit. She was lucky to escape serious injury but suffered severe shock and was unable to dance for several weeks.
“Dame Ninette de Valois, the company’s artistic director, telephoned to inform me that I was to dance Swanilda in Oxford in four days’ time and that I should come immediately to rehearse the role. Robert Helpmann, who was to partner me as Franz, could attend but one rehearsal of the pas de deux. The rest of the company was on tour and I was unable to rehearse with them. So on an evening in June 1942 it was a very nervous Swanilda that took the stage. Later I grew to enjoy the role which I danced many times before I left the company in 1946 to become Ballet Mistress of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet.”
The Australian Ballet will perform Coppélia in Melbourne and Sydney. Subscription packages are still available in both cities
Image: Peggy van Praagh as Swanilda in Coppelia
2 November 2009
By Jessica Thomson
filed under Flashback, Peggy
In the twilight years of the Borovansky Ballet, Artistic Director Peggy van Praagh was keen to add a touch of Australiana to the repertoire. Something lighthearted and humorous was what she had in mind, a la Ballets Russes crowdpleasers Le Beau Danube and Gaite Parisienne, so loved by Australian audiences. Australia, Dame Peggy decided, needed a Gaite Parisienne of its own.
The proposed ballet was Melbourne Cup – a comic account of the very first running of the famous horse race, won by ‘Archer’ in 1861, to celebrate its centenary. But Melbourne Cup was not to be a Borovansky ballet; the company dissolved and plans for the bold new project went with it. Van Praagh got her wish soon enough, however, when The Australian Ballet was born in 1962, with Dame Peggy at the helm.
Choreographed by Rex Reid, Melbourne Cup was the fledgling company’s very first commission and took pride of place in its debut season. The colourful one-act ballet premiered not, funnily enough, in Melbourne, but in Sydney on 16 November, 1962. According to Geoffrey Hutton, theatre critic for The Age at the time, the performance “brought the house down”. Melbourne Cup, his review went on, “has style and humor (sic); the decor is lively and so is the music … with a little attention it can be made into a natural finishing ballet.”
As high-spirited and comical as the finished product might have been, efforts to evoke 1860s Melbourne were taken seriously by the ballet’s collaborators. The designer responsible for enlivening the decor was Ann Church. Her designs, in the words of Rex Reid, captured “the rawness and romance of the event” – in three scenes: the bar (naturally) of the Theatre Royal on Cup Eve, the ballroom of a well-to-do Melbourne home (of the period, of course), and last but not least, Flemington Racecourse. Read the rest of this entry »
16 September 2009
By Isabel Dunstan
filed under 2010, Peggy
With cane in hand, and a fiercely stubborn air, Dame Peggy van Praagh perfectly fit the dance teacher cliché. Peggy was The Australian Ballet’s founding Artistic Director, not only bringing success to the company, but invigorating Australian ballet, bringing the country’s dance up to an international standard. If you were a young dancer who caught Peggy’s eye there were great things in store for you. David McAllister, current Artistic Director, and Colin Peasley, the longest-serving employee at The Australian Ballet, were two boys – dancing decades apart – whom Peggy gave a real chance.
Peggy van Praagh was retired by the time David McAllister joined the company, but she returned to coach classes for the 1982 staging of Giselle for the regional touring arm, The Dancers Company. With little hesitation Peggy selected the wide-eyed David to play the peasant pas de deux. He was only in his second year. Two years later, David had reached grand new heights and was performing Franz in her interpretation of Coppélia. Peggy once pulled David aside and asked, “Do you know the dancer Graeme Murphy?” David replied that he had. “You remind me of him.” David was thrilled to be compared to the performer. Popping David’s quickly inflating ego Peggy declared: “You poke your neck forward like he does”. David continued to rise, and rise, throughout the company and now looks back on his experiences with Peggy fondly. He knows it was her doggedness and attention to detail that set the high standards of The Australian Ballet in the early days. “She was controversial in some ways but she really spoke her mind. She told you exactly what she thought,” David remembers. “She tended to call a spade a spade.” Read the rest of this entry »
