And for a longer look at that faultless technique … here’s Lucinda dancing the La Favorita pas de deux.

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The idea was that Edward Coutts Davidson wanted to recreate his Wonderland fashion spread from the April issue of Harper’s. To say yes would be a huge undertaking, but after working with Edward and the team at the end of last year we decided to break with tradition and take a bit of a gamble.

Twenty-six of our gorgeous dancers along with Dana Stephensen and Amy Harris (who were not performing but were our silverly-clad representatives at the media call) traipsed up St Kilda Road to the grounds of Government House. While those performing rehearsed in the ballroom, carefully plotting how best to avoid a grand battement in Premier John Brumby’s lap, Dana and Amy donned their Roger Kirk-designed costumes from The Silver Rose, and oh how we laughed when the photographers begged to know “Ladies! Who are you dressed by today?”

The girls made a pact to remain en pointe for the entire shoot in front of a swarm of fashion photographers when they caught a glimpse of the ridiculous height of the models resplendent in heels that could kill.

At the media call the ballet theme worked beautifully with the Wonderland theme as a Collette Dinnigan blue tulle tutu with a crystal studded bodice was modelled by a lass sprouting pink fairy floss hair and rabbit ears. She was coupled with a glamorous Cinderella-inspired Willow gown, worn for the very first time by Principal Artist Danielle Rowe in the Harpers spread featuring The Australian Ballet.

As the black fancy cars began to roll into the grounds and the legs and the heels and the hair and the shimmery shiny people made their way up the stairs to the gardens of Government House to guzzle champagne, boiled lollies and gingerbread ladies clad in tutus, my nervousness was compounded by a last-minute request by David McAllister to be his plus one. Thank goodness for Brooke Lockett’s heels, her brilliant two minute make-up application and Rohan Furnell’s cologne and pep talk, I somehow managed not to shame our Artistic Director in the front row as we were wedged between Megan Gale and the Lord Mayor Robert Doyle.

There was no need to fear: it was a goosebump moment that everyone who took part in should be incredibly proud of. The Australian Ballet showcased Melbourne beautifully on the international stage as Dinnigan and Willow were joined on the runway by stunning designs from Michelle Jank, Sass & Bide, Dion Lee, Tina Kalivas, Akira and Romance Was Born … and Premier Brumby walked away without a hint of bruising.

Photographs by Kitty Walker

Who is your all time favourite choreographer, and why?
All the Australian ones I’ve worked with, of course! I love Cranko and Macmillan’s works. I also love Jiří Kylián’s works because they are so musical; he portrays emotion without narrative perfectly. He is also so clever with comedy, which is always so hard to get right.

What’s your favourite costume to wear on stage?
I like nighties, and they appear in so many ballets. Odette in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake starts in a beautiful one; it’s so flattering and soft. In Graeme’s Nutcracker – The Story of Clara, Clara wears a simple night dress, and the kimono she wears for just a moment in the third act is exquisite. I like to dance in them because I feel comfortable and the fabric floats so elegantly. The costume department has made me so many exceptional costumes – the incredible detail and volume of what is created for the company is completely overwhelming. In The Silver Rose as the Marschallin I wear this dress which is like a shimmering golden Klimt painting. The costumes are so important to how I feel on the stage and I am so lucky that they are all so special.   

What has been your favourite pas de deux during your time with the company?
There have been so many it’s impossible to pick! I think what makes a pas de deux really special is the trust, skill, musicality and relationship that the partners share. A special mention for Kylián’s Forgotten Land, Petit Mort and Return to a Strange land.  Also, the pas de deuxs in Madame Butterfly, Raymonda, Manon, Swan Lake, Giselle and Romeo and Juliet are completely fulfilling and danced with a lot of emotion. In the more classical style, the technical challenge of The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote and The Nutcracker can be very rewarding. I am looking forward to performing the Marschallin in The Silver Rose; the duets in this ballet are so full of passion and drama.

If you could live in any other city in the world, where would it be and why?
There are many cities I would like to visit. Prague (because I’ve always wanted to go) St Petersberg (for obvious ballet history reasons), Rio de Janeiro (because it would be fun), Buenos Aires (because I have a friend there) and there are ones which I would love to go back to: Paris (because it’s so chic), New York (for the buzz), and Rome (because there is so much more to see) but for now I’m really happy living here.

The Australian Ballet performs The Silver Rose in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide

Image: Jacob Sofer, Rachel Rawlins and Matthew Donnelly in rehearsal for The Silver Rose. Photography James Braund

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In just four days the curtain will rise on The Silver Rose. With an all-Australian creative team, Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon took this quintessentially European story and tailored it for the ballet stage. We chatted to the master choreographers about how this extraordinarily lavish ballet got off the ground, and found its way home.

Where did the idea for The Silver Rose come from and was it a work you had been thinking about for a while?
Graeme: It’s something that had been in our minds for some time. Der Rosenkavalier was a particular favourite; Janet and I have always loved it musically. We loved the roles, and I have a thing for themes about age, love, loss, moving on and being left.

Ivan Liska, [director of the Bavarian State Ballet] asked us in 2004 to do a work. He wanted something for the family for the Christmas premiere season and The Silver Rose surfaced. Ironically Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier had premiered in the same theatre in Munich. That was something that linked the ballet and the opera.

Janet: It was very short notice. We didn’t think we would be able to do it because we were working on Hua Mulan, Graeme had just finished choreographing Grand, and we’d just taken Swan Lake to London with The Australian Ballet.

What was it about the characters that appealed to you in a ballet context?
Graeme: They’re all large – they all read big. You have the mature, pensive, distraught, self-obsessed, slightly older Marschallin; and by contrast the total innocence of the fresh young flower [Sophie] and the puppy-love of adolescent youth [Octavian], which is really nice for a dance character. Then there’s the Baron who is a sympathetic buffoon, whose love is really based around desire, sex and lust. You just knew the actions for these incredibly intricate relationships could be explored in solos, duos and quartets.

Janet: And underneath those four principals there are the soloists (who are the paparazzi), and the entourage of hair dresser, make-up artist and couturier introduce interesting subplots as well.

How much character direction do you give the dancers?
Graeme: A lot. Janet is fabulous about getting to the essence of the character, always within the realm of staying true to the choreography. Dancers need that, and so rarely get it.

Janet: There are so many layers to being a person in a ballet on stage. It’s very easy to fall back on cliché – ‘this is the gesture you’d do if you’re sad or happy’, but it has to be natural and as though you are doing it for the first time. We throw things at them, give them options, and they find ways within themselves. The ultimate prize is if they give something back. We don’t want a version of what we’ve said; we want them to open up.

Graeme: Much of The Silver Rose verges on slapstick. It’s a great opportunity to introduce comedy, a much-maligned and often unused aspect of dance. Comedy used to be a bigger part of ballet than it is now. And it’s quite nice in a work like this to have the comic-tragic aspect. Janet and I have always had this theory that if the rehearsal room is filled with laughter and hard work you avoid injuries, pitfalls, depression, insecurities. And you get the full range of the performers’ artistry.

Did you approach the Strauss estate about using his music?
Janet: Ivan did approach the estate and they said there was no way we could use the music.
Graeme: We knew the estate would never allow us to use the music in any way. The Strauss family is notoriously protective of their heritage, but I had absolutely no regrets in not using it. The whole work is such a perfect opera that to fiddle with it in any way would have been absolutely wrong. The best thing that ever happened was that I said, “I think Carl Vine could do it” and because all we were keeping was the original scenario from the von Hofmannsthal story it was important to find a score that was totally different, totally refreshing. Carl was so generous; he gave us his complete body of work and said he would help find the narrative within his compositions.

How and when did designer Roger Kirk come on board?
Graeme: That was interesting, because I was bereft of Kristian Fredrikson. We were in Munich when Kristian died (2005). He hadn’t been available because he was doing The Sleeping Beauty. He was doing a lot and he wasn’t that well. But Roger had been doing such beautiful things and I was very aware of him. It was ironic and wonderful because I had a great need to find somebody else to do the grand works, and people with that knowledge are so rare – people who can give you the full design, décor and costume. We’d worked together in the ‘80s then went our separate ways. This was beautiful because it brought us back together. It was like finding an old friend. And I feel at last I have found a soul mate.

Did your choreography for The Silver Rose allow for the European style?
Graeme: I don’t think so. I was pretty fresh out of Swan Lake and was still doing work with Sydney Dance Company so it was that Murphy-esque thing of wedding a certain classical technique and with contemporary aspects, which is incredibly hard to do. A dancer has to be slightly schizoid to get both styles sitting comfortably. The Bavarian State Ballet is a big company, with a lot of former Eastern Bloc dancers, so the standard is quite extraordinary. But we are just amazed working here with The Australian Ballet. They’ve done so many Murphy-type works, things other companies and dancers find so difficult, which they’ve just nailed.
Janet: We always said The Australian Ballet would do this work beautifully, and in a way we feel it’s come home.

This is an excerpt from The Silver Rose programme by Jane Albert. Jane Albert was deputy arts editor of The Australian newspaper and is a freelance writer.

The Silver Rose opens on Friday 26 February.

Image: Janet Vernon and Graeme Murphy. Photography Jessica Bialek

Is this the first time you’ve worked with Graeme Murphy?
No, I did a ballet with Graeme for The Australian Ballet called Meander, but that was about 20 years ago. So it had been a while.

What is the background to your involvement in The Silver Rose?
I’d actually just done a production of the opera Der Rosenkavalier for the Wellington Festival a few years earlier, so I was already familiar with the story. Graeme came over and explained that he wanted to set this ballet at the turn of the century, so he already had that sort of image of what he wanted to do. And after a little bit of discussion I threw a few ideas at him, and that’s sort of how it kicked it off.

What was your main inspiration for the set design?
About six months before Graeme approached me to do the ballet, I had been to Hungary and I’d stayed at the Four Seasons Gresham Palace Hotel in Budapest. It was an Art Nouveau palace that had been converted into a hotel. The entrance foyer had this glass roof over it and I went: ‘Wow! This is a fabulous set!’ And so when Graeme said ‘Art Nouveau’, I said, ‘That’s my inspiration!’

The look of the ballet, particularly the first act, seems to be heavily inspired by the work of artist Gustav Klimt. How did that come about?
It’s always really difficult when people ask you how things evolve because things are thrown at you. Graeme might have said, ‘A bit Art Nouveau, a bit Klimt,’ and you just take it, you grab that bit and you run with it! So I used the Klimt in the curtains and in her dress, which was like a dead steal of his painting of the girl in the gold dress. And so then, when the Marschallin gets dressed [in Act 1], that painting is actually recreated on stage.

Are there any particularly tricky costume changes the dancers have to contend with in this ballet?
No. There’s really nothing like we had in Dusty for instance –there were thousands, that poor girl! In The Silver Rose there are a few things that we have to slip over the top, but there are no split-second changes.

Can you tell us a bit about where you sourced the fabrics for the costumes?
Well, when you’re in Europe everything’s mainly ordered from catalogues and books, but we did have one bit of fabric for a coat that came out of Turkey, I think. But then I had to chop that up when I saw what Graeme had choreographed – I had to make it more danceable! But the little panels down the front of Sophie’s ball gown, I had those beaded in India.

What was your main goal for the set design?
What I’ve tried to do is give you this really crisp, white set that will transform easily into the three particular acts. So from this white set, by introducing different [lighting] colours and costume combinations, you’re going to get three different looks out of the one atmosphere.

Can you talk a little about what it was like to work as a part of an all-Australian creative team (choreographer Graeme Murphy, creative associate Janet Vernon and composer Carl Vine) to create a ballet in Europe?
It was an interesting thing that the music was Australian, Graeme was Australian, I was Australian and yet we were doing [a ballet based on the European opera] Der Rosenkavalier in the home of Strauss and giving it another slant.

I think that because we have all worked internationally, I’d like to think that as a creative team we are international players. So it doesn’t really matter if you’re doing it in Sydney, New York, Munich or London, you’re applying your trade to an international standard.

How did you feel when you first saw The Silver Rose performed in Munich?
When you do shows, they get on stage and it all comes together and you go, ‘Oh wow, this is great’, you know? And not every show you do you think it’s really fabulous – I mean, you think you’ve done a good job. But sometimes you get goosebumps and you go, ‘Oh my god, this is really fabulous!’ And I really felt that about The Silver Rose.

The Australian Ballet performs The Silver Rose in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide in 2010

The Silver Rose tells the tale of the Marschallin, a celebrated actress who is facing the passing of time and the fading of her youth. The Marschallin’s lover Octavian finds himself unexpectedly enraptured by Sophie, a younger woman. While watching her lover drift into the arms of another, the Marschallin remains resilient but finds herself in the shadow of young love. Graeme Murphy choreographed the role of the Marschallin on Sherelle Charge for the Bavarian State Ballet. Now Sherelle is teaching principal ballerinas of The Australian Ballet the ways of this complex character.

The Marschallin is a beautiful, strong character. Do you think she might go down as one of those roles dancers dream to perform?
Absolutely. It’s a character that gives the ballerina a chance to delve deeply into her emotional side. What’s so enjoyable for the dancer performing the Marschallin is that she has this dual personality. She shows an external strength but, internally, she’s very fragile. She’s really struggling with her personal life and how she’s aging. It’s an issue you see every day in Hollywood, with women filling their face full of Botox and trying to do everything to stop themselves from getting old. Time is something that affects the Marschallin deeply, and not just physically. She’s had a history of many men and she’s realising this is finishing. It’s not her personal look that’s changing – it’s her whole life.

When the Marschallin is on stage, you get a real sense of her past. What kind of history did you create for her?
I think you craft a history for every role you perform on stage. But in The Silver Rose you really have the chance to see that she has a story to tell. In the initial scene she is having a nightmare about her past lovers. You can see that she was always very dependent on her youth and beauty.

What are the most important aspects of this character that you’ve tried to pass on to the dancers?
What I’m really trying to get across to them is that she needs to show the two sides to her personality: her vulnerability and her strength. And she changes between the two qualities very quickly. She appears very exuberant when the photographers and the paparazzi are around, but she’s incredibly reserved and vulnerable when she’s alone in her bedroom. It’s a matter of finding a balance between the two, and knowing when to be withdrawn or not. Even when she’s with Octavian, she feels she has to put on a show for him. At the end of the first act she tells Octavian to go, and to present the rose. And that’s an interesting point because it’s when she begins to treat her true love just like everybody else.

Graeme Murphy is very attracted to the themes The Silver Rose explores: age, time, love and loss. Do you find yourself attracted to these themes too?
Well, when I first performed The Silver Rose I was asked by a journalist whether the themes of time and ageing were a personal issue. At the time I said no, but the minute I put the red wig and make-up on, I slipped into the role very quickly.  As a dancer you feel eternally young. You’re surrounded by beauty and young dancers. When you’re performing this role, you don’t take it personally – you just become her on stage.

The Australian Ballet performs The Silver Rose in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide in 2010

Image: Bavarian State Ballet. Photography Wilfried Hoesl