Nelle said:

During the intermission of a performance of Swan lake at the Sydney Opera House my now husband proposed to me and very shortly after our beautiful daughter was concieved in the Botanic Gardens. I named my daughter Odette after that unforgettable night and the beauty and grace of the swan princess.

Alice said:

My favourite moment is Odette’s transition in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake. Just changed out of her wedding dress, Odette walks up behind the flirting Siegfried and the Baroness, and pushes them apart with this look of utter horror consuming her face. Madeleine Eastoe does the most convincing impression of a girl who has gone from innocent, ecstatic and in love with her new husband, to a confused, flirtatious, wild spirit. The whole next scene is both hilarious and scary, as the audience sees Odette kiss a random wedding guest and dance flirtatiously with the guests, occasionally giving Siegfried and the Baroness a wild glare. The chaotic sequence comes abruptly to a halt when Odette walks backwards into Siegfried, and they begin a stunning pas de deux of love, pain, confusion and disbelief.

I could write about 10 other moments in the ballet – how cruel of you to ask for just one!

Michele Bayly-Jones said:

My Mother and I always attended the ballet together and we saw Murphy’s Swan Lake in Adelaide and Sydney. My favourite Swan Lake moment and memory is when we sat together in the Sydney Opera House watching Swan Lake as our outing to celebrate her wellness after cancer. My all time favourite moment in the ballet is the sublime blackness of the frozen lake – the beauty and drama took my breath away. Unfortunately that was the last Australian Ballet we saw together as she succumbed to her illness in the new year, and now my daughter and I attend the ballet in Adelaide each year and we have many happy moments at the Ballet.

hila said:

I think my absolute favourite Swan Lake moment would have to be Bourne’s all-male swans flocking on stage together in one huge sweep. In the theatre I saw it, I was quite close to the dancers on stage, and I could literally see the sweat dripping off their bodies. It was such an unusual and absorbing moment, because everyone who is familiar with Swan Lake would be used to a delicate flocking of feminine dancers. Instead, the audience and I received what felt and looked like a huge sweep of masculine energy. I literally heard a few women next to me gasp, although there could have been other reasons for this gasping, besides the beauty of the dancing

Clare said:

I was reared on a diet of traditional classical ballet, all tutus and pointe shoes. When I was in highschool a production of the Mats Ek toured to Perth (I can’t remember the company that was performing). These bald swans, waddling about on stage and moving in this loose-limbed, ungainly way, independently of each other, were a revelation to me and my understanding of what ballet could be.

It was such an extraordinarily beautiful work, and since then I have had an especial soft spot for those works that show beauty through awkwardness. Tero Saarinen’s Borrowed Light falls into the same category to me, and I think I hold Borrowed Light and the Ek Swan Lake as my two favourite dance works of all time.

Michelle said:

My favourite Swan Lake moment – it’s a bit hard to describe, but I’ll try. It’s the moment in the Act 3 pas de deux when Odile is trying to seduce the hapless Siegfried. The tempo changes and theatre is filled with the strains of a violin, both seductive and mournful just like the vision we are watching as Odile temps him with her beauty and at the same time holds herself away from him in a long backbend (in most versions anyway). There is something about that moment that the music, the plot and the dance all come together to perfectly portray the moment of Siegfried’s downfall and thus, the destruction and betrayal of his love for Odette. For me, it’s the pivotal moment of the ballet perfectly captured by Tchaikovsky in a glorious musical phrase.

Robyn Davis said:

I recognized the merciless muscular aggression of Matthew Bourne’s swans from an encounter I had walking along a towpath in England years ago when I was met in a face off by a flock of advancing hissing swans that truly terrified me. That Matthew’s dancers could bring that strength and sinister reality to their performance elevated his ballet far beyond the beautifully tragic Swan Lake I had always previously known. It left a real kick in the guts.

Stephanie Steenbuck said:

I’ll never forget watching the Royal Ballet on film with Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes dancing the Act II pas de deux when I was little and wishing beyond anything that one day I would be Odette.

Ross said:

Act 3 of Murphy’s interpretation is pure genius: from the moment Odette makes her ghostly appearance (crashing the triumphant Baroness’s party) – to her graceful, assured circling of the guests, to her ‘stand off’ face to face with the Baroness (just a moment but it is ‘oh! so powerful!’ – to her complete enchantment of the Prince, having an almost a hypnotic control over him.

The contrast of their warm, loving pas de deux (you can see the transformation as Odette moves from mistrusting her cheating lover at the beginning to total unity and belief in their partnership at the end) – to the furious-but-devastated Baroness’s solo – really shows the extremes of the story… you almost feel sorry for old Siegfried being trapped in the middle of these 2 stunning women!

The mood shifts again after Odette and her Prince begin another pas de deux, but the evil Baroness calls in the Sanatorium guards… there is a look of horror in Odette’s face as she thinks the Prince is ‘in on it’, and the Princess vanishes into thin air.

The scene finishes with a rejected Baroness, alone in an empty room with no hint of the party that filled it an hour before.

Al said:

The final act in Matthew Bourne’s production when the lead Swan first emerges from under the bedclothes as though from birth, and stretches to his full glory, graceful, proud and strong. The tenderness with which he embraces the Prince in contrast with the feral, satyr-like, shadowy swan flock who swarm like pecking geese. What an incredibly visceral depiction of madness, imaginative and haunting.

Thank you all for playing and look out for more competitions soon!

Rigos’ recent 2010/2011 Nutcracker ballet is similar to Darren Aronofsky’s psychological reworking of the pristine ballerina heroine in Black Swan (2010) through an exploration of hidden desires. His Nutcracker is a confronting, funny and lewd ballet, expressed through a series of dark and illicit dreams experienced by an adult Clara. Like Black Swan, Rigos’ Nutcracker explores the relationship between innocence and experience, violence and sexuality, reality and fantasy, dreams and nightmares.

Rigos’ ballets are often called ‘postmodern’, which can imply numerous things. One of postmodernism’s most common meanings refers to a critical, subversive and radical interpretation of past stories. Rigos’ Nutcracker is a visual erotic feast featuring nude male dancers bathed in red light, a mascara-smudged Clara playing with her nutcracker doll in her underwear, and vivid simulations of sexual encounters through choreographed dance. Rigos’ adult and sexualised Clara (played by a transsexual dancer) is a subversive reworking of the prepubescent Clara in Tchaikovsky’s ballet. His ballet sheds new light on Clara’s seemingly innocent dream in the original Nutcracker story, which on closer inspection, is filled with violence and unspoken romantic desires hidden beneath childhood play.

Rigos’ Nutcracker is similar to Graeme Murphy’s own postmodern version of The Nutcracker (1992) in which Clara is transformed into a Ballets Russes dancer trapped in Australia by World War II. The playful war that Clara imagines between the toy soldiers and the mice in Tchaikovsky’s classic story is literalised in Murphy’s version as a real historical battle, bringing violence to the forefront.

This critical perspective is evident in other postmodern ballets, such as Matthew Bourne’s and Mats Ek’s respective 1995 and 1987 reworkings of Swan Lake. Unlike the traditional virginal female swans, Bourne’s all-male swans exude a virility that highlights the importance of gender in the creation of ballet narrative. Similarly, Ek’s androgynous bald-headed swans remind us of the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity that we apply to the balletic body. What all of these ballets have in common is that they ask their audience to think critically and re-examine classic stories from a more interrogative perspective. This is one of the ways in which ballet contributes to the critical spirit of debate associated with postmodernism.

As the world waits to see whether or not Natalie Portman will score an Oscar for her portrayal of an obsessive ballerina in Black Swan, we celebrate the scintillating black swans of The Australian Ballet in versions of Swan Lake by Dame Peggy van Praagh, Anne Woolliams and Graeme Murphy.

I have discovered that swans use a lot of glitter. And a very particular sort of glitter at that: very, very fine bright white glitter that sticks to everything and can be found in all sorts of interesting places at the end of the day.

We refurbished Swan Lake recently for the Perth season and although the show is in quite good condition, there’s no getting away from the fact that it has been on tour every year since it was made in 2002. The headdresses are very stylised, with two pieces of thermoplastic shaped to represent a wing and a tail. The girls pin them into their hair either side of their French rolls and originally they were painted with white opalescent paint and finished off with glitter at the base of each piece. It was only when we resprayed one did we realise how brown they were! I guess it’s down to the stage lighting that we had no idea; during the performances they looked beautiful. Close up however the poor swans were looking a little worse for wear, not quite as sparkly as they had been and rather like they had been swimming in a murky pond.

Kate my fearless and trusty assistant had no idea what l was letting her in for when we talked about bringing them up to scratch. For days we were lost in a haze of glitter, spray paint and PVA glue like drag queens at the Mardi Gras. But finally they were done, resprayed, reglittered and packed into their boxes for their journey to Perth.

Ready, as Betty Pounder used to say on opening nights, to “Sparkle, Darlings”.

Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake is available to purchase on DVD from The Australian Ballet Shop

Amber Scott returned from Perth after performing one of the most iconic roles for the ballet stage, Odette in Swan Lake. For Behind Ballet Amber writes about bumps and bruises, sunshine and beaches, and the thrill of performing on opening night.

Week one of rehearsals …

Here we are again: a room full of dancers faced with the task of taking on complex characters, entering into a world of love, betrayal, longing and redemption. Four acts of love scenes, mad scenes, swan scenes and a lot of lung-bursting dancing. I have missed Odette since the overseas seasons where we performed Swan Lake last year. There is something about this character that endlessly fascinates me. Each year as I begin work on the role of Odette I feel like I’m revisiting an old friend, and layers are peeled away to reveal what has been learned since we last met.

Graeme Murphy has given our company a beautiful Swan Lake. There is fantastic material to share with my partner the Prince (Adam Bull) and the nemesis Baroness (Lucinda Dunn) as the three characters tell their stories. There is also a lot of devilishly difficult dancing, partnered and solo work which, no matter how many years you have danced, requires a great deal of stamina and sweaty hours in the studio. This is the stuff that gives you strength and focus on stage. The rehearsals are a wonderful start to the journey. In saying all that, the first few rehearsals sometimes feel like a battlefield as you work out the various grips and holds for the pas de deuxs and trios.

In week one, there have been knees knocked, faces slapped (accidentally of course!), bodies slammed, fingers trod on, knees grazed and, at one point, I even managed to pull Adam over my head to the floor while I was in the splits! It was spectacularly funny and kept Miss Fiona Tonkin laughing for the rest of that rehearsal. After a few more days of sweating our way through the choreography, and going through boxes of bandaids, serenity returns to our lake. The pas de deuxs cease to flap and we start to glide harmoniously with one another.

Week two of rehearsals …

At the end of a two-hour rehearsal I go home with a strangely swollen left cheek and headache ­– this time not due to a pas de deux injury. The next day: fevers and chills, my other cheek is just as swollen and Odette is looking more chipmunk than swan. My doctor sends me off for a mumps blood test. Great. After a few days of sleeping and feeling anxious about the impending trip to Perth I get the all-clear and I am not mumpish. It must be another virus so I spend most of the week in bed, dreaming of Swan Lake.

Week three of rehearsals …

I am back at work and after a few days of getting my legs to feel more like a ballerina’s than Bambi’s, we do our first full-call in the studio. It goes pretty well and feels nice to be with everyone going through the choreography. The next time we dance this in its complete form we’ll be in Perth!

Saturday 17 October

A gaggle of swans, some Hungarians, one Prince, one Baroness and some lovely administration staff board QF 481 and we chase the sunset west across the Nullarbor. Everyone looks forward to a weekend spent in balmy Perth. On Sunday I end up on Cottesloe Beach with some friends. It’s heavenly to feel sand and the salty water on blistered toes, and sunshine warm up our dancers’ ghost-white skin. The Melburnians are easy to spot on this beach!

Monday 19 October

A group of early-birds head off to WAAPA on the No.19 bus to enter a lovely performing arts complex. The bus passes green parks which continue all the way to WAAPA with its own lawns where young artistic folk sprawl between lectures and rehearsals. Some are doing crazy vocal warm-ups, whereas The Australian Ballet dancers are chatting about what we did on the day off and comparing sunburn (Miss Lana Jones!).

Class, rehearsal and physio all go smoothly as we iron out sore stiff body parts after our four-hour flight. I manage to gouge my eye out with a locker door as I’m getting changed to go home so spend the rest of day wandering around the Hay Street Mall, now with band-aids on my face.

I decide to go to the theatre to see the space and get my bearings. The Burswood Casino area is a short train ride out of the CBD and there are a number of performing arts spaces that have recently shown such as acts as The Black Eyed Peas (woo hoo!) I take all the wrong turns and end up in the auditorium of the theatre instead of the dressing room. Oh well, it’s good to see we have a beautiful big stage that’s wider than deep. The set looks glorious with the extra room. The venue seats over 2000 but they seem fairly close to the stage so they’ll be swept up by the story.

Wednesday 20 October – opening night!

Its here! Rehearsals are over; the final corrections are adjusted; the musical nuances are agreed upon with our conductor Nicolette Fraillon; pointe shoes are stitched; Gatorade cracked open; words of luck from David and the ballet staff are shared; ‘chookas’ gifts and hugs are exchanged; fake-eyelashes glued; make-up applied; eye-wounds covered, and blisters padded … drum roll … Once upon a time, on the eve of her royal wedding, a young girl, pure and fragile as crystal, senses the beginning of a fault in her husband’s loyalty …

The show goes really well and I feel very fortunate to be given the lead on an opening night! It’s my first opening night for a full-length work so, in many ways, tonight is a milestone. My Prince Adam Bull is steady and wonderful throughout, even when I am throwing myself against him in fury over his shenanigans with the Baroness. Baroness Lucinda Dunn is breathtaking and her Act Three is incredible. The whole company does really well and, as always, it feels like a real team effort as we take our curtain calls before a kind and generous Perth audience. These are the moments that would be nice to freeze-frame.

Amber Scott. Photography Liz Ham