It’s the beginning of August, and you all know what that means: another comment of the month giveaway! Leave a comment on any blog piece throughout August and go in the running to win a copy of former Principal Artist Lynette Wills’ gorgeous book of candid photographs taken in rehearsal studios, dressing rooms and side of stage.

Congratulations to Katherine who responded to Robert Curran’s top pas de deux with fascinating thoughts on how emotions are conveyed through classical dance. You’ve won a poster from The Australian Ballet Shop!

It’s the first of June, which means another Comment of the Month competition on Behind Ballet! Just leave a comment on any Behind Ballet piece throughout June, and you’ll go in the draw to win a copy of our new Divergence poster signed by Coryphée Robyn Hendricks. We’ll announce the winner here on 1 July.

Last month saw an explosion of comments on Behind Ballet, which made choosing May’s winner very difficult indeed, but we loved Steve’s rumination on Coppélia’s tricky Mazurka. Congratulations, Steve!

Image: Robyn Hendricks in Stanton Welch’s Divergence. Photography Tim Richardson. Poster available for sale through The Australian Ballet Shop

In 2009, dancers from The Australian Ballet made two guest appearances on reality TV show So You Think You Can Dance to many a rave review. One corps de ballet member of the company has just returned from making a splash on China’s version of the same show,  known as Top Dancer. The Australian Ballet’s Chengwu Guo was a contestant in the competition, and finished up on top. Out of 20,000 hopefuls Chengwu danced his heart out before thousands of adoring fans, many of them screaming and waving home-made signs, and won the competition. Chengwu’s parents were secretly flown from Beijing to Guizhou to show their pride – a big highlight for Chengwu during his time on the show.

Chengwu also appears as the teenage Li Cunxin in the feature film, Mao’s Last Dancer. The Australian Ballet congratulates Chengwu on his recent successes!

Right now, in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, there’s an an exhibition of the artifacts of stage design. Amongst the sketches of billowing costumes in soft pastels and complicated, charcoal mise-en-scene, there’s a single sheet of graph paper. It’s marked into a grid of eight by eight squares, with numbers and triangles roughly added in ballpoint pen. It is, in fact, a chart of entrances and exits for Merce Cunningham’s Suite by Chance from 1952. Surrounded by so many eye-catching designs, you could be forgiven for wondering how something seemingly so strict and rigid could have created art that changed the face of contemporary dance. How could it generate movement on stage that was so striking, so idiosyncratic, that it “abounded in non sequiturs”?

Merce Cunningham died this week. He was 90 years old. His passing has given license to repeat many of the grand anecdotes that circulated around any cultural figure that has been so endlessly discussed. How could anyone resist retelling how Cunningham’s musical collaborator, John Cage, publicly admittedly to their decades-long romance? (When quizzed about their relationship during an interview in 1989, Cage simply replied: “I do the cooking, and Merce does the dishes.”) Read the rest of this entry »