Prince, peasant, artist, cad, student, swashbuckler – there’s no role Damien Welch hasn’t performed in his 18 years as a dancer. This Monday 30 November he’ll take his final curtain call as a Principal Artist with The Australian Ballet.
The son of Australian dance legends Marilyn Jones and Garth Welch, and the younger brother of choreographer Stanton Welch, Damien started ballet classes at the relatively late age of 15. He quickly made up for lost time, joining The Australian Ballet in 1992 and reaching the top rank of Principal in just six years. Dancing countless ballets both at home and overseas (often cast opposite his on-and-offstage partner, fellow Principal Artist Kirsty Martin), he’s worked with some of the world’s leading choreographers, and had numerous roles created on him, switching effortlessly between classical and contemporary works.
In recent years Damien has worked behind the curtain as well, restaging Stanton Welch’s masterwork Divergence and documenting new works. Earlier this year, he made his choreographic debut with a piece called Chemical Trigger for the Bodytorque 2.2 season, for which he also composed the score. The sight of Damien wandering the hallways of The Australian Ballet between rehearsals, guitar slung from his shoulder, will be sorely missed. He’ll return as a guest artist in 2010 and continue his long relationship with the company, but for now we bid farewell to an extraordinary talent.
Damien takes his final bow on the closing night of Concord in Sydney
Fantastic photos – couldn’t you find any older ones as well?
Also someone needs to check the captions – a fair few of them have typos…”Muskateers” anyone?
Hi Anna, good pick, thanks. Is there a particular ballet you wanted to see Damien in? Unfortunately photographs from a lot of our earlier ballets haven’t yet been digitised, but we can have a look.
I’ve seen Damien perform quite a few times now but most loved his performances with Kirsty Martin. Such chemistry – everything else disappears when they’re on stage together. Damien, you shall be missed.
It is a while since we happened to see Damien Welch dance on one of our subscription nights, but always he is the complete professional and able to ‘do’ all moves and moods required. I am old enough to have loved watching his parents perform in the fledgling AB as well.
I cannot believe that Damien has retired as it only seems like yesterday that I used to watch him and his brother playing in the S.O.H.Greenroom, and being piggybacked by the then Ballet dancers–the brothers must have been pre -schoolers waiting for either mum or dad to come off the stage…..I worked as an usherette since 1973 and I know that time has passed, but I still cannot believe that having admired Damien’s parents dancing for so long, that in fact I then admired the talents of both brothers on stage as well for a further 18 years—-Damien was wonderful to watch in all of his roles given and I feel proud and priviledged to have seen 2 generations of Welch family magically dance on our Sydney Opera House stage.
Damien I wish you a long and happy life and looking forward to seeing you as a guest artist next year.
Thank you Anna for the great photos, and one more thing, if I may, I once asked their dad, who out of the two boys would make it as a better dancer, his reply was “Damien, as my other son will be a better choreographer” and so it was predicted a long time ago, and so it came to pass.
Damien will be missed but if we are lucky he may do a guest appearance with Kirsty now that she is coming back. I also have seen Garth and Marilyn dance when I was very young and Damien certainly did his parents proud. I hope he will have an influential behind the scenes role in the AB in the future.
Thank you for gracing the stage Damien.
[...] choreographer Damien Welch set out to create a ballet about the relationship between personality and clothing choice. “I [...]