Australia Dancing - Ray, Robert (1947

Ray, Robert (1947 - )

Robert Ray began his dance training in Sydney at the Scully-Borovansky School and continued his studies at the Australian Ballet School. Between 1977 and 1979 he studied modern dance and composition in New York with Merce Cunningham and June Finch and with Hanya Holm at the Juilliard School. As a performer he danced with London Festival Ballet, West Australian Ballet and the Dance Company (NSW) as well as with smaller experimental groups.

Ray's choreographic career includes works for the Dancers Company, the Australian Ballet, West Australian Ballet, the Royal New Zealand Ballet and National Capital Dancers. His best known works are The Sentimental Bloke, Poems and City Dances. Ray made a second career in opera and choreographed for such companies as Canadian Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Australia, San Francisco Opera and Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Victoria.

Between 1979 and 1991 Ray was a faculty member of the Australian Ballet School where he taught modern dance and composition, classical ballet, pas de deux and repertoire. With the school's visiting expert Evgeny Valukin, head of ballet training at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts, Moscow, Ray studied the Russian system before writing and implementing a Russian-based five year program at the ABS.

In 1997, Ray became a teacher at the Victorian College of the Arts where he wrote and implemented the postgraduate diploma in classical ballet teaching, awarded by the University of Melbourne. In 2010 Ray was invited to New York as lecturer to staff at the Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Dance and the Joffrey Ballet School. Subsequently he was offered the post of artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet School and invited to establish an eight-year Russian-based system of teaching there.

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