Australia Dancing - Gielgud, Maina (1945

Gielgud, Maina (1945 - )

Bell, Brendan: Portrait of Maina Gielgud, 1996

Maina Gielgud was artistic director of the Australian Ballet from 1983 to 1996 and is that company's longest serving director to date. During the fourteen years of her directorship she brought over forty new works into the repertoire, including works by her mentor Maurice Bejart, as well as many works by Australian choreographers. For the Australian Ballet she staged her own productions of The Sleeping Beauty (1984) and Giselle (1986).

Gielgud's directorship was marked by the appointment to the company of two resident choreographers, Stanton Welch and Stephen Baynes. Both Baynes and Welch made a number of works for the Australian Ballet during Gielgud's time with the company, including Catalyst (1990) and Beyond Bach (1995) from Baynes and Divergence (1994), Madame Butterfly (1995), Corroboree (1995) and Red Earth (1996) from Welch. Both choreographers have continued to be respected creators of new ballets for the Australian Ballet and for a range of other companies in Australia and overseas. Gielgud was also the first Australian Ballet director to commission a work from an Indigenous choreographer. Stephen Page made his first work for the Australian Ballet, Alchemy, in 1996 for a Gielgud all-Australian triple bill program, which also included works by Welch (Red Earth) and Meryl Tankard (The Deep End).

London-born, Gielgud came to Australia to direct the flagship company after a twenty year career as a dancer in Europe and the United Kingdom. She danced with a wide range of companies including Maurice Bejart's Ballet du XXe Siecle, German Opera Ballet Berlin, London Festival Ballet and Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet. She also visited Australia on several occasions during her performing career. In the mid 1970s she danced the lead in Australian Ballet productions of The Sleeping Beauty, La Fille mal gardee and Romeo and Juliet and also performed her Bejart-choreographed solo Forme et ligne (Squeaky Door) with the company in 1974. In the 1970s and 1980s she choreographed several of her own works, including the well known Steps, Notes and Squeaks of 1978, which subsequently toured to Australia. Immediately prior to coming to Australia as artistic director of the Australian Ballet she was rehearsal director for London City Ballet.

Gielgud left the Australian Ballet at the end of 1996. Following a series of disputes concerning the management of the company and its dancers, the board of the Australian Ballet declined to renew her contract. After leaving Australia, Gielgud directed the Royal Danish Ballet between 1997 and 1999. Following her departure from Copenhagen she worked as a freelance director and guest repetiteur and returned to the stage in 2002 in a Bejart production, L'Heure exquise, partnered by Martyn Fleming. In July 2003, at the invitation of Stanton Welch, she took up the position of artistic associate at Houston Ballet where until mid 2005 she advised on artistic issues, staged productions, and coached the company's dancers. She has since returned to freelance work.

Bibliography:

A list of Gielgud's roles as a dancer and works as a choreographer is in Martha Bremser (ed.), International Dictionary of Ballet, Volume 1 (Detroit: St James Press, 1993), pp. 563-565. Extracts from her oral history interviews for the National Library of Australia, and a list of the works she commissioned from Australian choreographers during her tenure of the directorship of the Australia Ballet, have been published as 'Remarkable Years' in Michelle Potter, A Passion for Dance (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1997), pp. 15-33

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Articles - New York Public Library Dance Collection
Pictures - Picture Australia
Collection - OzLife