Sea Legend (1943 - )

Photographer unknown: Dorothy Stevenson and Martin Rubinstein in Stevenson's 'Sea legend', Borovansky Ballet, 1943

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Choreographed by Dorothy Stevenson with a score by Esther Rofe and designs by Alan McCulloch, Sea Legend premiered at Melbourne's Comedy Theatre during a season by the Borovansky Australian Ballet in November 1943. The work was restaged by Stevenson for the International Ballet in London in 1948. Rofe had written the music in London while studying at the Royal College of Music. When plans to produce it as a ballet had fallen through, Rofe offered the music to Borovansky who in turn gave it to Stevenson. Rofe's original title for the music was Sea Ballet.

Stevenson had, earlier, choreographed a ballet about a half-drowned mortal, which was set to Claude Debussy's piano work, The Submerged Cathedral, and which had been performed at an early Borovansky studio performance. She reworked this piece into Sea Legend. Its story centres on a mortal man, created by Martin Rubinstein, who falls in love with a creature of the deep, danced by Stevenson herself. A corps de ballet represented the sea which, enraged by the love between the mortal and the sea creature, drew the woman back into the sea. The man followed to his doom.

Sea Legend was notated in Labanotation in 1986 as part of the Australian Choreographic Project. While without a distinctively Australian theme, its all Australian creative team of Stevenson, Rofe and McCulloch make it a very early, perhaps the first, all Australian production.

See also: Borovansky Ballet ; Rubinstein, Martin ; Stevenson, Dorothy

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Find more about Sea Legend in:

• Internet - Google
• Pictures - Picture Australia