Australia Dancing - Warren, Leigh (1952

Warren, Leigh (1952 - )

Leigh Warren studied on a scholarship at Valrene Tweedie's Australian Academy of Ballet in Sydney before taking up another scholarship to the Australian Ballet School in 1969. He joined the Australian Ballet in 1970 and was promoted to soloist two years later. Warren then travelled to London where he joined Ballet Rambert and worked with internationally acclaimed choreographers including Glen Tetley, Lar Lubovitch, Christopher Bruce, Norman Morrice, then director of the Rambert company, and Louis Falco. Warren enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music in New York in 1974 to complete a Churchill Fellowship awarded to him in Australia in 1972.

Returning to Australia in 1975, Warren danced with the Dance Company (NSW) under the direction of Jaap Flier but returned to Europe in 1976. He worked again with Ballet Rambert, then with Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague and then between 1984 and 1985 as a freelance artist. Warren was senior lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts before being appointed artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre in 1987. He led Australian Dance Theatre until 1992 after which he set up Leigh Warren and Dancers.

Warren's choreographic skills developed in New York at the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with Kazuko Hirabayashiu from the Martha Graham School, and during his period with Nederlands Dans Theater where he was contemporary teacher for NDT2. His first major evening of choreography, however, was presented in London in the mid 1970s while he was performing with Ballet Rambert. He made many works during his career as artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre and his prolific output has continued with Leigh Warren and Dancers and as a freelance artist. In 1999 he was the recipient of an Australian Dance Award for outstanding achievement in choreography for his work Shimmer.

Warren has been involved in a number of acclaimed collaborative productions. In 2001 he created Quick Brown Fox in co-operation with William Forsythe, artistic director of Frankfurt Ballet, for the Melbourne Festival. Between 2002 and 2007 he choreographed and directed the 'Portrait Trilogy' of operas by Philip Glass - Akhnaten (2002), Einstein on the Beach (Parts 3 & 4 - 2004, Parts 1 & 2 - 2006) and Satyagraha (2007). These were a co-production between Leigh Warren and Dancers and the State Opera of South Australia, and Warren was awarded the 2004 Adelaide Critics' Circle Individual Award for Einstein on the Beach Parts 3&4. In 2005 Warren collaborated with Gina Rings to choreograph Petroglyphs - Signs of Life, which won an Adelaide Critics' Circle Award for innovation, and in 2007 he collaborated with Yamaguchi based choreographer Uno Man to make Wanderlust.

Bibliography:

Leigh Warren, 'Evolutions Two: Former Artistic Directors of Australian Dance Theatre', Heritage and heresy: Green Mill papers, 1997 (Braddon, A.C.T.: Australia Dance Council, c1998), pp. 87-90.

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Collection - OzLife
Articles - New York Public Library Dance Collection
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