Australia Dancing - Ballet Rambert Australian tour (1947

Ballet Rambert Australian tour (1947 - 1949)

Stewart, Jean: Sally Gilmour in 'Giselle', Ballet Rambert, 1947 or 1948

The organisation that eventually became Ballet Rambert was founded by Marie Rambert in London in the 1920s initially as a vehicle for her students and as a means of fostering new choreography. The company toured Australia in association with the British Council beginning in Melbourne in October 1947 and concluding in Perth in January 1949. The company gave over 500 performances and appeared in Adelaide, Brisbane, Broken Hill, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney as well as undertaking a tour to New Zealand in May 1948.

As well as popular classics such as Giselle, Swan Lake Act II, and Les Sylphides, the company's repertoire for the Australian tour included contemporary choreography by English artists such as Frederick Ashton, Walter Gore, Andree Howard, Antony Tudor and Ninette de Valois. It also introduced Australian audiences to the work of English designers such as Nadia Benois and Sophie Fedorovitch. Walter Gore's Winter Night, designed by Australian Kenneth Rowell as his first professional commission for a ballet company, received its world premiere in Melbourne in November 1948.

A number of Australians were engaged by the company to perform in Australia, notably Kathleen Gorham who danced under the name Ann Somers and Charles Boyd who had performed with Ballet Rambert in England in the early 1940s. While some Australian dancers elected to travel to England with the company at the conclusion of the Australian engagement, others decided to remain in Australia, among them Margaret Scott who went on to make a singular contribution to the development of dance in Australia most notably as founding director of the Australian Ballet School, and Joyce Graeme who established the Melbourne-based National Theatre Ballet Company in 1949.

The Ballet Rambert tour to Australia is discussed in 'Ballet Rambert Creates a Splash' in National Library of Australia News, December 2002. A listing of Ballet Rambert's Australian repertoire is available as an online resource at Ballet Rambert Tour of Australia and New Zealand 1947-1949.

For further online resources relating to the Ballet Rambert tour see the National Library of Australia's online exhibition Dance people dance, especially 'Artistic impact (Item 6)' and 'Artistic impact (Item 7)'.

Bibliography:

Margaret Scott, 'Ballet Rambert: Memories of Australian Tour 1947', Heritage and heresy: Green Mill papers, 1997 (Braddon, A.C.T.: Australia Dance Council, c1998), pp. 67-70.

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