Australia Dancing - Woolliams, Anne (1926

Woolliams, Anne (1926 - 1999)

Mitelman, Jacqueline: Portrait of Anne Woolliams, 1987

Born in Folkestone, Kent, Anne Woolliams took her first dance classes with a teacher who had been a student of the German expressionist dance pioneer Mary Wigman. She went on to study with a range of teachers including Judith Espinosa and Vera Volkova. Her performing career began with the Russian Opera and Ballet Company in London and she subsequently performed with a range of companies as well as in films and musicals. As a teacher she worked around the world and, in particular, spent a challenging period in the late 1950s and early 1960s with Kurt Jooss and the Folkswangschule in Essen, Germany.

Woolliams was appointed artistic director of the Australian Ballet in September 1976 and served in that role for a relatively brief period until December 1977. During that time she was much admired for her talent in coaching dancers, especially in roles from the repertoire of choreographer John Cranko with whom she had worked in Stuttgart between 1963 and 1973. She introduced into the Australian Ballet repertoire, in 1974 prior to her appointment as artistic director, the Cranko production of Romeo and Juliet and, later, Cranko's Onegin. For the Australian Ballet she also produced, in 1977, a version of Swan Lake that remained in the company's repertoire for twenty-five years until it was supplanted by the Graeme Murphy production of 2002. During her time with the Australian Ballet she encouraged the creation of new choreography and her programs Ballet '77 and Dance Horizons were occasions for the showing of works by young choreographers such as Paul Saliba, Julia Cotton, Meryl Tankard and Walter Bourke. In 1977 she also staged revivals of The Sleeping Beauty, Sebastian, Onegin, Giselle, The Merry Widow, Les Patineurs, Serenade, and Raymonda Act III. Additions to the repertoire in that year were Don Asker's Monkeys in a Cage and Eugene Loring's Billy the Kid.

Following her resignation from the Australian Ballet, Woolliams became the inaugural dean of dance at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. After leaving Australia in 1987 Woolliams established a ballet school in Zurich before being appointed artistic director of the Vienna State Opera Ballet in 1993. She retired to live in England in the late 1990s.

Bibliography:

Edited extracts from Anne Woolliams' oral history interview for the National Library of Australia are published as 'Recollections: from an interview recorded in 1987', Brolga 12 (June 2000).

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