A very important date: Australian Ballet’s biggest ever production is back

In 2017, Benedicte Bemet didn’t know if she’d ever be able to dance again. The Gold Coast-raised dancer was recovering from an ankle injury that forced her to take 12 months off from her job as a soloist with the Australian Ballet. “I was sort of questioning everything: who I was, what my career was going to be,” she says.

By the time she injured her ankle, Bemet was widely regarded as a “rising star” of the ballet, having won the $20,000 Telstra Ballet Dancer Award for emerging talent in 2015, the year she performed the lead of Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty.

“I was on a really great trajectory,” she says. “I’d been given a lot of wonderful opportunities and my future was looking really bright. [When I was injured] everything got flipped on its head and I honestly thought I would have to retire.”

Alice in Wonderland is the Australian Ballet’s biggest production ever.Credit: Jason South

But by the second half of 2017, Bemet’s ankle was healing. “I was making progress,” she says. “And I was like, OK, I might be able to get back en pointe and back dancing and then hopefully get back to where I want to be physically.”

Seven years on, fully recovered and now a principal artist with the Australian Ballet, Bemet stars as Alice in the company’s blockbuster production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which opens in Sydney on February 20. Its Melbourne season, opening on March 15, will be the company’s final turn in the State Theatre before an extensive renovation begins there in April.

“It’s such an epic ballet,” Bemet says, pointing to its extravagant sets, costumes, props, and scene changes. “It’s almost like a theme park turned into a ballet.”

The ballet by superstar English choreographer Christopher Wheeldon premiered in London in 2011, performed by the Royal Ballet. It was first performed by the Australian Ballet in 2017, starring principal artist Ako Kondo as Alice, earning the company a Helpmann for Best Ballet, and was remounted in 2019.

It’s billed as the Australian Ballet’s biggest production ever, requiring more than 350 costumes and 27 set changes, and utilising optical illusions, digital projections and puppetry. More than 75,000 people attended its first season of 41 performances across Melbourne and Sydney.

Bemet recalls seeing that first season in Australia. “I loved it and I loved watching all my friends as animals and certain characters. It was freaking hilarious,” she says. “It’s been really nice having watched it and being able to do it now myself.”

La Bayadere as part of Summertime at the Ballet in February 2021.Credit: Jeff Busby / The Australian Ballet

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of a string of blockbuster ballets to come to Australia recently.

Dance critic for The Sydney Morning Herald Chantal Nguyen describes a blockbuster ballet as having a sense of spectacle – including theatrical elements one might expect in a musical, such as a rock band on stage. They may be staged outside traditional performing arts venues, including in arenas, or performed in the round.

Blockbusters will often include international stars performing “flashy” excerpts from ballets, the dancers leaping across the stage “with lots of turns, jumps and really big extensions – that’s how high you can raise your limbs”, Nguyen explains.

Local gala performances include the Australian Ballet’s return for the first time since the start of the pandemic Summertime at the Ballet at Melbourne’s Margaret Court Arena in February 2021. More than 50 per cent of the audience for that show were people who had never been to the ballet before.

The following year, in January, three dance enthusiasts including young Brisbane dancer Joel Burke produced the first Ballet International Gala (BIG). With the ambition of changing public perceptions of ballet, their first showcase boasted dancers from the world’s top companies, including Australian Alexander Campbell from the Royal Ballet and Aran Bell and Skylar Brandt from American Ballet Theatre, performing pieces from well-known ballets.

Benjamin Millepied’s Romeo & Juliet suite will make its Australian premiere in June.

BIG followed up its successful debut in Brisbane with events in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. It will open its fifth season in August this year, in Brisbane, after it brings a star-studded production of Romeo and Juliet to the outdoor stage at the Home of the Arts on the Gold Coast in May.

Nguyen is cynical about the rise of the blockbuster ballet gala. “It’s just a bums-on-seats cash grab for the company that runs it and the artists,” she says. “It’s an easier buck for them to make because the idea is spectacle rather than art. It’s not really meant to make you feel anything apart from adrenaline and excitement.”

If they are not a gala showcase, blockbuster ballets may be adaptations of popular narratives that figure large in the public consciousness, like the Australian Ballet’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Anna Karenina or, on an international level, English choreographer Matthew Bourne’s 2005 adaptation of the movie Edward Scissorhands or David Nixon’s 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Nguyen explains: “When an established ballet company says ‘blockbuster ballet’, it’s basically a marketing strategy to make it seem more like a movie and give it that pop culture relatability element. It’s about making ballet ‘relevant’ and ‘exciting’, but in a flashy Netflix sort of way.”

Local examples include Queensland Ballet’s Derek Deane’s Strictly Gershwin in 2023 and Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon, by Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, which lands in Brisbane in October.

Meanwhile, from June, the Sydney Opera House boasts a new production from French choreographer and Carmen director Benjamin Millepied: Romeo & Juliet Suite. The show – which marks the Australian debut of the contemporary ballet company founded by Millepied in 2011, L.A. Dance Project – combines dance with live video, akin to blockbuster theatre productions including Sydney Theatre Company’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Maria Abashova who plays Anna and Oleg Markov who plays Karenin.Credit: Justin McManus

Speaking of narrative-driven productions like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, despite her cynicism, Nguyen is optimistic about how blockbuster elements can make ballet more accessible and open the form up to new audiences. “Alice is ‘blockbuster’ done well – it really is like watching a film. It makes what is sometimes a very elitist, inaccessible art form palatable for a modern audience,” she says.

“But if you just stop there, then you’re missing out on a lot more of the art form. For me, really good art, including dance, makes you feel intellectually, emotionally and spiritually challenged: it speaks to the human condition, human experience, makes you see different perspectives.”

David Hallberg, artistic director of the Australian Ballet, admits that he was inspired to remount Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by the breadth of the potential audience – including people of all ages, first-timers and people who may be interested in musical theatre. For the production’s original run, more than a third of the audience were first-time ticket buyers.

“It’s really breaking down the barriers,” he says. “Some people are intimidated a bit by it all. And I think Alice in Wonderland gives an opportunity to not be intimidated by it; to come in and see a really amazing show. You don’t need to read the 700-page novel to get it. You don’t need to do a ton of pre-research to get it. You can sit down and enjoy ballet.”

During Hallberg’s tenure as leader of the Australian Ballet, the company has presented collaborations with companies including Australian Dance Theatre, under Wiradjuri artistic director Daniel Riley, and a festival bringing together companies from across Australia, DanceX, including Chunky Move, Bangarra and Lucy Guerin Inc. The event “shone a light on the richness of the dance community in Australia”, Hallberg says.

But events like DanceX appeal to a different kind of audience member to blockbusters like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Australian Ballet’s artistic director David Hallberg.Credit: Justin McManus

“I’m really proud of that fact that the Australian Ballet has the capability of hosting DanceX and having meaningful collaborations like that, but also being able to present Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for an extended run for audiences that have never been to the ballet,” he says.

Hallberg recognises there will be criticism of blockbuster ballets from purists. “I think the art snobs will think of a term like that and try and rise above it,” he says. “But I ask them, why? Why not lean into what a blockbuster means?

“For me, a blockbuster is something that’s big. Something that’s spectacle. Something that is accessible, enjoyable, exciting. Through the blockbuster ballet, we are able to bring in a bigger audience, more interest, without diminishing the art form, without selling out, without forgetting who we are or our DNA as an art form.”

The artistic director also stresses that bringing international work like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Australia doesn’t take away from the Australian Ballet’s ability to support local artists, pointing to award-winning choreographer Stephanie Lake joining as a resident choreographer this year. In fact, successful blockbusters can help to fund the production of risk-taking original work.

Hallberg says: “I spend a ton of time reading the room, the room being Australia, and knowing the responsibility we have as an organisation to give the opportunity to really important artists, making the Australian cultural landscape even richer than it was previously. I take that responsibility very, very seriously.”

Benedicte Bemet agrees that there is more of a sense of spectacle in ballet today and suggests that new technology, including projections and remote-controlled elements, has broadened how stories can be told.

“It’s opened up so many more options for the magic that you can create on stage,” she says. “And I think, also, ballet is coming out of that kind of historical, picture-book type of dancing and it’s being put into the modern world, where they’re like, ‘Oh, well, if they can do that in a musical or in a stage show, then why can’t we do that in the ballet as well?’”

She is excited by what blockbuster ballets offer dancers and audiences alike: “Anything that helps make the world you’re creating more believable, it’s really nice for you as the dancer, and it’s really great for the audience as well.”

It seems when it comes to blockbuster ballet, Australia is down the rabbit hole.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is at Capitol Theatre from February 20 to March 5 and the State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, from March 15 to 26.