Reimagining the classics

Bringing new life to fabulous favourites

In 2023, for the first time in the company’s history and to coincide with our 60th year, The Australian Ballet’s special anniversary season features three full-length ballets that are fully funded by our community of supporters.

Two of these philanthropy-enabled productions, Don Quixote and Jewels, have delighted audiences during the first half of this diamond anniversary year. Both works have carved memorable milestones in the company’s history and acted as tangible reminders of the meaningful impact our community is having on the quality of art we’re seeing on stage.

In celebration of the artistic legacy to which the company pays tribute in both seasons, it’s with great pleasure that we raise the curtain to reveal a little of the work that goes on behind the scenes when the company is entrusted with the responsibility of reinvigorating a timeless classic for a new era of artistry.

For 60 years, our supporters have given the gift of exceptional ballet to audiences across Australia. We would like to celebrate and acknowledge the people in our philanthropic community who have made these productions possible.

As the curtain rose on the opening night of Melbourne’s Don Quixote season, introducing a ballet that runs over a prologue and three acts, you couldn’t miss the gasps of wonder from the audience as the sets were revealed for the first time.

Fifty years after the release of Rudolf Nureyev and Sir Robert Helpmann’s genre-defining film, and two years after conversations began with Barry Kay’s estate about the creation of a production to his original designs, Don Quixote had put The Australian Ballet on the map once again.

Getting to this point was no mean feat. Enabled by the generous contributors of The David Hallberg Fund, with additional support from The Barry Kay Fund, a widereaching and highly skilled creative team worked with set designer Richard Roberts, trawling Kay’s original designs and revisiting archival footage as well as the original film set to create the extraordinary designs audiences saw on stage.

Reflecting on one of the largest obstacles faced when reimagining the set, Head of Staging Bart Kendall says, “The fact that the original design was a film set that was constructed inside an aircraft hangar without stage restrictions presented some real challenges for Richard and our team. Richard did a fantastic job of recreating the scale and impact of the film set in a way that we could then break down into containers and build in-venue in a couple of days – not the months they took in the 1970s.”

Echoing Bart’s sentiment, Head of Costume Workshop

Musette Molyneaux shared some of the approaches her team took when painstakingly restoring the costumes from the Don Quixote movie. “It’s a production that has been performed for many decades, and over that time the way costumes are used changes and morphs. Thankfully, we had the documentation from when the production was first staged and some of the original costumes in storage. But, as some of the costumes have since been altered, we spent a lot of time watching the movie over and over – freeze-framing it to take screenshots and work out exactly how each costume needed to be restored based on the original footage.

“We also found an archive at the National Gallery of Australia and got permission to view it, which allowed us to Pantone-match the colours, take measurements and photograph the costumes inside and out so we could recreate them as closely as possible. For example, when we discovered the original fabric samples from the Fandango gentlemen’s costumes, we realised that the colour was initially a deep bottle green that, over time, had faded to a mid-grey,” Musette revealed.

Fortunately, with a combination of digital printing, colourmatching and hand-painting techniques, the team were able to bring the colour back into the costumes and, more broadly, the production.

The reimagination of Don Quixote for the company’s 60th anniversary was an undertaking of epic proportions, and one those involved feel immensely proud of. Reflecting on the experience of seeing the work finally come to life, Bart says, “It was incredible – unreal. I think the set is probably one of the best we have, and that’s saying something!”