From sparksstage: to the

the timeline of My Brilliant Career

How do you create a world-class ballet production, from concept to premiere? We spoke with the creative team behind My Brilliant Career to find out.

2016, Brisbane, Australia: The conversation

On a routine trip to Australia to see family, Cathy Marston travels from Sydney to Brisbane to meet Queensland Ballet Artistic Director Li Cunxin and the Company. During the conversation at the temporary Beesley St, West End studios, Li tells Cathy he would be very interested in the possibility of a new work based on an Australian story.

2021: Technology across oceans

Over phone calls and emails across different countries, Li and Cathy decide on a 45-minute work, My Brilliant Career, to run as part of a triple bill in Queensland Ballet’s 2023 season. Cathy engages a creative team, including dramaturg Edward Kemp and Australian set and costume designer David Fleischer. Across the world using Zoom the team begin to share conversations, concepts, and vision boards.

“The journey of discovery”

Cathy: “I’ll start by finding the story, and most times work with a dramaturg and mostly this is Edward Kemp; he and I have made over 20 ballets together over about 20 years. We’ll research and discuss what it is about the story that’s drawing me in, what perspective we want to give, what our interpretation is of it, which character is telling the story, because sometimes I like to turn it upside down. Then we’ll plot it into a kind of ballet script, we’ll work with the composer and the designer, and before reach the studio the whole thing is there on paper. The other thing I’ll do is write a list of words for each character that describes their way of moving.”

After joining Cathy’s creative team, renowned set and costume designer David Fleischer dives into research for the project. Residing in Sydney, he had previously travelled to the rural location outside Canberra where the novel is set. Of the region, he says it was great to get a sense of the materiality and also what nature is doing out there. He shares this insight with Cathy and the team, and they progress to creating vision boards.

David Fleischer: “This is the first time I’ve worked with Cathy, so we went on a journey of discovery over Zoom of what our responses were visually to the work. Especially with a historic novel like My Brilliant Career I’ll start with research – and a lot of that is photographic research of the period to get an understanding of what they were wearing and how they lived. In doing that, we got to know each other’s processes and were able to move quickly to the design phase. By the end of each session, could export a document of images as a record of the conversation.”

Meanwhile in Brisbane, Queensland Ballet staff build a creative pitch to invite supporters to join the journey of this world premiere production. The presentation incorporates timelines, designs, concepts, creative names and biographies, as well as the significance of the work, and is designed to offer interested parties a comprehensive overview of the production.

My Brilliant Career is flagged as a game-changer for Queensland Ballet: a brand-new work created on an Australian company from an awarding-winning female choreographer, telling a classic Australian story about a female icon.

2019, Sydney: A spark ignites

Cathy Marston: “I was visiting my parents-in-law in New South Wales with my husband, who is Australian, and nearby where they live is this beautiful bookshop in a vineyard. I was looking through the shelves and My Brilliant Career drew my attention. I read it and the thing that really popped out to me was the character of Sybylla. She’s just so magnetic, there’s something special about her; more than the plot, it was her character specifically, and some of the other characters as well. I felt like they would be wonderful things to study in movement.”

Cathy proposes the piece to Li, who immediately loves it. Then in 2020 the global pandemic hits; travel stops, productions are cancelled, and the story is put to the side.