A beloved show vanished from the stage for almost half a century. It’s finally returning

In a program that brings together the old and new, The Australian Ballet is digging into its archives and bringing back a long-missed favourite, with Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella returning to the stage after a 47-year absence.

“I wanted to bring back the works that made [their] mark in this company and had decades long of runs,” says artistic director David Hallberg. “ Cinderella is one of the great classics of the balletic repertoire. The score is unbelievably rich. And choreographically, I think Ashton’s version is very true to the story.” Ashton’s style, Hallberg adds, is “very specific and very demanding for dancers”.

Another returning classic is Hallberg’s reimagining of Swan Lake , which premiered in 2023. Three years later, Hallberg says there will be some tweaks with set and costume design, and emphasises the importance of going back to familiar works, of not keeping them static.

“The danger is that it becomes a museum piece, and that’s honestly my biggest fear with a work like Swan is that it just becomes something we roll out, something we perform for audiences that love ballet or maybe are seeing ballet for the first time, and then we call it a day ... Swan Lake needs to be assessed for today’s audiences,” he says.

“I think the most blatant kind of evolution of bringing Swan Lake into today’s time is that technique in ballet has evolved. The legs are higher. There are more pyrotechnics in technique, and I don’t say that as a negative. I say that as dancers are jumping higher, the jumps have refined, the turns have refined, and so therefore, the choreography remains as it was, but I think it’s being executed to a greater standard.”

One of the more recent works featured in the upcoming program is a return season of Kunstkamer , a modern, critically acclaimed non-narrative work with music that moves from Janis Joplin to Beethoven. In 2022, The Australian Ballet was the first company to perform it outside of the Netherlands, and ever since, Hallberg – who had a cameo role in that season, which he will not be reprising – has been asked when it will be returning.

“On the one hand, it’s great to keep people’s memory of seeing a world. Live performance is ephemeral, alive, but I also have to listen to audiences’ tastes, and Kunstkamer is the one ballet that people continually ask to bring back to the stage.”

The 2027 program will also feature the Australian debut of Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling , a three-act ballet that premiered in 1978 that tells the true story of the events leading to the death of Austria’s Crown Prince Rudolf, and Mixed Bill: Modern Masters which brings together works by George Balanchine, William Forsythe and Jerome Robbins. As part of Modern Masters , Sydney and Melbourne will each see an additional Balanchine work – Kammermusik No. 2 in Melbourne and Ballet Imperial in Sydney.

Cinderella will premiere in Adelaide – with music performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Earlier this year The Australian Ballet faced criticism for their use of recorded music for its regional tours, including for a performance in Adelaide .