Russell Kerr Returns

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32016, 17 June 1969, Page 9

Russell Kerr Returns

Russell Kerr, who re* signed recently as artistic director of the New Zealand Ballet Company because of ill-health, has returned to ballet. Mr Kerr has joined two Auckland teachers, Bettina Edwards and Basil Patterson, in a new organisation, the New Zealand Dance Centre. The centre will offer professional training in both the traditional theatre and the modern dance, in which Mr Patterson specialises. It will, according to Mr Kerr, complement the National Ballet Centre in Wellington. The centre will, he says, not only carry its students to an advanced level in dancing; it will also instruct them in music, make-up and mime. "New Zealand now has so many good teachers that the stage will soon be reached at which only the very advanced performers will need to go overseas for training—and then only to assure themselves that their standards are sufficiently high."

Mr Kerr returned to New Zealand from London a decade ago to teach and has since been, successively, bal-let-master, choreographer, producer and artistic director at the New Zealand Ballet Company. He himself went overseas as a student dancer, and became a principal in the Festival Ballet Company. Meanwhile, another New Zealander who returned home from sucess abroad, but later went to Australia, is making a series of ballet Aims for television there,

He is Bryan Ashbridge, former principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, and a television producer with the 8.8. C. and later with the N.Z.B.C. Mr Aahbrldge is now aasis-

tant to the artistic directors of the Australian Ballet, Miss Peggy van Praagh and Sir Robert Helpmann. GTV Channel 9 in Melbourne has signed him to produce and direct 10 ballet sequences using principal and soloist dancers of the Australian Ballet. These are to be featured in the popular programme, “In Melbourne Tonight,” the first of them tomorrow.