Home For Ballet Company In Old Factory

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32031, 4 July 1969, Page 3

Home For Ballet Company In Old Factory

The Australian Ballet has moved into its first permanent home, a former tyre retreading factory in the Melbourne inner industrial suburb of Flemington.

The owners of the semifabricated building gave it to the Melbourne City Council for community use when they moved their factory plant elsewhere. The council offered it to the ballet company and its associated ballet school for a nominal rent of $1 a year. The Australian Ballet, which has needed a permanent home since its formation

in 1962, accepted the offer gladly. Sprung, wooden floors were laid over the factory’s concrete floors; intemali walls were built to provide three big studios. Music and class rooms for the ballet School were incorporated in the building as well as changing rooms and showers.

Part of the old 15,000 sq. ft factory was left untouched to serve as a storage area for scenery.

Large windows in the sawtooth roof of the factory building flood rehearsal rooms and studios with natural light. Thp ballet company moved into its headquarters recently after a successful threfe-month tour of South-East Asia and a long tour of Australian country centres. Another tour is being planned initially for 1971, but it is not yet decided which countries the company will visit.

“It is all a matter of finance,” said the company’s joint artistic director. Miss Peggy Van Praagh. Her fellow director is the internationally known ballet choreographer and actor. Sir Robert Helpmann. “We regard trips of this sort as cultural missions and not commercial ventures but these tours can be very costly,” she said. During its 1968 tour the company performed in nine countries over a period of three months. The company appeared in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, and Phnom Penh. In between productions the dancers rehearse eight hours a day, six days a week. “We strive for perfection,” Miss Van Praagh said. “And the only way to get it is to rehearse, rehearse and then rehearse some more.”—Australian News And Information Service.

The photograph shows the Australian Ballet dancers, Graeme Murphy and Renee Valent in the yard of the company’s new headquarters. In the background is a new block of fiats.