Michelle Potter AM (born 18 November 1944) is an Australian dance writer, critic, archivist, and curator of historical materials. Her research and writing have focused on but have not been restricted to Australian dance history. [1] She was honoured for her achievements with the award of Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2023 Australia Day Honours List.
Born in Sydney, Michelle Anne Potter became interested in dance in her youth, after seeing a performance by the Borovansky Ballet. She began her dance training with Joan and Monica Halliday in her hometown, then went on for further study with jazz dancer and teacher Ronne Arnold and Valrene Tweedie, a pioneer in Australia of the Cecchetti method of ballet training. She also studied acting and theater techniques at the Mina Shelley School of the Theatre in Sydney, a well-known school for professional performers. Having become an accomplished dancer by the time she was 15, she determined to get an early start in her theatrical career. [2]
Potter began her professional career in 1959 performing in Aladdin, a Christmas pantomime directed by Maurice Sullivan and Mina Shelley, and continued to work in the Sullivan-Shelley shows for the next few years. In the mid-1960s she worked with Valrene Tweedie's choreographic ensemble, Ballet Australia, performing in both full-scale productions and in choreographic workshop performances. [3]
In the 1970s and 1980s, after earning a bachelor's degree with honours in social anthropology and receiving a diploma in education from Sydney University, Potter moved to Canberra and taught ballet technique and creative movement classes for Janet Karin and Bryan Lawrence at the National Capital Ballet School. During these years, she tried her hand at choreography, creating Court Serenade (1975), to music by Delibes for National Capital Dancers; Orpheus and Eurydice (1977), to music by Gluck, for Canberra Opera; and Morning Prayer (1978) for St. James Church in Curtin, A.C.T. She also appeared in several productions by the National Capital Dancers, including The Nutcracker and Giselle. [4]
In the 1980s, Potter returned to academia and earned a second undergraduate degree with honours in art history and subsequently a doctorate in art history and dance history at the Australian National University. She was the National Library of Australia's Esso Fellow in the Performing Arts between 1988 and 1990 and Australian National University's Janet Wilkie Memorial Scholar for 1989, which gave her study time in New York. The focus of her research over the years has ranged from the history of the Wassily de Basil's Ballets Russes in Australia, with particular emphasis on the designers of sets and costumes, [5] to contemporary masters such as Merce Cunningham, whose work with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns was the subject of her doctoral dissertation. [6] She has also done intensive study on Robert Helpmann [7] and on Pina Bausch. [8]
In 1996, Potter curated the National Library of Australia's exhibition entitled Dance People Dance, which toured Australia under a Visions of Australia grant until 1999. Between 1997 and 2001, Potter was manager of the Keep Dancing! project at the National Film and Sound Archive. As part of that project, she co-scripted, researched, and produced two video documentaries and a film:
Potter has been writing about dance since 1990. Her articles and reviews have been published in a range of journals, magazines, programs, and newspapers in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Among them are The Australian (Sydney), Ballet News (Melbourne), Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance (Canberra), Choreography and Dance: An International Journal (London), Dance Australia (Sydney), Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts (New York), Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research (Edinburgh), Dancing Times (London), and Jahresmittlungen van Tanzplan Deutschland (Berlin). Her writing has also been published as chapters in numerous anthologies and catalogs, notably those related to the Ballets Russes published by the National Gallery of Australia. She is the sole author of seven books:
Potter is the founder of two notable media dedicated to dissemination of information about dance history and current performances. In 1994, she founded Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance and continued to edit it until mid-2006. A few years later, in 2009, she established a personal website, Michelle Potter ... on dancing (https://michellepotter.org), as an additional outlet for her writing and reviews. [9]
In 2002, Potter was appointed inaugural curator of dance at the National Library of Australia. In this post she recorded over one hundred oral history interviews with eminent Australians working in the arts. She was also one of the original team of investigators for the research project Ballets Russes in Australia: Our Cultural Revolution, a four-year collaborative partnership of the Australian Ballet, the University of Adelaide, and the National Library of Australia, which began in 2005. [10]
In 2006, Potter left the National Library to move to the United States and take up an appointment as curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, a position she held until 2008. During this appointment, she co-curated Invention: Merce Cunningham and Collaborators, a major retrospective exhibition for the New York Public Library in June 2007. [11]
Since returning to Australia in 2008 Potter has worked as an independent dance writer and critic.
Potter was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2023 Australia Day Honours List. In addition she is the recipient of two Australian Dance awards: Outstanding Achievement in Dance on Film (2001) and Services to Dance (2003). [12] She shared the award for achievement in dance on film with Sally Jackson, with whom she had collaborated on the video documentary Boro's Ballet. She has also won an International Dance Day Award (1996), a Canberra Critics' Circle Award (1997), and two Australian Cultural Studies Awards (1998 and 2000). [13]
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Graeme Lloyd Murphy AO is an Australian dancer and choreographer. With his fellow dancer Janet Vernon, he guided Sydney Dance Company to become one of Australia's most successful and best-known dance companies.
The Australian Ballet (TAB) is the largest classical ballet company in Australia. It was founded by J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1962, with the English-born dancer, teacher, repetiteur and director Dame Peggy van Praagh as founding artistic director. Today, it is recognised as one of the world's major international ballet companies and performs upwards of 150 performances a year.
The Ballets Russes was an itinerant ballet company begun in Paris that performed between 1909 and 1929 throughout Europe and on tours to North and South America. The company never performed in Russia, where the Revolution disrupted society. After its initial Paris season, the company had no formal ties there.
Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), known as Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre from 1993 to 1999, is a contemporary dance company based in Adelaide, South Australia, established in 1965 by Elizabeth Cameron Dalman. The ADT was the first modern dance company in Australia, and drew on the techniques of Martha Graham for its inspiration.
Ceremonial dancing has a very important place in the Indigenous cultures of Australia. They vary from place to place, but most ceremonies combine dance, song, rituals and often elaborate body decorations and costumes. The different body paintings indicate the type of ceremony being performed. They play an important role in marriage ceremonies, in the education of Indigenous children, as well as storytelling and oral history. The term corroboree is commonly used to refer to Australian Aboriginal dances, although this term has its origins among the people of the Sydney region. In some places, Aboriginal people perform corroborees for tourists. In the latter part of the 20th century the influence of Indigenous Australian dance traditions has been seen with the development of concert dance, with the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts (ACPA) providing training in contemporary dance.
The Australian Ballet School is the premier ballet training facility in Australia, located in Melbourne.
Dame Catherine Margaret Mary Scott, was a South African-born pioneering ballet dancer who found fame as a teacher, choreographer, and school administrator in Australia. As the first director of the Australian Ballet School, she is recognised as one of the founders of the strong ballet tradition of her adopted country.
Dame Margaret van Praagh was a British ballet dancer, choreographer, teacher, repetiteur, producer, advocate and director, who spent much of her later career in Australia.
Meryl Tankard is an Australian dancer and choreographer who has a wide national and international reputation.
Garry Stewart is an Australian dancer and choreographer. He was the longest-serving artistic director of the Australian Dance Theatre, taking over from Meryl Tankard in 1999 and finishing his term at the end of 2021. He is renowned for his unusual, post-modern interpretations of classical ballets.
Gideon Obarzanek is an Australian choreographer, director and performing arts curator. He was Artistic Associate with the Melbourne Festival (2015–2017), co-curator and director of 'XO State' at the inaugural Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (2015–2017). Obarzanek was appointed Chair of the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2015 and Strategic Cultural Engagement Manager at Chancellery at the University of Melbourne in 2018.
Valentin Zeglovsky (1908–1985) was a ballet dancer with the Ballets Russes who was one of the de Basil dancers who is considered to have contributed to Australian ballet.
STUDIO was a subscription television arts channel available in Australia on the Foxtel and Austar platforms.
Hélène Kirsova was a Danish prima ballerina, choreographer and ballet teacher and is noted as the founder of the first professional ballet company in Australia. She trained in Paris with former Sergei Diaghilev ballet dancers and choreographers. She then performed in companies run by Léo Staats and Ida Rubinstein before in 1931 becoming a soloist with Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, dancing for several years in Europe and North America. In 1936, as a principal dancer, she joined René Blum's Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo in which she scored a singular success in London. Later that year she joined Colonel Wassily de Basil's Monte Carlo Russian Ballet as prima ballerina on an extensive tour of Australia and New Zealand where she was fêted by critics and audiences. She remained in Australia, started a ballet school in Sydney, and in 1941 formed the Kirsova Ballet. Despite wartime restrictions she directed the company for several years before retiring in 1948. She has been described as the "Godmother" of Australian ballet.
Henry Neville Haythorne was an Australian dancer, ballet master, artistic director, and teacher who performed in vaudeville, musicals, and ballet companies in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Australia. He was assistant artistic director of the Scottish Ballet (1969–1974) and artistic director of the Queensland Ballet (1975–1978) and the Royal New Zealand Ballet (1981–1992).
Tivoli is an Australian dance musical that pays tribute to the Tivoli variety and revue circuit. It was directed and choreographed by Graeme Murphy from a scenario by Murphy and Kristian Fredrikson, with dialogue by Linda Nagle and Paul Chubb. Music incorporated existing songs from Tivoli productions, original songs by Max Lambert and Linda Nagle, and an original musical score by Graeme Koehne.
Xenia Nikolaeva Smirnova Krüger Borovansky was a Russian-born dancer and choreographer, based in Australia after 1939. She was principal teacher at the Melbourne Academy of Russian Ballet, and active in running the Borovansky Ballet.
Rachel Cameron was an Australian ballet dancer and teacher. She was one of the leading dancers in early Australian ballet in the 1940s, performing with the Borovansky and Kirsova ballet companies, and was one of the first ballet dancers in Australia to reach the rank of principal. After emigrating to Great Britain she was an inspirational educator of ballet teachers at the Royal Academy of Dance in London for over forty years. In 2010, she received the Royal Academy of Dance's prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award in recognition of her outstanding services to ballet.
The Kirsova Ballet was the first professional Australian ballet company. It was founded by prima ballerina Hélène Kirsova in 1941. Initially the leading performers were dancers who had stayed in Australia following the 1938/1939 tour of the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, but they were supported by talented young Australian dancers promoted from Kirsova's ballet school in Sydney. These local performers soon led the troupe and appeared in several seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane. The company also supported Australian composers, musicians, artists and designers in producing new ballets choreographed by Kirsova. Struggling under wartime restrictions, unable to tour abroad, and later suffering creative differences with the country's main theatre owners, the company's prominence was brief. It closed in 1945 having been the pioneer of a genuine Australian ballet tradition. Its influence on Australian ballet was significant.
Shirley Elizabeth McKechnie was an Australian pioneer of contemporary dance as a dancer, choreographer, director and educator.
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