Soirée

There’s something quietly transcendent about Soirée, Queensland Ballet Academy’s luminous 2025 season, a production that doesn’t just unite dance, music, and visual art, but lets them breathe together like three parts of the same soul. Inspired by the intricate woodblock prints of Cressida Campbell AM, Soirée is an evening that turns stillness into movement, translating brushstroke into breath, canvas into choreography.

The evening opened with Academy Défilé, choreographed by Paul Boyd, a celebration of discipline, dedication, and the full spectrum of the Academy’s talent. Seeing all levels of students, from the youngest to the pre-professionals, share the stage was profoundly moving. The unity of line, posture, and timing reflected hours of rigorous training, but it was the sense of joy that shone through. Boyd’s choreography balanced structure with spirit, allowing every dancer their moment to gleam within the grand design.

After this, Campbell’s artworks appeared digitally across the backdrop for each performance, and the audience was drawn into her world of luminous still lifes and domestic dreamscapes. The subsequent choreography translated these pieces into living art.

In Full Bloom, choreographed and performed by Ashlyn Beggs, Arran O’Sullivan, Ava Eie, Emily Sprout, Lucia Minju Song, Maya Irimichi, Monet Hillard, and Nicole Drynand, took Campbell’s Protea and Gum Leaves as its muse. Here, costume and movement merged seamlessly with the image’s botanical elegance. The choreography was fluid and contemporary, full of expressive hands and rippling arms that echoed wind through leaves. Each dancer displayed poise, grace, and precision, their timing impeccable. The ensemble moved as one organic being yet never lost individual character.

Then came Swing Shift, a buoyant creation by Sienna Baensch, Leah Chapman, Saya Hibino, Gabrielle Lowe, and Matthew Erlandson, inspired by Through the Windscreen. Retro charm met classical training in this joyous collision of swing and ballet. The dancers’ energy was infectious, crisp, bright, and rhythmically playful. With clever literal nods to Campbell’s composition and cheeky costuming that channelled mid-century flair, this was pure entertainment done with technical integrity.

Memory, Abundance, Loss, choreographed by Natalie Weir, was a suite of five works (Bedroom Nocturne, Reading the Paper, Flannel Flowers, Hallway, and Self Portrait). Weir’s choreography has always been emotionally articulate, and here she achieved a symphonic blend of intellect and heart. Bedroom Nocturne was hauntingly tender, dancers entwining in shapes of trust and surrender. Reading the Paper pulsed with dramatic urgency, its symbolism sharp and layered. Flannel Flowers was visual poetry, soft, airy, and breathtakingly pretty, the dancers swaying like a field in gentle bloom. Hallway brought the act to a spirited close, charged with vitality and youthful daring. Each segment revealed the Academy’s ability to handle emotional nuance as deftly as technical complexity.

Paul Boyd returned with Soliloquy of the Heart, a meditation on memory threaded through eleven of Campbell’s artworks, from Bush Remnants to Sydney Harbour Triptych. The work explored nostalgia with restraint and grace, less a lament for the past, more a quiet conversation with it. The dancers moved as if remembering themselves, gestures half-forgotten, tenderly rediscovered.

Boyd’s choreography demanded both dramatic sensitivity and classical strength, and the dancers delivered with conviction. The men’s leaps were commanding yet controlled, the women’s pointe work feather-light and fluid. There was a shared maturity in the ensemble’s performance, a collective understanding of stillness as much as motion. The standout moments, Still Life with Dragonfly and Sydney Harbour Triptych, were thrilling and bursting with emotional truth, buoyed by Camerata’s exquisite live accompaniment.

Kathryn Lee’s costume designs were integral to the production’s success. Her fabric choices echoed Campbell’s palette of earthy ochres, muted greens, and luminous blues, and her silhouettes flowed like brushstrokes. Glenn Hughes’ lighting, subtle yet precise, drew the audience’s focus exactly where it belonged, sculpting the dancers and artworks in light. Together, they achieved that rare theatrical alchemy where design becomes storytelling.

Soirée is a triumph of collaboration, a bold affirmation of the Academy’s calibre and the depth of Queensland Ballet’s creative ecosystem. It’s not merely a showcase, it’s an education in artistry, a reminder of how interconnected the arts truly are. Every dancer, from the first to take the stage to the last to bow, embodied the future of Australian ballet: disciplined, daring, and deeply expressive. There was never a dull moment. Only beauty, brought to life.

Kitty Goodall