David Hallberg to become Australian Ballet's new artistic director

Yep. Beginning January 2021.  Congratulations to all.

Comments

[Rachel Perez]

Wonderful for David and for the Aus Ballet!! Curious what this means about the end(?) of his performing career?

[Haglund]

He said that he has performing commitments into 2021 and that he anticipated a farewell performance at the Met.

[kelly]

He hasn't actively been involved with ABT for years now. One performance a year shouldn't be enough to keep someone on the principal roster. So the "farewell" performance announcement feels disingenuous.

I hope he's more successful with AusBallet than Millepied was with POB or Stiefel with New Zealand. There seems to be a high turnover rate of directors at some of these companies when the director is a high-profile dancer.

[Haglund]

ITA, Kelly. The "farewell" will be little more than a money grabber for ABT. Most of the regular ABT audience "farewelled" him years ago.

I wish him all the success and luck. He has no experience directing, no experience coaching, no experience teaching, no experience managing people. One doesn't have to look back in history too far to remember Aussie Ross Stretton's very short time as AD at the Royal Ballet where he tried to move the art form forward which has become a tired cliché and meaningless marketing tag. Hopefully Hallberg has carefully studied all the mistakes that Stretton and Millepied made so that he can avoid them. It's oh so lovely to hear of an AD's promising ideas, but if he/she doesn't know how to execute, then what good are they? Maybe Hallberg will simply be an Instagram AD while everyone else does the work.

[Solor]

Good point. The qualities needed to be a good artistic director have as much to do with management, maturity. interpersonal skills and vision as they do with dancing. These are not attributes that can normally be developed as a dancer, no matter how good at that one might be.