New York City Center
8 October 2026
By Mark Kappel
Touring, whether domestic or international, presents huge financial and logistical challenges. Visiting dance companies are therefore especially welcome in New York City these days, and The Australian Ballet’s return was warmly received.
The Australian Ballet had not performed in New York City for some years. Previous visits included appearances at City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival and performances of Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake at Lincoln Center. This time, the company was welcomed rapturously, even wildly.
The company appeared at the Fall for Dance Festival and presented its own season at City Center from 8–11 October 2026. These were its first New York performances under the artistic guidance of David Hallberg, a familiar face on the New York dance scene as a former principal dancer of American Ballet Theatre. There was anticipation of seeing Hallberg’s artistic imprint on the company.
Enthusiastically received by the audience, Hallberg gave a pre-performance curtain speech in which he remarked that the City Center stage was where he had made his New York debut as a dancer, and where he had also given his farewell performance. This was a very personal homecoming.
The Australian Ballet presented the New York premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar in what was described as a revised version of this ambitious narrative dance work. Wheeldon’s work as a choreographer of full-length narrative ballets was familiar to New York audiences. For Oscar, he worked with composer Joby Talbot and designer Jean-Marc Puissant. On this occasion, he turned from fictional source material to the life of Oscar Wilde, the Irish writer whose scandalous fall from grace involved a conviction for gross indecency, imprisonment and subsequent self-imposed exile in France.
Wheeldon used Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose and The Picture of Dorian Gray as starting points, alongside flashbacks from Wilde’s prison cell, to explore the events and victimisation that brought about the great writer’s downfall. To fill in the narrative gaps, Wheeldon employed passages from Neil McKenna’s book, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, spoken by onstage narrator Seán O’Shea. When Wilde, his family and other important figures in his life expressed emotion, Wheeldon used elements of abstraction. The dancers filled in the blanks.
The Australian Ballet’s members have an international reputation both as dancers and as dance actors. Callum Linnane dominated Oscar in the role of Oscar Wilde, with other pivotal roles danced by Sharni Spencer as Constance Wilde, Joseph Caley as Robbie Ross, Elijah Trevitt as Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, and Steven Heathcote as the Marquess of Queensberry.
The dancers brought Wheeldon’s concept and ballet to life. On opening night, they and Oscar’s artistic team were enthusiastically received with a standing ovation.
A few days before the Oscar season, Australian Ballet dancers Adam Elmes, Lilla Harvey, Callum Linnane, Samara Merrick, Elijah Trevitt, Yaru Xu and Maxim Zenin displayed their versatility in Stephanie Lake’s Seven Days at the Fall for Dance Festival, warming up audiences for the performances of Oscar yet to come. Divided into seven sections, reflecting its title, this contemporary piece was diverse in tone and imagery, and effectively danced by the company’s performers.
On the same program, Pony Cam performed the world premiere of the dance-theatre work kinda like that, which used dance and theatre to celebrate the more than 400 dance pieces presented at the Fall for Dance Festival over the years. Full of surprises and clever, self-deprecating humour, the work acknowledged the festival’s accomplishments. We had the opportunity to laugh at ourselves as Pony Cam made clever comments about choreographers whom we have grown to love here in New York.
For The Australian Ballet, these performances marked a welcome return. I hope the company will be able to return to a New York stage sooner rather than later.
Copyright 2026