David Hallberg, Artistic Director of The Australian National Ballet led a 2026 company tour of Berkeley and New York with Christopher Wheeldon’s 2024 full-length ballet Oscar to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall (September 25–27) and New York City Center (October 8–11). The company also performs resident choreographer Stephanie Lake’s Seven Days at City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival on October 2–3.
For Hallberg, who has led the Melbourne-based company as artistic director since 2021, the tour collapses two chapters of his life. The pandemic denied him retirement performances at American Ballet Theatre and the Bolshoi Ballet, but he had already moved to Australia to start his new role. A former principal with ABT and the Bolshoi and former guest principal with The Royal Ballet, he knew the company from his years as a resident guest artist.
Toba Singer: In the movie “Delancey Street,” an older woman neighbor tells a young man who is two-timing his wife, “With one tuchus you can’t dance at two weddings.” After learning that for several years you were dancing in Russia and New York in the same season, it occurred to me that with one tuchus and one serious ankle injury, that was something of a geo-physical miracle!
Dancers are their companies’ most treasured assets, yet ironically, their most disposable liabilities when they end up injured, as you did. While an injured dancer waits for surgery or a physio session, it’s with an awareness that five others wait outside the Artistic Director’s office with a plan afoot for the injured dancer’s contract. It can be a booby trap. How does a dancer in that situation manage to curate an integral career path while healing both mind and body?
David Hallberg: Well, I don’t think there is any career that is completely under your exclusive control. A lot of things must align. Success may depend on the presence of certain elements: A sufficient level of talent, agility, and physical capacity. And then, opportunity. Opportunity is not something a dancer always has control of. What a dancer does have control over though are the decisions and choices they make: the decision to want to become a dancer, the decision of where to train, of where to dance professionally. And then when you are offered a contract, whether it is with the company that you want to dance for. And then once hired, there are other elements you find that you are not in control of: casting, repertoire, and promotions, but to gain some sense of control in that situation, a dancer arrives better equipped when, like anyone else, he or she knows his or her own self. That knowledge gives you a sense of autonomy in what you’re giving to dance. What do I see in this role? How do I want to interpret it? I don’t mean just as far as performing is concerned. I mean everyday practice, like daily class: What do you choose to focus on, to work on? I think it’s a mixture of elements, some that the dancer is in control of and some that the dancer is not in control of.
TS: When I had an opportunity to interview the Bournonville-trained dance educator Johnny Eliasson, who danced with Royal Danish and English National Ballet companies, he expressed concern about the rise in injuries among dancers. He saw it as having coincided with the introduction of Marley to cover wooden floors. It worried him that the dancer’s feet no longer had direct contact with the wooden floor the way they did when he danced on them before the advent of Marley. He said that the foot could feel its limits on those floors and adapt to them. According to Eliasen, that sense of the floor affects everything, even processes that aren’t apparent superficially: muscle development, attack, and whether the foot is strong enough to support the back, but also, neural connection with the body as a whole, and affects conditioning of the dancer, including of the mind and heart. Another respected New York-based teacher, Edward Ellison, who danced with San Francisco Ballet and is a Vaganova-trained teacher, once told me, “The floor is [akin to] the dancer’s father.” It’s the most dependable source of support. You must have a good relationship that “father” if you’re a dancer. What thoughts about the broad picture of injury and long-range curation of working conditions for dancers come to mind from your experience with your ankle injury and surgery?
DH: Well, I’d say that a dancer’s physicality is is very individual. Everyone feels it differently. And everyone feels their relationship to gravity differently and and the way that they use their physicality. To express or execute classical ballet technique, the one thing I learned from Willie Burmann, who was an amazing teacher in New York, was that the essence of one’s relationship with the floor has to do with pushing down into it and not dancing too high up on the foot to attempt to convince yourself you’re dancing high up. His approach was dialectical: To go up, you must push down off the floor rather than raise the body from the foot. Pushing it from the floor through the foot and leg muscles affords the springiness and leverage to go up. Many dancers approach movement too high up on the foot and leg. It disrupts their equilibrium, their balance. Pushing down into the floor balances your body’s weight. It results in a more harmonious line. It’s a calmer approach to how to create movement. The greatest masters of that technique were Wendy Whelan and Alessandra Ferri. Everyone has an individual approach to gravity in terms of technique, but for me, it came from Willie Burmann’s classes. They were the turning point for me in terms of what affects how weight is distributed.
TS: I’d like to go back to last Friday night’s intermission when the press gathered for a brief Q and A with you during Christopher Wheeldon’s “Oscar” at Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley. Your focus was on Wheeldon’s effort to interpolate diversity into the work to enable the audience to see itself reflected from the stage in all its diversity. Why diversity? Calls for “diversity,” and similar cancel-culture code words, sound disingenuous to me, and not just in the arts. I had an email from a dear friend that referred to Columbus Day, which my friend corrected in the text, to read, “Indigenous People’s Day.” If I were an indigenous person, the last thing I think I’d welcome would be a repackaging of Columbus Day as a celebration of my people, whose oppression began with the arrival of Columbus. Explain why diversity carries so much weight in the arts today?
DH: I think it’s because there’s been, if you take “Oscar” as your example of promoting diversity, a lack of diverse storytelling in classical ballet. It’s always been the Prince and the Princess. Or it’s been in the love story of Romeo and Juliet. It’s very seldom or almost never, for example, homosexual stories. As an evolving art form, it’s important to look at themes that are underrepresented on the stage. I loved playing Romeo but not playing Romeo and only Romeo. Or in Sleeping Beauty, where the Prince Desiré falls in love with the Princess. That’s not the only representative of society or of a love story. So, I think diverse storytelling is important. I’d be interested to know, what Chris would say about that as well.
TS: My feeling is that in these times, there’s an overabundance of inauthentic tribalism that labels us according to what society needs us to identify as that would have us retreat from coming together in unison at a time when the need for solidarity and universality is greatest. I agree with the goal of broadening the oeuvre to be more inclusive, but I don’t see the cry for diversity resulting in that taking place. Also, classics such as Romeo and Juliet pull you in with a love story that exposes what society exacts when “diverse” lovers come together and assert their right to defy their families’ clannish biases. The classics focus on the contradictions that confront societal prejudice. To my way of thinking, solidarity provides a better platform for the themes you express concern about than does diversity because what defines “diverse” tends to smuggle in a quotient of rancor, when what is called for is universality, cooperation, and mutual respect.
TS: Let’s say you could design a dance education module, broadly conceived, that integrates the best from what you and others have learned from cross training, bodywork, nutrition, and from the artistic trove inhabited by Konstantin Stanislavski, Ute Hagen, Jerzy Grotowski, and Sanford Meissner. Couldn’t such a curriculum more aggressively cultivate the actor we seek in the dancer, and a corresponding intellectual development, as Fernando Alonso, the Cuban dance pedagogue favored in the creation of characters? Each dancer on the Cuban stage has an “intention.” Fernando liked to remind his students that, “No one stands on the stage as an observer.” How would you put together something along those lines?
DH: Classical ballet training would be in the forefront. We use our bodies for expression, so first and foremost, it’s a strong classical class in ballet technique. Acting training is approached very differently around the world. There could be a greater emphasis on the dancer as an actor, made more central. That is found in rigorous teaching of ballet technique. Well-being, both mental and physical is important. There are some older bodies of knowledge and awareness to learn more about that are becoming more prevalent, so all of this is changing. At Australian National Ballet, we promote the very important concept of a healthy dancer. If those three things could come together, it would bode well for molding a well-rounded artist, technically, physically, and emotionally.
TS: It has occurred to me, especially while watching boys in their early teens dance, when they haven’t quite got enough articulation in their feet yet, that training in Voice and Diction—the variant that actors receive, with its emphasis on articulation and voice fluidity, could make dancers more aware of what muscles they must engage with and fire to achieve articulation and fluidity in their footwork. Similarly, in their épaulements and port de bras. It might be a little unusual but could prove an effective form of cross-training, providing them with an additional tool.
David, you have such a crazy/busy schedule during this two-city [Berkeley/New York] tour. Thank you for taking time to share this conversation with me.
DH: No worries at all! A pleasure, and great to meet you in person last Friday as well!
