But of course the proof of the pudding is always in the eating. The Australian Ballet’s programs so far this year have not been all together thrilling even though they have looked good on paper and even though, as the company celebrates its fortieth anniversary, there is much to be proud of. Most recently a triple bill, which opened on the same day as the 2003 launch, promised much but in the end delivered little. The program was called United! because it brought together dancers of the Australian Ballet and West Australian Ballet (celebrating its fiftieth anniversary) in the one evening of dancing. The program consisted of Hans van Manen’s Black Cake first made in 1989, a brand new work (with the somewhat pretentious name of Subtle Sequence of Revelation) by Australian dancer and choreographer Adrian Burnett, and Christopher Wheeldon’s Mercurial Manoeuvres made for New York City Ballet in 2000. The big disappointment, especially as it was presented in Australia so soon after Wheeldon’s fresh and exciting Tryst, was Mercurial Manoeuvres. To my mind Mercurial Manoeuvres was more than a little derivative of those of Balanchine’s works that make use of a large ensemble. Its performance was made more difficult to handle by the fact that the Australian principals had little of the pizazz of their New York cousins. It needed the fast footwork and confident rather than complacent stage presence of City Ballet dancers. Someone like Merrill Ashley or, closer to today, Wendy Whelan, in the lead would have been sensational and would have made a big difference to how the work was perceived from the auditorium. The Burnett piece, with its snaking rolls and twists of the body, resembled a choreographic doodle more than anything else and was also more than a little derivative, this time of Kylian and Tharp. Black Cake? Not quite in the same league as Nine Sinatra Songs although in a similar vein. The promise of new and exciting was pretty much misplaced.

So looking at the events of one day in August in Melbourne, Australia, when the launch of the Australian Ballet’s season for 2003 was followed by the premiere of its triple bill, United!, it is hard not to wonder about the role of the artistic director in the twenty-first century. This is especially so when events in London have brought the issue of artistic direction into strong and clear focus. Who should an artistic director please? Should an artistic director set out to please anyone? And how can he or she avoid the collapse of an audience’s expectations, built up by a powerful publicity machine, when little of what is promised actually comes across in reality? When interviewed in 1996 during the last year of her tenure as artistic director of the Australian Ballet Maina Gielgud suggested that ‘please’ was the wrong word to use of an artistic director’s intentions. She then went on to list a whole lot of other ideas that an artistic director might have in mind when putting together repertoire - involve, interest, shake-up, surprise, entertain, amuse, move, for example. In Australia, six years down the track and two artistic directors and much publicity later, Gielgud’s words seem more and more apt. It’s a matter of having an aesthetic that looks beyond pleasing. Depending on who is meant to be at the centre of act of pleasing, or at whom the act of pleasing is being directed, pleasing can build a try-hard aesthetic or can build complacency. Neither is ideal. And surely artistic directors need an aesthetic focus that cares more about the art form than anything else and that grows from experience and wide knowledge of what works when and with what? There seems to be a bit of anxiety in London about the future direction of the Royal Ballet, but there should probably also be a bit of anxiety in Australia about the future of the flagship company here and probably also about the future of most companies. Artistic directors hold the future of the art form in their hands and that matters more than dancers, audiences, critics, funding bodies and the like.

(The Australian Ballet’s 2003 season will also feature Andre Prokovsky’s The Three Musketeers and a triple bill of works by American choreographers: Jerome Robbins’ In the Night, George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments and Glen Tetley’s Voluntaries.)