ALIGHT IN PARIS
AROUND the time this issue of Dance Australia is due out, the Paris Opera Ballet (POB) was to be performing in Australia. This company, the pride of France and the quintessence of classical dance, was to make an exclusive visit to Brisbane as part of the Queensland Performing Art Centre’s International Series. The city was to come alive with French culture and chic. Then Covid-19 hit and the tour was stopped dead.
“We had just come back from Tokyo,” dancer Hannah O’Neill says of the sudden halt to operations. “Then we got an email saying class was cancelled; then we got another announcing an urgent meeting at the Opera. We were then all told that everything was closed.”
O’Neill is a sujet in the Paris Opera Ballet. She is something of a rarity – the daughter of a Kiwi professional rugby player and a Japanese mother, she was born in Japan, raised and trained in New Zealand and later in Australia. She is one of a small contingent of
