BALLET-ENTHUSIAST • GEOLOGIST • BLOG AUTHOR
Richard Murphy – WABalletomaniac
I have no musicality and find most modern music to be nothing but irritating noise. I can enjoy some classical music such as Bach but being a visual person unless I have something to focus my eyes on, I quickly lose interest, and my mind moves on to other things. So, for me ballet gives meaning to music and helps hold my attention, thus I admire and appreciate dancers who can interpret the music for me and bring it to life. It also helps that in doing so they show incredible technique and skill.
After graduating with an MSc in Geology from New Zealand I spent much of my working career as an exploration geologist in Australia and briefly in Indonesia. It was fortunate then that the silence of the desert and jungle was soothing to my spirit. On retiring from field work I spent 15 years as a senior researcher for a private Resource Intelligence company that provided collated information on the worldwide mining industry to governments, mining and exploration companies, financial institutions/banks and mining service companies. It was a natural activity therefore for me to investigate the background and history of the ballets that I enjoyed.
It was also natural for me to write up any notes and observations I made in a format suitable for a client to read rather than just taking lots of disjointed personal notes. Thus, the entries on various ballets I have attached to this blog site although seemingly written for an audience were written entirely for my own enjoyment and use. It was only in about 2022 that I began pondering the idea that other balletomanes may find these blogs of interest and not until late 2024 that I started making active plans to publish them. Note that because these blogs were not originally written for publication and are not academic papers, they are poorly referenced, only the most important references cited. In addition, because I am familiar with the ballets discussed, as will be I assume the few people who may wish to read these blogs, I have not supplied detailed story synopses.
Living in Western Australia many entries cover the activities of Western Australian Ballet (WAB) but where easily done I have separated the WAB comments out so readers not from WA can easily skip them. It is also important to note that any comments and opinions expressed are entirely my own and should not be attributed to WAB.
Finally, very many thanks to Judith Lebski for her ballet illustrations and to her partner Florian Delfanti for his assistance in creating this web site.
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