Ballet is a form that remains haunted by its own past, unable to escape its various ghosts, spirits, wilis and sylphs. Its stages have long been sites for representing the spectral, transforming performances into mediums for ghosts to reappear and for rituals of mourning to be performed. In Australia, in particular, ballet is a dance genre that remains doubly haunted by its colonial history: on the one hand it is a site for conjuring alien spirits, such as the lyrebird, and adapting their already existing sacraments and ceremonies, while on the other it is a site of absence, erasure and haunted silences.

This one-day symposium at the University of Melbourne invites researchers and artists to engage with this specifically Australasian history of hauntings, revisiting and revising the local history of ballet, its missing stories and its spectral presence in other narrative and dance forms.

We invite examination of how ballet is haunted by its own traditions, structures and unresolved narratives, its secrets and its indecipherable gestures, particularly those regarding settler histories and their intersections with narratives of national formation. How has ballet in Australia been shaped by the ghosts of colonialism and how do these spectres continue to haunt Australian performance today?  

We also seek proposals that consider ballet’s ongoing entanglement with contemporary movement practices. Its presence lingers especially in contemporary dance, often as a form of negation: the more it is excluded the more it is necessarily included as a framework for exploring the performative limits of the body. Inspired by a recent issue of Performance Research (29.7), On Ghosts, other contributions may wish to address not only human spirits but also the disturbances created by objects, props, sites, buildings and institutions, as well as digital artefacts and collections.

In this interdisciplinary symposium, we welcome perspectives grounded in historical research, cultural analysis and practice-informed research, as well as perspectives that shed light on ballet's ghostly presence in recent ideological, ecological, technological and other paradigmatic shifts. Moreover, we are open to a variety of contributions, including papers, panels, artistic interventions, or short provocations, interrogating the symposium themes. Proposals may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Haunted repertoires and ghostly bodies
• Early and colonial histories of ballet in Australasia
• Vanished dances and vanished dancers
• Ballet dancers in literature, film and popular culture
• The haunting of contemporary and modern dance by ballet
• The recurrence of the Romantic in contemporary Australian ballet
• Digital dancers and their phantom affects
• Monsters of repetition: swans, wilis and sugar plums
• Indigeneity as a haunting of Australian ballet: from Terra Australis (1946) to Rites (1997)
• Ballet and the haunted ground of Australia’s nation-building project
• Noh theatre and Asian ghosts in ballet
• Gendered hauntings in training, choreography and performance
• Shadows of the past: sets and other design elements in contemporary Australian ballet productions
• How ballet in Australia remembers its past
• The rehearsal room as haunted space
• Ballets blancs: culture, art and policies of white exclusions
• Mesmeric influences: Robert Helpmann, Laurel Martyn, Marilyn Rowe, Rex Reid, Maina Gielgud.
• Fleeting presences: touring companies from Anna Pavlova (1926) to the Tokyo Ballet (2023)
• Ghosts in the machine: digital dancers and technologies of ballet transmission

We welcome papers of 20 minutes on any topic, as well as cameo presentations of 10 minutes for a special session on aspects of repertoire and biography.

ORGANISERS: Rachel Fensham, Andrew Fuhrmann, Caitlyn Lehmann with Yvette Grant and Gareth Belling, University of Melbourne

ABSTRACTS of 200-300 words to be submitted by June 15, 2025 to  ballet-history@unimelb.edu.au  

Please include your name, contact details, institutional affiliation, and the format of the presentation along with technical requirements.  

If you have any queries, please write to the organisers at the above email address.