The best of Australian ballet and orchestral music is set to impress audiences in China and India with tours of productions and programs in 2015.
The Australian Government has announced that it will provide $470,000 to The Australian Ballet, The West Australian Symphony Orchestra, The Australian World Orchestra and the National Film and Sound Archive for international projects. These projects will help to build on the international profile of Australia as a nation of excellence in the arts that punches well above its weight.
Funding of $150,000 will go to The Australian Ballet for its 2015 China tour to Beijing and Shanghai – the company’s first major tour of China since 2006. The tour will showcase Australia’s national dance company in one of their finest and most loved productions. Details of the program will be revealed in March.
The Australian World Orchestra under the direction of Maestro Zubin Mehta will receive $250,000 to assist its tour of Indian capitals Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi in October 2015. The Orchestra will also deliver an education program to young Indian musicians and perform Haydn’s Toy Symphony in a series of concerts for underprivileged children, with the involvement of a number of high-profile Australian and Indian cricketers.
The West Australian Symphony Orchestra will receive $50,000 to develop a ‘Symphony Cultural Bridge’ between the China Philharmonic Orchestra and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. The cultural exchange project will use symphony music to foster cultural awareness and share expertise between professional musicians.
The National Film and Sound Archive will host a workshop following the Annual Congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) with a grant of $20,000. FIAF is the peak international body for the preservation of film heritage, and the grant will facilitate presentations from international experts in a two-day workshop on digitising audio-visual collections, Digitise or Perish: Managing AV collections in a digital environment.
Each project supports the Australian Government’s belief in Australia as a self-confident cultural force on the world stage and is proud to support the capacity for Australia’s best arts companies to continue to take the best that Australia has to offer to the world.
Image: The West Australian Symphony Orchestra – photo by Emma Van Dordrecht