Sea Legend

Abstract

Choreographed by Dorothy Stevenson with a score by Esther Rofe and designs by Alan McCulloch, Sea Legend premiered at Melbourne's Comedy Theatre during a season by the Borovansky Australian Ballet in November 1943. The work was restaged by Stevenson for the International Ballet in London in 1948. Rofe had written the music in London while studying at the Royal College of Music. When plans to produce it as a ballet had fallen through, Rofe offered the music to Borovansky who in turn gave it to Stevenson. Rofe's original title for the music was Sea Ballet. Sea Legend was notated in Labanotation in 1986 as part of the Australian Choreographic Project. While without a distinctively Australian theme, its all Australian creative team of Stevenson, Rofe and McCulloch make it a very early, perhaps the first, all Australian production.