biography

leigh warren - artistic director / choreographer

Leigh Warren trained at the Australian Ballet School and later graduated to the Australian Ballet. In his final year with the ballet company he was awarded the first Churchill Scholarship for the Performing Arts, which he completed at the Juilliard School of Music, New York.

Leigh's distinguished performing career included stints with Ballet Rambert, the Netherlands Dance Theatre and Nureyev and Friends. In 1993 Leigh formed his own company - Leigh Warren & Dancers. The company has performed for audiences in Holland, Singapore, London, Indonesia, Korea, Japan and all states of Australia.

ABC TV has filmed a number of Leigh's works - Lure (1994), Shimmer and Tehillium (1999), and in 2000 Leigh was choreographic adviser for Spectre de la Rose in Paul Cox's film The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky.

Leigh and his company have received numerous awards, including the inaugural Adelaide Critics Circle award, four Australian Dance Awards, the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award and four Green Room Awards.

The 2001 Melbourne Festival commissioned Leigh to produce a work in co-operation with William Forsythe, Artistic Director of Frankfurt Ballet. The resulting work, Quick Brown Fox, premiered at the 2001 festival in a sold-out season.

In 2002 he directed his first opera, Akhnaten, a co-production between State Opera of South Australia and Leigh Warren & Dancers. Akhnaten featured in the 2003 Melbourne Festival and in 2004 Leigh directed another in Philip Glass's portrait trilogy of operas, Einstein on the Beach Parts 3 & 4. Leigh won the Adelaide Critics' Circle 2004 Individual Award for his direction and choreography of Einstein on the Beach. In 2005 he won another Adelaide Critics' Circle Award, this time for Innovation for Petroglyphs - Signs of Life, choreographed with Gina Rings.