The West Australian Ballet’s opening season at The Quarry was conceived by David McAllister in 2025, during his last year as artistic director. It features four world premieres.

It opens with Australian Tim Harbour’s Once and Future and culminates with London-born Ihsan Rustem’s Incandescence. Both are nationally and internationally lauded dancers and choreographers, having danced in, and created works for, many of the world’s most renowned dance companies.

In between these works are pieces choreographed by WAB dancers Soloist Polly Hilton and Principal Chihiro Nomura. Both are light-hearted, humorous, shorter than Harbour’s and Rustem’s, and full of joie de vivre – a foil, perhaps, for the gravitas of the others, which explore more deeply issues of the heart and mind.

Adam Alzaim and Asja Petrovski in Polly Hilton’s Paper Moon for Incandescence Ballet at the Quarry. Photo © Sergey Pevnev

Hilton’s Paper Moon, created, says Hilton, from our strange and fantastic dreams as children, is danced to eclectic music such as Bobby Krlic’s Midsommar OST and Ryan Lott’s Counting Atomic, the tempo of which...