Ken Sparrow Photography

My Dance Photography

For 10 years I was in the extraordinary position of being allowed absolute access to Queensland Ballet. This came after a fortuitous meeting with François and Robyn Klaus in 2003 at a Queensland Ballet "Friends" function. At that time François had been the Artistic Director and Chief Choreographer for the company since 1998 (and would be to 2012) and Robyn was his Artistic Associate.

François Klaus was born in Cannes, France while Robyn White came from Townsville in Queensland, Australia. They met whilst they were both dancing with the Hamburg Ballet.

After accepting the proposal floated by François and Robyn to assist them by the documenting of their creative work with Queensland Ballet I was able to extensively photograph the company dancers both in rehearsal at the Thomas Dixon Center in West End, Brisbane and in Dress Rehearsals and in some performances at QPAC in Brisbane.    I was also able to photograph the company when they were performing at the Arts Centre on the Gold Coast and at some other venues.

Over the 10 years that I was involved with François and Robyn at Queensland Ballet I estimate that I took in excess of 250 thousand photographs. A selection of 250 of the most memorable and iconic images from that time are included in the "Ballet and Dance" gallery. This collection includes photographs of some of the many overseas dancers who would accept François' invitation for them to join Queensland Ballet for the staging of the very popular  “International Gala” that François organised at QPAC in August of each year.

Since leaving Queensland Ballet at the end of 2012 François and Robyn now travel the (ballet) world as guest teachers. His website is here.

In particular his Gallery page, containing photographs from many of his productions whilst with Queensland Ballet (many of which were taken by me), is here.

To go directly to my Ballet and Dance gallery just click on the page banner above.

Any of the individual galleries can also be accessed by simply clicking on the Gallery Names to the left of this page.

Many of my ballet photographs have found their way onto the internet. Many have been supplied by Queensland Ballet directly either for performance reviews in newspapers or dance magazines, used for publicity purposes or in some cases they have been posted by the dancers themselves in blogs or on social media. Some of them I have gathered together in a Pintrest collection here.

Some more of my ballet photographs can be found in my flickr albums here.