Meet TBDA nominee Benedicte Bemet
The 2015 Telstra Ballet Dancer Award nominees were unveiled earlier this year by The Australian Ballet. Nominees include company dancers Benedicte Bemet (Mackay, QLD), Jasmin Durham (Gordon, ACT), Robyn Hendricks (Port Elizabeth, South Africa), freshly-appointed principal dancer Ako Kondo (Nagoya, Japan), Amanda McGuigan (Summer Hill, NSW) and Marcus Morelli (Brighton, VIC).
As part of a new series of unique artist-dancer collaborations produced by major sponsor Telstra, each nominee was paired with a talented Australian installation artist or designer to create a work that was filmed and photographed.
The Telstra Ballet Dancer Award (TBDA) is considered the most prestigious prize in Australian ballet and is one of several initiatives run by Telstra in partnership with The Australian Ballet, aimed at fostering young ballet dancers to reach their full potential.
Telstra Group General Counsel Carmel Mulhern said the artist partnerships were introduced this year to enable Australians to see ballet in a whole new way.
“Our partnership with The Australian Ballet is one of the longest-running arts partnerships in the country, and for over 30 years now we’ve sought to take ballet beyond the stage to connect more Australians to its joys and beauty,” said Mulhern. “Announcing our Telstra Ballet Dancer Award nominees is one of the most exciting moments of the partnership each year. In 2015, we’ve added another dimension to the Award through a collaboration with other arts leaders, to make the powerful art form of ballet more accessible to Australians.”
Now in its 13th year, TBDA was created to help nurture the talent of Australian ballet dancers. It has uncovered some of The Australian Ballet’s brightest stars, including seven previous winners who have risen through the ranks to reach Principal Artist status.
The 2015 winner will take home a $20,000 cash prize and be announced on Thursday, December 3. The winner of the People’s Choice Award, decided by public vote, will receive $5,000.
Dance Informa will profile each nominee over the course of the next few weeks. Starting it off is Benedicte Bemet!
Benedicte Bemet was born in Mackay in 1994, and started ballet at the age of three. She grew up on the Gold Coast and began her training at the Ransley’s Ballet Centre. When she was 10, her family relocated to Hong Kong, where she continued her ballet training at the Jean M. Wong School of Ballet.
Four years later, she was accepted into The Australian Ballet School. In her time at the school, she was awarded the Award for Excellence in Level 6; in 2009, she was sent to New York and Canada to represent the school in the exchange program. Bemet toured with The Dancer’s Company in both 2010 and 2011, and was accepted into the company in 2012.
Three years after joining the ensemble, some of her performance highlights are from Paquita and Giselle in 2015, The Nutcracker in 2014, Sechs Tanze 2014, and Don Quixote in 2013. Last year, she danced as one of the cygnets in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake.
For her TBDA collaboration, she worked with the fashion duo from Aje, Adrian Norris and Edwina Robinson. They watched her move and took inspiration to create sheer curtains that would “ebb and flow around her.”
Bemet said, “Breathing is so important to me. If I can breathe through a step it makes it something real and honest to me. When I breathe in I’m breathing in all the technique, all the emotion, the feeling behind what I want to achieve. Then when I breathe out, I like to surrender and let it all go.”