In a series of moving portraits, Ewan Murray-Will films Hélène Kirsova with friends and family at her wedding reception.

This unique and candid home movie footage of members of the Ballets Russes company was taken at Sydney’s Bungan Beach in the late 1930s.

Filmed in slow motion, two women and a man (Paul Petroff) make human formations on the shoreline of the beach. A woman dressed in black swimwear runs towards Petroff and leaps into his arms.

Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe – shown here on tour in Australia during 1936-37 – revolutionised ballet by giving equal emphasis to dance, music, drama and design.

Amateur filmmaker Ewan Murray-Will captured unique and candid images of one of the world’s greatest dance companies. 

Hélène Kirsova performs in this excerpt from the one-act ballet, Le Beau Danube. Ewan Murray-Will films the action from an elevated position left of the stage.

In the final scenes from Léonide Massine’s symphonic ballet Les Presages, dancers from the Ballets Russes du Monte Carlo move frenetically across the stage, performing a series of strange

In this brief colour sequence from the ballet Thamar, Thamar seduces a man whom she is going to lure to her castle before killing him.