The Australian Ballet has unveiled its 2015 season line-up, with a heady mix of the old, the new and the refreshingly unusual. “The Year of Beauty” brings together classic and contemporary pieces, and is headlined with a new production of Tchaikovsky’s classic The Sleeping Beauty.

Billed as a “19th-century classic for a 21st-century audience,” the crowd-pleaser will be newly envisioned by the company’s Artistic Director David McAllister whose interest in the piece started when he was cast as a child extra in Rudolf Nureyev’s production in Perth in the 1970s. “I feel like Sleeping Beauty has been in my DNA since then,” McAllister told Limelight. “It made a big impression, although in the end all of us boys were too small, so we ended up getting sacked. I stood on stage for about five minutes with Rudolf and then he said ‘no, too short’ and we all got scrapped!”

That didn’t dampen the budding artist’s spirit though, and he went to see the Nureyev production twice. “It was amazing to watch at that age, because it was all so magical. I didn’t see all the reality of it. I just got swept up into the fairyland of Sleeping Beauty.”

Although still in the workshopping stages,...