Clytie Campbell

After eleven years as a dancer with the Royal New Zealand Ballet and 19 years of performing onstage, Auckland born Clytie Campbell joined the Artistic Team as a Ballet Mistress in 2017.

Alongside supporting dancers by teaching classes, arranging schedules, ordering shoes and ensuring the artistic vision comes to life, in 2021 Clytie has staged Ethan Stiefel and Johan Kobborg’s 2012 Giselle, working closely with the choreographers via Zoom.

In 2019, Clytie staged Greg Horsman’s production of La Bayadère for both West Australian Ballet and Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet, spending 6 weeks working with each. Prior to this, she worked with Queensland Ballet for two months staging the same production in 2018.

Clytie joined the RNZB in 2005, returning from eight years dancing in Europe. Starting at the age of five, her entire ballet training was at her mother’s school, the Philippa Campbell School of Ballet in Auckland.  At 17, Clytie joined the Deutsche Oper Ballet in Berlin, where she danced for more than six years, before moving to Vienna’s Staatsoper Ballet.

Clytie danced many lead roles with the RNZB including Kitri in Don Quixote, the Sylph in La Sylphide, Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis in Giselle, the grand pas de deux in The Nutcracker, and Carabosse and the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, as well as solos in Esquisses, Silhouette and A Million Kisses to My Skin. Her role as Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet was described as ‘a knockout’. Clytie also received critical acclaim for her lead roles in 2011’s European tour of From Here to There and on the RNZB’s 2014 US tour, critics praised her ‘technically and expressively strong and appealing’ performance in Javier De Frutos’ Banderillero. Clytie’s last performance with the company was in November 2016 as Hermia in the late Liam Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a production the renowned choreographer created for the RNZB in 2015.

Clytie occasionally teaches at her mother’s dance school and has taken many RNZB Education masterclasses for a range of young aspiring dancers.