06.07.2026
Birthday Offering: New Zealand’s Place in a Royal Ballet Tradition
Birthday Offering is a ballet that carries history in every step, and for the Royal New Zealand Ballet, that history runs close to home.
BIRTHDAY OFFERING;
1926-2024 : Rowena Jackson ;
Choreographer Frederick Ashton ;
Composer Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov ;
Costume Designer Andre Levasseru ;
Sadlers Wells Ballet 25th Anniversary Special Programme ;
5th May 1956 ;
Photographed by Roger Wood ;
Credit: Roger Wood/ Royal Ballet and Opera/ ArenaPAL ; www.arenapal.com
Sir Frederick Ashton created Birthday Offering in 1956 to mark 25 years of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, just before the company received its Royal Charter and became The Royal Ballet.
Ashton built seven dazzling solo variations, each one designed around a specific leading ballerina and shaped to bring out her particular gifts as a dancer.
The seven were a roll call of the era’s finest classical talent – Margot Fonteyn, Rowena Jackson, Svetlana Beriosova, Elaine Fifield, Nadia Nerina, Violetta Elvin, and Beryl Grey.
All but one, Rowena Jackson, had recently performed the title role in The Sleeping Beauty – a formidable test of classical technique. The male dancers in the original cast included two further New Zealanders, Alexander Grant and Bryan Ashbridge.
Southland-born Jackson, together with her dancer husband Phillip Chatfield, would later return home and help shape ballet in New Zealand for a generation; first as early leaders, alongside Poul Gnatt and Russell Kerr, in building up the New Zealand Ballet, then guiding the company as it grew into the Royal New Zealand Ballet we know today. Chatfield served as Artistic Director from 1975 to 1978, with Rowena by his side, and they remained part of the RNZB family throughout their lives.
David McAllister AC in the RNZB costume workroom with the 1989 Birthday Offering costumes from The Australian Ballet.
The RNZB hasn’t staged an Ashton ballet since the late 1990s, which makes this Winter Season something of a homecoming.
Our production borrows the very costumes worn in The Australian Ballet’s 1989 staging – a season that featured a young dancer named David McAllister, our former interim Artistic Director, now a RNZB board member and a treasured member of the RNZB whānau. His partner in that Australian premiere was Fiona Tonkin, a New Zealand-born dance legend in her own right.
Technically demanding and visually opulent, Birthday Offering is pure showcase: épaulement, quick and complex footwork, and Ashton’s unmistakable musicality, built to let dancers shine as individuals within something larger and more glittering. It is ballet’s version of a sparkling tiara, only brought out on the most special of occasions.
Birthday Offering features alongside Ultra Folly and Stand to Reason in our Winter Season, 16 July – 1 August 2026, presented in association with Viking.