Culture
The Real Story Behind Brisbane Festival's Biggest Theatre Premiere Just Got a New Partner
Phillipe Blake—27 August 2026·2 min read
Choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa on turning INXS into Elegantly Wasted — a ballet about what happens when the curated, filtered self finally cracks. In her own words, ahead of the world premiere at HOTA.
There's a moment, about halfway through talking with Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, where she stops describing Elegantly Wasted as a dance piece and starts describing it as something closer to an intervention. "There's your image on Instagram or TikTok, and then there's the real you," she says. "We peel it back throughout the ballet — and at the end there is just a bonding between these people who were maybe not so self-secure of themselves during the piece."
That's the real engine of the world premiere she's brought to Queensland Ballet and HOTA this September — not a jukebox tribute to INXS, but a study of what happens when the mask finally comes off.
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Photo: Joe Shults.
Lopez Ochoa, the celebrated Belgian-Colombian choreographer behind Queensland Ballet's sell-out Coco Chanel: The Life of a Fashion Icon, has built a genuinely unusual career. A classically trained dancer from the Netherlands who spent years with Scapino Ballet, she was, by her own account, always more drawn to hip-hop and jazz — and has spent decades since chasing companies willing to let those worlds collide. "I would beg my mom to send me to Paris to do some street dance, and it cost a lot of money in those days," she says. "Now you can learn on TikTok."
That fusion — street dance and classical ballet, filtered through theatre — is what she calls her signature, and it's all over Elegantly Wasted. But the real spark for the piece wasn't the movement vocabulary. It was INXS itself, and a very personal act of time travel. "Those were one of the first CDs that I bought," she says. "I had ten CDs, and they were one of them, and those CDs traveled with me for twenty years." She remembers Suicide Blonde and Mediate — "really rough videos" — and set out to tap into exactly that raw energy for a cast who, by her own admission, had never heard the songs before rehearsals began. "Their parents knew the music, so I felt very old when they told me that. But I think that now, after five weeks of rehearsing, they're falling a little bit in love with the music of INXS."
The piece itself is set in a luxury hotel lobby — a location Lopez Ochoa chose with real intent. "I spent a lot of time in hotels. You never know the stories of all these people who are passing there at the same time," she says. Six couches double as the set, dismantled and rearranged throughout the show to keep reshaping the space. Onto that stage she brings a cast of young people who open the piece "well curated and so self-assured of themselves" — only for that composure to fracture as the show goes on. She was careful, she says, not to reduce them to a single idea. "I don't want to pigeonhole influencers, as every influencer has a reason why they are selling their lives." What interested her more was the exhaustion underneath it — the way people now reach for anything, even heartbreak, "to sort of keep the algorithm going."
Working with instantly recognisable songs came with its own trap, and Lopez Ochoa knew it. "I was afraid that at some point it would look like a number from So You Think You Can Dance," she says, "so I decided to go back to pointe shoes at the beginning of the process and elevate the art form." The soundtrack itself had to be rebuilt for the stage — most INXS tracks run three and a half to four and a half minutes, so she asked sound designer Jake Rodriguez to stretch and reshape them into something more theatrical. "Otherwise it would have been a jukebox performance."
There's a genuinely full-circle moment in the casting, too. The production's new principal dancer, Japanese dancer Jun Masuda, previously danced with Tulsa Ballet — where Lopez Ochoa first worked with him five years ago, in a season disrupted by a pandemic-cancelled premiere. "I didn't know he was joining this company until the day I arrived," she says. "It is lovely to work again with him."
Asked how she knows when a piece is finished, she doesn't talk about a final rehearsal — she talks about grief. "I always get a little melancholic when I choreograph the very end, because then my work is done and it becomes their piece," she says. "I try to milk it, try to postpone the very last seconds, just to savour a little bit more the interaction I have with the dancers." It's a feeling she's learned to manage rather than resist. "I have to learn how to detach, so I have to be very much of a Buddhist about it — otherwise I'm on the plane and it's very emotional."
She won't get long to sit with it. Straight after opening night, Lopez Ochoa flies out to Lithuania to begin a new production of La Dame aux Camélias — with fifty dancers she's never met. "So I have a premiere here on the 10th, and then on the Monday I get to know fifty new dancers," she laughs. "It keeps me young."
What she actually hopes Brisbane and Gold Coast audiences take from Elegantly Wasted is simpler than any of the theory behind it. "I hope there's also a young audience that's open to the sound of INXS, but discovering ballet — and how ballet can expand past just the tutus," she says. "It's definitely going to be a piece for everybody. There's a lot of emotion — sadness, melancholy, joy, butterflies. Everything is in there."
Elegantly Wasted premieres at HOTA, Gold Coast, 10–12 September 2026, choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and set to the music of INXS. Tickets and full performance times at queenslandballet.com.au.
Jakob Perrett
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