Our Principals
Hilary Kaplan
Hilary Kaplan was born in South Africa. A child prodigy in various styles of dancing, she trained with the late Reina Berman (ballet) and with Mercedes Molina (Spanish dancing), Luisa Cortes and Enrique Segovia (Spanish dancing). For a number of years, she won most of the first prizes in Ballet, Spanish, Character and Classical Greek in all the major dance competitions in Johannesburg.
Having done outstandingly well in all her Royal Academy of Dance examinations including achieving the Solo Seal, she was awarded the RAD Bursary, which enabled her to complete her training at the Royal Ballet School in London. She then returned to South Africa where she danced with PACT and CAPAB.
She then married and settled down to open her own highly successful ballet school. While teaching she completed a BA at the University of Witwatersrand majoring in languages.
Hilary was subsequently appointed a Dual Examiner and Tutor for the Royal Academy of Dance and a Dual Examiner for the Spanish Dance Society. She is a sought-after examiner and teacher travelling all over the world, appearing regularly on the faculties of international summer schools and seminars. In 1996 she moved to Australia with her husband and five daughters. While examining in Sydney that year, she met Archibald McKenzie, with whom she conducted a number of courses for the RAD. She went on, together with Archibald, to found Alegria in 1998. Since then she has qualified with a Licenciate Diploma in the Cecchetti method and has been recently awarded the Prestigious FRAD by the Royal Academy of Dance.
Archibald McKenzie
Archibald McKenzie was born in Western Australia, but has lived in many parts of Australia, as well as in Denmark, Belgium, France and England. He originally studied music at the Royal Danish Conservatoire, majoring in piano his main teachers being Erik Starup (German school) and Stanislav Knor (Russian school), and Chinese (with Soeren Egerod) and Classical Philology (with M Herman Hansen, M Skafte-Jensen, J Blomqvist and J Christensen) at the University of Copenhagen. Later he studied conducting with Dobbs Franks (Barsin/Toscanini school) and more piano with Victor Makarov (Russian school). He holds firsts in Chinese (supervisor P Ryckmans) and Ancient Greek (supervisor K Lee), and an LLB from the University of Sydney, and has lectured on Chinese and Central Asian matters at several universities. He has worked in various capacities (pianist, composer, editor, musical director) and various styles of music and theatre and has performed in Australia, Europe, and Asia. He chairs the Spanish Dance Society Australasia and is a founding committee member of the Kudos Foundation which supports Greek and Latin studies in Australia. He has curated and co-curated exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art, including the work of significant Chinese artists such as Ah Xian, Guan Wei, Shen Shaomin, Shen Jiawei and Xiao Lu.
He had worked as a pianist/accompanist for many Australian and international ballet companies, and with many outstanding dance teachers, and had gradually formed a framework of ideas and values relating to classical dance in the theatre. After meeting Hilary, they decided to open a school together and thus Alegria was born.
Since then, he has taken several dance exams himself in the Spanish Dance Society, RAD and Cecchetti systems, and has qualified as an RAD and Cecchetti ballet teacher, largely thanks to the patient coaching of Hilary Kaplan. Never a professional dancer himself, he nevertheless brings his professional experience of music and theatrical work, and the aesthetic values distilled from that experience, to bear in his teaching and in the policy directions that Hilary Kaplan and he set for the school.