ABSTRACT
A child prodigy is a rare thing among choreographers, but Kudelka produced his first piece at the age of fourteen, and by twenty-one he had created the deeply disturbing, utterly adult ballet, A Party (1976). This prompted the Toronto dance critic Penelope Doob to ask in 1977, ‘How many choreographers, especially at twenty-one, can make convincingly realistic ballets about grown-ups?… [H]e just might turn out to the special choreographer we have been waiting for.’2 He was. According to Canadian ballerina Karen Kain, Kudelka ‘has become the foremost choreographer in this country’,3 and by 1997, at the age of forty-two, he had already made over sixty works, and acquired a rising international reputation.
