There is something quietly remarkable about what Brisbane’s South Bank does for a Queenslander who has never left the country. On a winter evening, walking into the Lyric Theatre at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, that person can watch the Bolshoi Ballet perform Spartacus — not in Moscow, not in London, not in New York, but exclusively here, in Queensland, on stages beside the Brisbane River. The production is the same. The dancers are the same. The artistic institution, one of the most storied in the world, is the same. Geography, ordinarily a constraint on cultural participation for those who live far from established metropolitan centres, momentarily dissolves.

This is not accidental. It is the result of a deliberate institutional strategy, sustained over more than fifteen years, to reposition Brisbane not merely as a city that receives touring productions when they stop on their way to somewhere else, but as an exclusive cultural destination — a city that international companies come to perform only. It is a strategy that carries consequences well beyond the night of any individual performance. It shapes how Queenslanders perceive the cultural standing of their state, how international companies and their audiences perceive Queensland as a destination, and how a city approaching the global moment of the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games understands its own cultural readiness.

A SERIES BORN FROM A CIVIC PROPOSITION.

Established in 2009, the QPAC International Series has featured many of the world’s finest arts companies including the Bolshoi Ballet, Teatro alla Scala Ballet Company, The Royal Ballet, Ballet Preljocaj, and American Ballet Theatre. The founding premise was both cultural and civic. Since 2009 the QPAC International Series has featured many of the world’s finest companies from the United States, England, Cuba, Germany, Russia, France and Italy. The QPAC International Series is a way to engage in a creative, cultural and intellectual exchange between communities from different countries and the various diasporas that make up contemporary Australia.

That framing — cultural and intellectual exchange rather than mere entertainment import — is worth pausing on. The Series was not conceived as a prestige booking exercise, a way for QPAC to decorate its programme with famous names. The series was conceived to engage in a creative, cultural and intellectual exchange between countries and to not only deliver world class performances on QPAC stages but to find ways to enrich and develop the local arts industry through engagement opportunities beyond the stage. The operative phrase is “beyond the stage.” From its first season, the Series carried an obligation to generate something lasting: professional encounters between visiting companies and local artists, public conversations, masterclasses, community events that carried the intellectual content of the work out to people who might never sit in the Lyric Theatre at all.

Since its inception in 2009, the QPAC International Series has been supported by the Queensland Government with funding from Tourism and Events Queensland. Government investment here reflects not just arts policy but economic reasoning: “Since 2009, the QPAC International Series has attracted the world’s finest companies to perform exclusively in Brisbane, including the Royal Ballet, Teatro alla Scala and last year’s Bolshoi Ballet, contributing nearly $33 million to our tourism economy.” By the end of the Series’ first decade, the numbers had become the most straightforward argument available for its continuation.

THE COMPANIES THAT HAVE STOOD ON QPAC'S STAGES.

The roster accumulated by QPAC’s International Series across its fifteen-plus years of operation constitutes, by any measurement, an extraordinary account of what a publicly supported performing arts institution can secure for its community. Since 2009, QPAC has welcomed the Paris Opera Ballet, Ballet Nacional de Cuba, Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Hamburg State Opera, The Hamburg Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Ballet Preljocaj, The Royal Ballet and Teatro alla Scala Ballet Company (La Scala Ballet). Each season carried its own significance. Several were not merely Australian exclusives but represented the first time those companies had ever performed on Australian soil.

Italy’s celebrated Teatro alla Scala Ballet Company performed for the first time ever in Australia — and only in Brisbane — as part of the QPAC International Series. From 7 to 18 November 2018, with their 110-strong company including more than 75 dancers, La Scala Ballet performed two iconic productions, both much-loved and stunning works of the classical repertoire — Rudolf Nureyev’s festive Don Quixote, and the haunting Giselle. The weight of that moment deserves recognition: La Scala, one of the oldest and most celebrated opera houses in the world, whose name is synonymous with Italian cultural heritage, made its Australian debut not in Sydney, not in Melbourne, but at QPAC in Brisbane. It is the kind of fact that reshapes a city’s cultural self-understanding.

The 2017 QPAC International Series featured England’s The Royal Ballet, who presented two original works, Woolf Works and The Winter’s Tale at QPAC, as well as a gala performance in Cairns following the Brisbane season. The Cairns gala is significant: it illustrates an understanding, embedded in the Series’ design, that international cultural access should not be bounded by the capital city. Queensland is a vast state, and the aspiration to distribute the consequences of these visits — through regional screenings, community events, and touring performances where feasible — reflects a genuinely civic orientation.

The 2016 QPAC International Series featured France’s Ballet Preljocaj. This leading contemporary ballet company performed a romantic and edgy retelling of Snow White (Blanche Neige), based on the Grimm Brothers’ original fairytale and featuring costumes designed by couturier Jean Paul Gaultier. The long-awaited Australian debut of American Ballet Theatre took place at QPAC from 28 August to 7 September 2014. ABT presented their lavish production of the imperishable classic, Swan Lake, and a triple bill; Three Masterpieces, which featured short works by legendary American choreographers Jerome Robbins and Twyla Tharp, and a work by the Russian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, ABT’s Artist in Residence.

The 2009 inaugural season was itself historically resonant. The Paris Opera Ballet visited Queensland in 2009, when it launched the first ever QPAC International Series. The QPAC International Series has presented some of the world’s leading performing arts companies over the last ten years, and it’s great that we can celebrate this success with the company that was there at the beginning. Paris Opera Ballet is the oldest national ballet company in the world and considered the birthplace of classical dance, dating back to 1661 and the establishment of the Académie royale de Danse by Louis XIV. Beginning with the world’s oldest national ballet company set a tone: Brisbane was not accepting what was available. Brisbane was asking for the historically significant.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENGAGEMENT BEYOND THE STAGE.

What distinguishes the QPAC International Series from a conventional touring programme is the architecture of engagement it builds around each production. The performances themselves are the public-facing peak of a much larger structure.

Each year, in addition to stunning on stage productions, the International Series incorporates a program of events and activities curated in collaboration with the visiting company to expand understanding of the productions, the artists and country these companies call home. Delivered in live and digital environments, the program includes exhibitions, talks and discussions, masterclasses, a live simulcast and community driven participation.

The 2025 season — Ballet Preljocaj’s return with Swan Lake — provides a detailed illustration. Renowned for pushing the boundaries of ballet, France’s leading contemporary ballet company, Ballet Preljocaj, returned to Brisbane in 2025 for its second exclusive season for QPAC’s International Series. The season sold out with more than 14,500 people experiencing the Company’s Swan Lake live on stage in Brisbane and thousands more via broadcast screenings throughout Queensland at 17 regionally-based community events. The arithmetic is instructive: for every person who sat in the Lyric Theatre, many more participated in the event as a Queensland-wide cultural moment.

As part of the public engagement program beyond the stage, QPAC hosted four post-show events including Q&As and a film screening with members of the Company alongside various local experts which were attended by almost 2,000 people. Thirty-eight pre-professional dancers, ballet and dance students took part in masterclasses taught by some of the Company’s dancers learning excerpts from Swan Lake. In addition to more than 4,000 people who took part in the 17 regional screenings of Swan Lake and a free screening hosted by QPAC on the Melbourne Street Green, there were a further 2,996 online views of the Digital Stage stream.

These numbers describe a different kind of cultural event. They describe an institution that understands its responsibility to extend a rare cultural encounter beyond those who could purchase a ticket and travel to South Bank. Whilst the International Series is considered a remarkable success for its consistently sold out seasons and the significant number of visitors the Brisbane-exclusive seasons attract, the Series’ enduring impact is in its broad public engagement program. That sentence, drawn from QPAC’s own institutional framing, is the honest account: the performances are extraordinary, but the enduring impact is in what happens around them.

THE RECIPROCAL OBLIGATION: DEVELOPING LOCAL ARTISTS.

The Series carries an explicit developmental obligation to Queensland’s own artistic community. This is not incidental to the programme’s design; it is foundational. Through partnerships with respected artists and arts companies that provide professional development opportunities for Queensland artists, audiences benefit and so too does the future of the local industry.

When the Bolshoi, The Royal Ballet, or La Scala send companies of more than a hundred artists to Brisbane for extended seasons, they bring with them technique, repertoire knowledge, and pedagogical traditions that the local arts community can access nowhere else without travelling to the company’s home country. The masterclass model — in which visiting company members teach Queensland pre-professional dancers, students, and emerging artists — functions as a direct transfer of institutional knowledge. It creates, in every visit, a small cohort of Queensland artists who have been trained by the world’s leading practitioners in their discipline.

As a producer, QPAC broadens the choice of live performance available to Queenslanders through creative development and investment in signature programs including the QPAC International Series, Out of the Box and First Nations Program, and the presentation or co-presentation of a diverse range of local, national and international artists and companies. As an investor, QPAC both collaborates with commercial producers on national and international tours and nurtures emerging artists through pathways to professional development. This positioning — as simultaneously venue, producer, and investor — means that the International Series functions as more than a booking. QPAC has skin in the outcome, and the developmental logic of each visit is designed to compound over time.

QPAC’s Friends of International Series plays an important role in the future of the program, contributing to ensure the program has multiple points of connection with Australian artists and audiences. Funds raised will help emerging young Australian artists engage with world-class productions, provide relevant programs that offer high quality artistic experiences, enhance arts learning with audiences and the public and demonstrate leadership in thinking and practice.

THE PANDEMIC INTERRUPTION AND WHAT IT REVEALED.

The QPAC International Series was not immune to the disruptions that reshaped cultural institutions globally after 2020. The QPAC International Series 2020 did not proceed due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This had been anticipated to be a particularly significant year: to celebrate a decade of QPAC International Series performances, Queensland was to exclusively welcome back the world-famous dance company that kicked the Series off in 2009, the Paris Opera Ballet. The cancellation of the 2020 season was a material loss — not merely a scheduling inconvenience — because the logic of the Series depends on continuity and accumulation. Each visit deepens relationships, extends reach, and builds the reputational infrastructure that makes the next invitation possible.

The pandemic years also revealed something instructive about the programme’s deeper value. In the absence of the Series, there was no equivalent substitute available. No digital experience, however refined, could replicate the encounter between a Brisbane audience and a hundred-strong international company performing at full scale on a live stage. The Series was missed in proportion to the gap it left — which is the most honest measure of any cultural institution’s significance.

"Culture reflects who we are and guides us towards what we want to be."

That sentence, drawn from QPAC’s own institutional philosophy as published on its national and international partnerships page, describes the precise function of the International Series. The selection of which companies to bring, from which countries, performing which works, is not culturally neutral. It reflects a set of values about what Queensland aspires to be in the world — a state that engages seriously with the full breadth of global performing arts traditions, not selectively and not superficially.

THE NEW GLASSHOUSE THEATRE AND EXPANDED CAPACITY.

The structural context for the International Series has shifted significantly with the opening of the Glasshouse Theatre in March 2026. The opening of the Glasshouse Theatre in March 2026 has made QPAC the largest performing arts centre under one roof in Australia. The $184 million Glasshouse Theatre was funded with Queensland Government investment of $159 million and $25 million from QPAC.

Designed by Blight Rayner Architecture in partnership with Snøhetta, the 1,500-seat venue makes QPAC the largest performing arts centre under one roof in the country and capable of presenting world-class ballet, dance, symphony, opera, theatre and musicals to the same standard. The acoustic and technical ambitions built into the design are directly relevant to the International Series. Companies of the calibre that the Series regularly attracts have exacting technical requirements; a venue that cannot meet them is a venue that cannot extend the invitations. The Glasshouse Theatre was designed, in part, with exactly this capacity challenge in mind.

This 1,500-seat theatre gives QPAC greater capacity to attract world-class talent and Australian exclusives to Queensland and forges its reputation as one of Australia’s biggest and busiest cultural precincts as it moves towards the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The new venue paves the way for QPAC to increase its visitation by an extra 300,000 people to 1.6 million visitors per year. For the International Series specifically, additional venue capacity means larger audiences for exclusive seasons — which in turn means stronger economic cases for securing companies that have previously been reluctant to commit to the cost of travel for what Brisbane’s earlier configuration could accommodate.

The idea of undulating the Glasshouse’s glass façade emanated from a prose-poem written by Aboriginal Elder and artist Lilla Watson which referred to ripples of the Brisbane River and fish swimming underneath the surface. The architectural and cultural intent are woven together: a building that embeds First Nations narratives into its skin, while simultaneously enlarging Queensland’s capacity to host the world. The two things are not in tension. They reflect a coherent civic vision of a city that is deeply rooted and genuinely open — the same paradox that the International Series has been navigating since its first season.

APPROACHING 2032: A CULTURAL READINESS ARGUMENT.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games cast a long shadow forward over everything QPAC is doing in this period. The Glasshouse Theatre’s explicit positioning as part of the city’s cultural infrastructure for 2032 is not rhetorical inflation; it reflects a genuine and practical logic. The Crisafulli Government is delivering a plan for Queensland’s future through a thriving creative scene and world-class visitor experience in the lead up to Brisbane 2032.

For the International Series, this context sharpens the argument for sustained investment. The audience that will attend Brisbane 2032 is not limited to sports spectators. It will include a global community of visitors and broadcasters, cultural commentators and diplomats, people whose impressions of Queensland will be formed not only by what happens in stadiums but by what they encounter across the city’s cultural institutions. QPAC’s reputation — built in part on the fifteen-plus year record of exclusive international engagements — is part of the cultural readiness that a host city can credibly present to the world.

Since opening in April 1985, QPAC has delivered exceptional arts experiences for more than 30 million people through 33,500 shows and performances. That four-decade record, and the International Series within it, represents not just a cultural achievement but a civic one: the persistent demonstration that Queensland takes its performing arts life seriously enough to secure the world’s finest companies and to build the institutional infrastructure that makes those visits meaningful and lasting.

Located in a thriving cultural and educational precinct at South Bank, QPAC is a Statutory Body of the Queensland Government — which means the International Series is, in the most literal sense, a public investment. Queensland taxpayers, through the Queensland Government’s sustained funding of Tourism and Events Queensland’s involvement in the Series, are co-investors in every exclusive international season that lands on QPAC’s stages. The return on that investment is measured not only in tourism dollars — though those have been substantial — but in the accumulated cultural confidence of a community that has seen the world’s finest companies perform, consistently and exclusively, on home ground.

WHAT EXCLUSIVITY MEANS FOR A CITY.

The word “exclusive” appears throughout QPAC’s public account of the International Series, and it is worth examining what the institution means by it and why it matters. Every company in the Series’ history — from the inaugural Paris Opera Ballet through to Ballet Preljocaj’s 2025 return — has performed exclusively in Brisbane during its Australian visit. Not in Sydney. Not in Melbourne. Brisbane alone.

This is a deliberate inversion of the usual hierarchy of Australian cultural touring, in which the major international companies arrive in Sydney or Melbourne and Queensland, if it is served at all, receives a reduced or subsequent visit. The International Series was designed to challenge that assumption. It signals, through consistent institutional action over many years, that Queensland has both the ambition and the capacity to secure primary relationships with the world’s leading performing arts institutions — not as a secondary market but as a primary one.

The implications of that position compound. Companies that have performed exclusively for Queensland audiences develop real institutional relationships with QPAC. Those relationships make future invitations easier to extend and more likely to be accepted. Ballet Preljocaj, renowned for pushing the boundaries of ballet, returned to Brisbane in 2025 for its second exclusive season for QPAC’s International Series. A returning company is not just a second visit; it is evidence that the first visit created something worth returning to. That is the architecture of genuine cultural relationship, not transactional booking.

The QPAC International Series is a way to engage in a creative, cultural and intellectual exchange between communities from different countries and the various diasporas that make up contemporary Australia. That framing acknowledges something that matters enormously in Queensland’s particular civic context: the state’s population is itself internationally constituted. Queenslanders with Russian heritage, Italian heritage, French heritage, Cuban heritage, German heritage — all the countries from which International Series companies have come — encounter something specific and moving when a company from their ancestral cultural tradition stands on the stage of the Lyric Theatre. The Series is not only for those who can name every work in the classical ballet canon. It reaches into community experience in ways that conventional arts programming rarely does.

PERMANENCE, IDENTITY, AND THE CIVIC RECORD.

The Queensland Performing Arts Centre does not exist only in the memory of those who have attended its performances. It exists in the civic and institutional record of the state — as a statutory body, as a cultural institution with forty years of documented programming, and increasingly as a subject of permanent digital identity. The emerging onchain namespace qpac.queensland represents exactly this: the possibility of a permanent, verifiable civic address for QPAC’s identity in the digital layer of Queensland’s cultural infrastructure — an address that is not contingent on any commercial platform, any renewal cycle, or any decision made by parties outside Queensland.

That kind of permanence matters for cultural institutions in a way that is often underappreciated. The International Series has generated a record — of companies, seasons, community events, masterclasses, regional screenings, economic impacts — that deserves to be anchored to a stable identity. The Series began with the Paris Opera Ballet in 2009 and has since documented the passage of some of the world’s most historically significant performing arts institutions through a single city in Queensland. That record is part of Queensland’s cultural heritage. The civic infrastructure that preserves and presents it should be as durable as the record itself.

As Brisbane moves towards 2032, the International Series is positioned not as a luxury feature of Queensland’s cultural life but as a structural component of its civic claim on the world. The exclusive seasons at QPAC — past, present, and forthcoming — constitute, in aggregate, an argument about what this city is. They represent the answer Queensland has been constructing, one extraordinary season at a time, to the question of whether a city on the subtropical eastern coast of Australia can be, on its own terms and without apology, a genuine participant in the global performing arts conversation.

The answer, accumulated across fifteen years and the stages of the Lyric Theatre and now the Glasshouse, is plainly yes. qpac.queensland is where that record, and that argument, lives permanently — a civic address commensurate with the institution’s standing in Queensland’s cultural life, and with the seriousness of purpose that the International Series has demonstrated since its founding season in 2009.