Our History Makers - Graeme Hudson

By Rose Mulready

Perth in the 1950s was generally not a place where boy meets ballet and falls in love. Graeme Hudson got his first taste of dance at the age of nine, when his grandmother asked him to take his three-year-old cousin to her classes. At first he would hang around on his bike outside until she was ready to go home, but as boy students were “like hen’s teeth”, the teacher, Evelyn Hutchings, soon invited him to join in. Hutchings taught musical comedy, a watered-down form of ballet and acrobatics (Graeme would later perform a series of backflips in Roland Petit’s Carmen). Her truck-driver brother helped teach the kids tap-dancing.

Graeme’s father, Ted, was against his son taking dance classes. Ostensibly, the reason was that he couldn’t afford it – he and his wife Norma, had five children – but Graeme wonders if it had something to do with his own thwarted ambition. “My father had wanted to learn dancing when he was a kid, but his stepmother told him, ‘You have to have a pair of black shorts to go to dance classes, and I’m not buying you a pair of black shorts.’ Graeme’s grandmother came to the rescue and paid for his lessons.��



Ted and my Norma loved to dance. Twice a week they’d go to ‘50/50’ dancing, which was old-time ballroom dancing, barn dancing, a bit of modern waltz. They went even after Dad went blind, right up until he died. They were beautiful dancers. Mum taught me to do all the ballroom dances when I was a kid. I could always get up and dance with any of the single women, sometimes with the embarrassment of having my nose at the height of their bosom. But, on a dance floor, I was always in my element.”��

He moved on to a second teacher, Gail Chipper and was soon winning scholarships and even the State Cup, which had never been won by a boy. But now he started splitting his after-school time and weekends between sport – swimming, football, tennis – and dancing. He also passed his Junior Certificate and got a job with the National Bank. At 17, through Chipper, he also got a job with the inaugural troupe of Perth Channel 7 Dancers. While he worked away at the bank, his feet under the desk would be practicing the routines.

At this point, he had still never seen a ballet performance, but the film of West Side Story was a revelation – he went to see it over and over again, and tried to incorporate the style of the dancers into his own work. Then he saw Black Tights, a film of Roland Petit ballets starring Zizi Jeanmaire, it was the first time he’d ever seen real classical ballet, or pointe shoes.

Bill Pepper, one of the Channel Seven Dancers, told him, “Graeme, you know, you’re never going to be a proper dancer until you do ballet.” Pepper took him to do classes with Kira Bousloff, the Ballets Russes dancer who founded the West Australian Ballet, and Diana Waldron, who founded Perth City Ballet. After only a couple of months of studying with them, Ray Powell came to Perth to hold auditions for �������. For Graeme, it was a terrifying experience. “Ray Powell setting all these twiddly steps – I’d never seen anything like it before. I couldn’t do a pirouette. I couldn’t jump properly!” Nevertheless, he was offered a place, and given a bursary to boot. (Graeme would go on to spend “every last shekel” in his bank account and, if not from the support of the School bursary, he could not have started his dream).

Now came one of the biggest decisions in his life to date.�� He had begun doing some ‘Exhibition Ballroom’ with his teacher Gail Chipper, who was only a few years older than him and already a professional State and National Title-winning dancer. Her partner was not strong enough to dance ‘exhibition’, so The Wrightson Dance Studio asked him to partner her, as a professional team. He loved all styles of ballroom dance but it didn’t take long for him to decide that he loved stage dance and ballet more.

Then came the sealer for the offer. Mrs Roberts, who was the student counsellor, student accommodation officer, etc, etc, she took on lots of roles and was a wonderful woman, had been offered by Garth Welch and Marilyn Jones, the ground floor of their home in Carlton.�� It would accommodate 4 students.�� The rental was set to suit those “very poor” students. He accepted the very timely and generous offer and made preparations to travel to Melbourne.

Along with three other WA boys; William ‘Billy’ Pepper, Ron (Erceg) Bekker and Arthur (Smirk) Raymond, who had been accepted by the School, Graeme crossed the Nullarbor in Ron’s old station wagon. (The other Perth boy accepted that year was Neville Burns, who travelled separately). Their first class was with the School’s director, Margaret Scott. “Without Maggie, I wouldn’t have had a career. She taught me about weight, about movement, about jumping, about balance – things that had never even been suggested to me. I credit her with making me a dancer. We were in fear of her, but at the same time, we just adored her. The fear was of not being able to do what she wanted of us. And she wanted us to be good because she loved us.”

Each of his teachers at the School had a different approach to their craft. “Maggie kept technique in her classes really tight and developmental. Paul Gnatt gave us stamina and strength: from his Bournonville training, he worked us really hard: 64 grand battement, then turn around and do it on the other side! Leon Kellaway always had a lot of wonderful tips for us, but he would also have the pianist play something different, and call out, ‘Come on, duckies, let’s all dance today!’ – he gave us that freedom.”

Madame Berezowsky taught them character dance, “such a different musicality and style, which we needed as soon as we stepped into the ballet company, because we had to do ��DZ��é������ and Raymonda. Madame’s classes were an absolute delight. She’d give us Russian steps to do, and she’d say, ‘Come on, my boys, come on – let’s really do this! It is hard!’ We would try and do it, and she’d stand up the front, and she’d laugh, and we would laugh, but by the second year, we were doing all these things that we’d thought were way out of our league. She did it all with humour.”

The School was only a two year course at that stage.�� At the end of his second year, Graeme still thought a professional career in ballet was out of his league. Betty Pounder, who had taught him at the School, was staging the musical Sweet Charity; he auditioned and got in, starting rehearsals a couple of days before his graduation (“Maggie was furious!”) On the second day of rehearsals, Sue Musitz (now Davidson), an alumnus-dancer who now worked on projects at The Australian Ballet, pulled him out of rehearsals to offer him a contract with Athletes and Dancers, a newly formed group that would visit schools, putting on small performances and introducing kids to the art form. (This troupe would later become the Dance Company of NSW, which ultimately became Sydney Dance Company.) Graeme was torn – he had always wanted to do a musical comedy – but when Musitz sweetened the deal by telling him the contract could lead to a place in The Australian Ballet, he couldn’t refuse. Pounder kindly released him from his contract and he embarked on seven months with Athletes and Dancers, along with three other dancers, including Janet Vernon, who would later run Sydney Dance Company with Graeme Murphy, Arthur Raymond and Sonia Humphrey, who later became a journalist and host for ABC art and ballet telecasts. In 1967, when The Australian Ballet returned from its South American tour, he and Vernon were invited to join.

Graeme stayed with the ballet for seven years. He toured to Southeast Asia, Japan, England and Soviet Russia; he was part of the 1970/71 American tour headed by Rudolf Nureyev and Lucette Aldous, and was a dancer in Nureyev’s film of Don Quixote. That notorious shoot was a nightmare for the dancers. Nureyev insisted on real candles lighting the scenes, which created a beautiful ambiance but took ages to light and then we had to get the scenes finished before they burned down too much; and real fruit and vegetables and meat in the peasants’ barrows which, given the Summer heat inside that aircraft hangar, both of these market stands became environmental hazards to sensitive nostrils. “He went and got stallholders from the Victoria Market – they looked fabulous and really knew how to present a fish!” The dancers, driven by the perfectionist Nureyev, had to repeat their performances over and over on concrete floors in the extreme heat. “It was such a hard slog. But we produced a film that was world class. I admired Rudy for what he went through to become a dancer, and his skill, and he made men in dance ‘pop’ – but, as a person … leave me with the image of him as a dancer, but don’t ask me to like him!”

By 1973, Graeme realised that he was never going to get the opportunities he’d dreamed of at The Australian Ballet. He decided to take a training grant from the Australian Council that would qualify him as an administrator. Laurel Martyn and Garth Welch had invited him to work at Ballet Victoria, where they had become co-directors. When he told Peggy van Praagh, the director of The Australian Ballet, she tried to tempt him with a coryphée contract; he was also invited to join stage management, but his mind was made up …he needed to get a ‘proper job’. A ballet dancer’s occupation was not seen as a ‘proper job’ in those days.

Ballet Victoria had two good years (that continued on from its’ many, many successful years under the guidance of Laurel Martyn in its’ previous life as the Victorian Ballet Guild) – including supporting one tour, produced by Michael Edgeley, with guests Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, and another, under BV’s own auspices, with the Kirov exiles Valery and Galina Panov – until it was laid low in 1975 by a financially disastrous visit to New Zealand and embezzlement of funds by two of its employees. Everyone was abruptly laid off, and Graeme decided to embark on study for a Degree in Social Work. (Interestingly, it was the time of The Whitlam Era, when university study was free and because of the circumstances of becoming unemployed, I was eligible for a Government training grant which helped finance me through study. But essentially, for the second time in my adult life, I was penniless again).�� With a brand new degree under his arm, he found great success, as a Graduate Social Worker, at the Department of Immigration, introducing humanising strategies to improve detention facilities and building bridges between isolated refugees and local communities. Most of his time was spent in Sydney but he also took short postings in Melbourne and Port Hedland. When immigration policies became more hardline in the 1980s, he decided to retire. “I couldn’t agree with those policies. I’m a social worker at heart, I’m not a detention officer.”

While he’d been working for the Department, Graeme had also been studying horticulture. After his retirement he set up a gardening business in the Blue Mountains, where he and his partner David had built a house. They’ve spent almost 40 years in their “paradise”, with a 2-acre garden visited by wallabies and lyrebirds.

Graeme and David like to travel. One trip, while in New York, they were at a performance of A Chorus Line when they spotted Janet Vernon and Graeme Murphy sitting two rows in front of them. After the show, the four spent hours reminiscing over Scotch and cups of tea.

In 1992, Murphy had made a contemporary version of The Nutcracker (Nutcracker – The Story of Clara) for The Australian Ballet, based around a (fantasy) Ballets Russes dancer called Clara, who on the eve of her death looks back at her long life. Clara the Elder, a role made on Margaret Scott, has a group of friends (Russian Émigrés) over on Christmas Eve, and those roles were played by age-appropriate dancers.������

“I said to Graeme, ‘If you ever do Nutcracker again, I want to be in it.’ And he said, ‘Grace, you’ve got it.’ A couple of years later, I got a call from him. The Australian Ballet were putting on a season of his Nutcracker.” The Émigrés in that season included Colin Peasley and Audrey Nicholls, who were both 82. Graeme, at 72, was relatively a baby. The experience was glorious. “All my time in retirement, I’d been thinking, if I could just get on that stage one more time – one more time!”

These days, Graeme involves himself in the history of The Australian Ballet, running a Facebook alumni group, putting together an upcoming book of dancer-interviews, and running events for ex-dancers. He is still in contact with ������� and looks back with gratitude on his time there.��

“It gave me a real work ethic. I didn’t know what work was before I came to the Ballet School. It was more intense than anything I had ever attempted in my prior dancing, sporting or academic years. But there was a fulfillment in the accomplishment of that learning, and feedback from lecturers that lead us on to harder tasks.�� When I was dancing, I’ve had people say to me at functions, after performances, ‘Oh, you must be so dedicated to be able to dance like that.’ I didn’t see myself like that, I just liked to dance. But now I realise that we really did have to be dedicated to be at the Ballet School. Many of us were away from the home for the first time; we put yourself into the hands of these people who were going to train us. Now I tell my little granddaughter and goddaughter, ‘Doing ballet is setting you up for life. It teaches you discipline, it teaches you how to multi-task, it teaches you so much about respect for people who have more knowledge than you.’ Dancers are always looking upwards. That was what it was like at the Ballet School. We not only had those wonderful teachers, we had the Company training and rehearsing in the same building … Now, when I’m at the gym, and I see people giving up, I always think, I can do two more. Because as dancers, we always did two more.”

��

Our History Makers – Lynette Wills

By Rose Mulready

��

Lynette Wills was born to be a ballerina – but not in the way you might think. She emerged into the world with a club foot and hip dysplasia, and as a baby spent five months in plaster. The doctors recommended ballet classes to help her realign and strengthen. At first, Lynette didn’t much like them. “There was no dream to start with; it was a necessity.”

��

Her family moved to Canberra when she was seven, and when Lynette started taking classes with the renowned teacher Betsy Sawers, ballet came alive for her – once she’d got over the shock of everyone being so much better than she was. In her first class, she panicked and ran out of the room. But she was soon lured back. Sawers had been a nurse, and “her anatomical understanding was deep. That was clear in her teaching. And the atmosphere of her classes was so enticing, passionate and creative.” Canberra, in the 1970s, was not on the touring schedules of the major ballet companies, but Sawers showed her students videos of the superstars: Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Makarova. Lynette was inspired, and eventually auditioned for �������. She didn’t get in.

��

Every dancer must have determination. “I thought, ‘I would like that no to be a yes!’ My parents were very against me missing any more school, but I begged and begged to have another year, dug my heels in, worked terribly hard, and got in.”

��

Lynette, herself a forthright personality, was immediately struck by the school’s “lively and fiery” founding director, Margaret Scott, who took the first-year students for class once a week. “She had a great respect for the technical base – if you don’t get the small things right, you can’t get the big things right. She was always urging us to keep exploring our technique: to learn more, learn more, stand in first position and learn some more! She was very clear on certain muscular engagements – she was constantly slapping her thighs and calling, “Up here, girls, up here!”

��

The Russian dancer Ai-Gul Gaisina, who embodied the Vaganova technique with its expressive use of the upper body, neck and head, was another favourite. “The way she would speak, her posture – she commanded the room. She always wore a shawl, it was a prop for her to demonstrate the styles and poses.”

��

Most unusually, in an era when girls still vastly outnumbered boys in ballet classes, the intake in Lynette’s year was a perfect split: 20 of each. Pas de deux class was evenly balanced, and further enhanced by the great star Kelvin Coe as the second-year teacher. “The boys loved him – he was a wonderful partner, so he had some great tips and tricks to impart.” Lynette learnt the fine art of building an understanding without words, without even eye contact. “You both have to be constantly listening to each other through touch. It’s like having a conversation through his hands on your waist. You can’t do it for him, you have to trust him and give the control to him.” These days, in pas de deux classes at the School, the teachers have the girls hold the boys up and try and walk them in a circle once or twice, so that they’ll realise the difficulty of finding someone else’s centre of balance, and be patient with their partners.����

��

Lynette and her fellow students took every opportunity to press their noses to the windows where the company dancers were rehearsing, idolising their heroes and dreaming of their futures. Lynette had her favourites: “Lisa Pavane – immaculate, so technically clean, in a class apart. Always Steven Heathcote – I could watch him every day. Miranda Coney – she just embodied characters, lost herself in the stories, abandoned herself to them.”

��

Lynette joined The Australian Ballet in 1991. Her first years with the company were spent under the directorship of Maina Gielgud, who was known for giving big opportunities to young dancers. In her second year, Lynette was cast as Kitri, the lead in Don Quixote – “just one show, but it kept me going for a year.” With her huge almond eyes, high cheekbones, dark hair and long limbs, she became known for fiery roles, villainess roles. She was promoted to senior artist, the rank just under principal artist, but when Gielgud was replaced by Ross Stretton, her career stalled. Even when Stretton was succeeded by David McAllister, Lynette’s peer and friend, he warned her she might not ever reach the principal rank.��

��

Enter a return season of Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake, a bold modern remake of the ballet that had become a sensation. Lynette was eyeing off the role of the Baroness von Rothbart, Prince Siegfried’s ruthless mistress, drawn to its emotional depth and texture. By this time, she had been with the company for a decade. “I finally knew the kind of artist I wanted to be. I had the confidence.” She had to ask twice to be listed as an understudy, but eventually, when all the other Baronesses were injured or sick, she had her chance. In a studio rehearsal, Murphy told her, “Have a go if you like,” and was taken aback to see that she had mastered the solo. “I know it all, Graeme,” Lynette told him. “I know every step. I know the whole ballet.” He gave her a show, and she shone. After her performance in the opening night of the Sydney season, McAllister made her a principal artist.��

��

Good years followed. Lynette danced the Baroness on opening night of The Australian Ballet’s legendary 2005 tour of London. She danced with cherished partners: Robert Curran, Geon van der Wyst, Steven Heathcote. She danced Hanna in The Merry Widow, Princess Aurora in Stanton Welch’s new production of The Sleeping Beauty, and ballets by her favourite contemporary choreographer, Jiří Kylián – “his works take me to another place.” She returned to the stage after her first baby, but after her second, she decided that she’d done enough. “I’d had my time. You can’t do it forever: young people need chances as well.”

��

Despite her enviable career, some of Lynette’s most memorable moments are the ones behind the scenes. “The camaraderie, the silly jokes, the lying around together exhausted in the common room, the high jinks in the dressing room. You make lifelong friends.”

��

For many dancers, the obvious next step after retirement is teaching, but Lynette had always sworn she would never teach. “I was obnoxious about it.” However, she couldn’t resist an invitation to join The Australian Ballet’s Dancing the Dream program, journeying to far-flung regional locations to give the children there a ballet class. “Some of these people had never done ballet, had never seen ballet. It was joyful.” Once again, Lynette had found her dream where she least expected it. She returned to ������� and began learning her trade, sharing a class with Madame Tang Shu, who had studied at the Beijing Dance Academy and had “incredible knowledge – a tiny little person, but unrelenting. Not mean at all – just ‘This is how we do it. Again!’”

��

“I always thought that when I stopped dancing, I’d be sick of ballet, that I’d have to get far away from it. But ballet is really different when it’s not about you. You understand it more, you see it in a different light. Being a teacher is nice, it’s generous, you get to give back. I love nurturing someone’s confidence so they can be their own best teacher. They need to understand what we’re telling them, not just do it because ‘I told you so’. You have to be a thinker. I often ask them, ‘If you were going to teach it, how would you give the correction?’ You have to get them to trust and respect you, and then you can push each other – hard!”

��

These days, ������� is a different place from the school Lynette knew. For one thing, instead of leaving school at 16, the students are kept in an academic stream, and as well as dance learn English, psychology, health, human development and drama. They leave with a graduate diploma that they can, after their dance careers, parlay into further study. Former students have become everything from lawyers to physiotherapists to news presenters. The drive and discipline it takes to become a ballet dancer are highly transferrable skills.

��

As well as technique and artistry, Lynette tries to give her students what they will need to navigate the challenging career of a professional dancer. “Mentally, it’s all about resilience, and about being kind and respectful to yourself when you’re working. We focus on the whole person. The students’ health and wellbeing and happiness is our foremost duty of care. We see a person who dances, not a just a dancer. Whether they make it or they don’t – we try to make the journey a positive one.”

��

A dancer, a photographer, an actor, a teacher, a choreographer, a psychic, an artistic director, a gallery owner: Simon Dow’s remarkable life is a testament to the rewards of staying eternally curious. His travels through his many artistic identities began at �������, where he found a sense of belonging, and taught for 10 years��in addition to creating numerous works as Resident Choreographer.

Our History Makers - Simon Dow

By Rose Mulready

As a child, his great love was movement. Simon’s parents were British, and spent their teens in London, going to the theatre, the opera and the ballet. Like the students in��The Red Shoes, they used to run up the stairs at Covent Garden to compete for the front-row seats of the Gods. “I’m an adopted child. If you feel that adopted children make choices – I chose well. They were the perfect pair of people to see the artist in me and support it.” Simon’s mother often listened to classical music on the radio. “The kitchen was filled with light, and we had a big table. I would move around the table, and under the table, and sometimes over the table. When I was about five, my parents asked me if I’d like to go and take a dance class. We went to this funny little local school in Chelsea, on the bay in Melbourne – jazz, tap and hula, singing – and I was the only boy, which was very common then. There I was, with all these girls, and this lively, energised, inspiring teacher. We tapped, we did ballet, we sang. I loved it, immediately. I’d found a place where they spoke my language. I was very quiet, verbally – deeply shy and introspective. Being physical was my way of interacting with the world.”

��

Simon was a sensitive soul, and his dance career nearly came to an unfortunate end when his teacher forgot to cue his entrance during a recital. He missed the performance, and was so inconsolable that his parents had to stop taking him to lessons. “Now I look back on it, it’s hilarious.”

Fortunately, fate intervened in the form of a Dutch couple who moved in next door. Their daughter was serious about ballet; she and Simon became great friends, and he went with her to classes at the National Ballet School in St Kilda. “That’s where I met some really formative teachers. A lot of them had been with the Borovansky Ballet and other professional companies. They just had this incredible knowledge of character and narrative. They were amazing to be around. I was eight, with all these adults. We did lots of performing. That was important for me. I’m not what is commonly called a classroom dancer: I really like being in rehearsal or on stage, losing myself.”

At that time, The Australian Ballet offered classes for boys. At twelve, Simon was at the barre with the likes of Garth Welch, Gary Norman, Colin Peasley and Brian Lawrence – a necessary antidote to his life outside the studio. “For boys to dance is still an anomaly. It still carries a stigma, to this day. I was mercilessly bullied. I kept it secret for as long as possible, and then, at the age of ten, I won a medal, and it made it into the paper, into the��Age. I was outed. I knew I was alien and unusual, but then��they��knew it. It was just hell. There was hardly anywhere where I could turn where I didn’t encounter taunting, name-calling, physical bullying – and for no good reason, other than my difference. I had a couple of teachers who were wonderful, they were my refuge. One was a music teacher, one was an art teacher. I felt like I could go to them, I felt safe when I was in their room.”

Home was Simon’s other refuge. “I used to perform every weekend. I’d choreograph some big piece in my bedroom, and I’d decorate my room, I’d make costumes. And then I’d let my parents in and sit them down, and they were imprisoned for the next hour! I’d put on what I called ‘pantomimes’ in the back yard. I’d rope in my friends and kids from the neighbourhood. I’d produce it, I’d rehearse them and tell them what to say. And I was such a shy kid!”

At 13, Simon won a Cecchetti Medal; one of the judges on the panel was Margaret Scott, the director of �������, famed for her ability to see potential in young dancers. At 14, Simon auditioned for the School, which didn’t officially take students who were under 15. The panel made an exception. When he opened the letter telling him he’d been accepted, “it was like the whole world tilted.”

Simon had been one of three boys in his ballet school. “Suddenly, there were boys everywhere. I had found my tribe. And the freedom! To walk into an educational institution and know that you wouldn’t be bullied, to feel joy, to wonder what you were going to do that day. It was transformative. I had found my place. It kind of saved my life.”

The School was at that time in a converted tire factory in Flemington, which was freezing cold in the winter, with unreliable heaters that warmed you only when you stood right under them. With limited room, the School and the company saw a lot of each other. Simon’s idols wandered the hallways. “You could peek into the studios, and you would see them working on things, and being fallible, so you learnt that dancing was a process.”

Margaret Scott was one of his teachers. “Talk about a passionate, fiery human! She had moments of being incredibly gentle and kind, but there was a wildness in her. She could come across as being very demanding, because she felt so strongly about things. I was terrified, sometimes, by the magnitude of her wildness, but I loved it – it was riveting, and so inspiring. I like to think I have a little of that about me when I’m interacting with my students. One thing Maggie had in spades was curiosity, which has always been a big driver for me as well. She would often ask you for completely different things, every day for a week. At one time she had this thing about the pelvis. ‘Darlings, we’ve got to learn how to lock it in the pubis.’ Of course, we were teenage boys, so we lost it.”

Jurgen Schneider, a celebrated teacher born in East Berlin, taught his boys the Vaganova method. “He was unrelenting, a detail person. He would come over and take your head and yank it into the right position. A real taskmaster, but boy, did we improve, and get stronger and faster.” Bruce Morrow was “a beautiful human, a gentle, kind, supportive man. He and his wife and their three children were all dancers. He always had a lot of keys in his pockets, and I remember them jingling as he’d demonstrate steps.” Leon Kellaway, who taught ballet and mime, “had a very particular nose – he looked a bit like a koala. He was wonderful: funny and eccentric. He walked with a cane, which he’d bang on the floor, and he’d tell us, ‘You have to make them believe!’ He had very bad arthritis, his fingers were twisted, so if he pointed at you, you were never sure that he was��actually��pointing at you. He smoked a lot, always a cigarette in those gnarled fingers.”

Another heavy smoker (there were ashtrays on the wall by the barre) was the Russian teacher Marina Berezowsky – Madame – who taught character dancing. “Always a cigarette, always a glint in her eye, and she loved teaching the boys.” Jack Manuel, the contemporary teacher, had a background in television, and choreographed a special duet for Simon and Roslyn Watson, the School’s first Indigenous student.

Over one summer, Simon grew four inches, and was partnered with Natasha, a tall Russian girl. They both had long limbs, but Simon hadn’t grown into his. In a presage lift, “she started to tilt backwards and just fell out of my hands. It was awful! But she wasn’t hurt, and she was very nice about it.”

At the end of the two-year course, Simon was still only 16. Maggie told him, “Darling, you’re like a soft, floppy puppy, frolicking through the fields. You’re so young – I think you need another year. I see something special in you, but you need more time.”

At that time, the School would teach its students the corps de ballet parts from the repertoire that The Australian Ballet was doing. That way, if there were an injury, the senior students were ready to step in. Simon stepped in to some amazing opportunities – he was a courtier in Peggy van Praagh’s production of��The Sleeping Beauty��when it opened the Sydney Opera House in 1973 – and was soon offered a contract with the company. Shortly after he joined, Anne Woolliams came out from Stuttgart Ballet to stage John Cranko’s��Romeo and Juliet.

“Anne, for me, was an absolute magician. She brought so much out of people, and she saw who you were. She had eyes that just went right in. She was very demanding, like Maggie was, like Peggy, like Helpmann, like Nureyev – he had it in spades! – they were lit. They were on fire. Anne pulled me out of the corps to do Carnival King – I was 17, and I’d only been in the company for three months. She saw something in me, some craziness, and chose me to dance first cast.”

Watching Anne work with the principals – Marilyn Roe, Kelvin Coe, Lucette Aldous, Marilyn Jones, John Meehan, Gary Norman – was a revelation. “I remember thinking, I want that: I want someone to work with me that way. Then Stuttgart Ballet came out on tour, and I saw Cranko’s��Onegin, and that was it for me – I thought, I have to go to Stuttgart. Those dancers were inhabiting roles with a depth that I’d always known was possible. That’s not to say that our dancers weren’t extraordinary. Marilyn Rowe – I saw her do things on stage that were so wild and uninhibited – she would make sounds, sometimes. It was so beautiful to see. I wanted more of that.”

Simon had only been at The Australian Ballet for two years. Robert Helpmann, one of the co-directors, had been a mentor. “Bobby saw himself in me. He’d grown up in Mt Gambier in the 1930s, as a stranger in his environment. He took me under his wing. Seeing him perform as Don Quixote at the Princess Theatre, seeing him do��Cinderella��with Frederick Ashton, had been formative for me. When I went to tell him I was leaving, he tried really hard to convince me not to go. He offered to promote me, and talked about casting me as the lead in a revival of his��Hamlet. (I was 19!) But I had to go.” He bought a one-way ticket to Germany. “I knew I wasn’t coming back.” He was accepted by Stuttgart Ballet, and stayed there for four years.��

“I was very lucky. I worked with such deeply committed artists. Anne was there for first two years. People loved her, and feared her. Like Maggie, she was this strong, powerful force, and she insisted that you leave ‘blood on the floor’. She would be your mother, and then she would be the dragon, and then she would be your psychologist, and then the clown – whatever it took to get what she knew was inside you.” Simon also watched, “glued to the wings”, as the company’s artistic director, the Brazilian ballerina Marcia Haydée, danced with the deep emotional truth that had made her the ultimate interpreter of Cranko’s works. He befriended William Forsythe, “a crazy genius” who would become one of the seminal reinventors of the art form, and danced in his first ballets. He toured all over the world. However, although he has since come to love and appreciate Germany, as a young man he found Stuttgart a stifling place to live. It seemed full of restrictions, and many of its inhabitants regarded��Ausländers��– foreigners – with suspicion: it was difficult to find an apartment. On tour in America, he fell in love with the energy, the “can-do optimism, the vibrant physicality of their dancers.” He made the choice to leave Stuttgart for Washington Ballet, a much smaller company with a resident choreographer, Choo San Goh.

In 1981, Simon and his dancing partner Amanda McKerrow, who had just turned 18, went to the Moscow International Ballet Competition. The Cold War was at its height; the woman assigned to be their guide turned out to be a KGB agent. Simon, who found that dance competitions made him uncomfortable, didn’t compete, but danced pas de deux with Amanda. She won the gold medal, and Simon was given a specially created award for the Best Partner of the Competition. The story of two Americans (Simon was assumed to be from the US) who had won the huge and prestigious Russian competition, art transcending politics, captured imaginations back home. Simon and Amanda appeared on the��Today Show��and��Good Morning America. A couple of months later, Simon got a call from Marilyn Rowe, who was directing The Australian Ballet. She had heard from Margaret Scott, who had been one of the judges in Moscow, how well Simon was dancing, and she asked him to rejoin The Australian Ballet as a principal. His first role would be Romeo in Cranko’s��Romeo and Juliet. It was an offer too perfect to refuse.

There were two good years at The Australian Ballet before a back injury he’d suffered in Washington flamed up again, and Simon was told to stop dancing. Needing a complete change, he went to New York and studied method acting with Lee Strasberg, then hit the boards in off-Broadway productions and summer stock. A couple of years later, a friend directed him to a teacher who rehabilitated injured dancers, and Simon was able to return to his first love. He danced as a principal with San Francisco Ballet and Boston Ballet; in 1991 he moved to New York and began freelancing. He danced until he was 46.

His teaching career began in New York, at the fabled Steps studio. He quickly built a devoted following, with up to 100 students in each class. “I had so many characters: there was a wonderful woman in her 60s who used to paint her pointe shoes.” There were dancers from both classical and contemporary companies, including Allegra Kent, one of Balanchine’s most famous ballerinas, who “just used to do her own thing.” Simon began to teach abroad; he studied butoh and photography, he choreographed. Then the 14-year-old who’d staged neighbourhood pantomimes emerged in him as an urge to direct a ballet company. He spent three years as artistic director of Milwaukee Ballet, and another three directing West Australian Ballet. Finally, Marilyn Rowe, who had taken on the directorship of �������, asked him – for the fourth time – to come and teach there. Somewhat perversely, as he’d just moved from a house a short bike ride away from the School to one in the country, he said yes. “It just felt like the right time.”

For Simon, teaching ballet to teenagers is about far more than technique. ‘I would call what I do as a teacher ‘helping people recognise their own beauty’.” Like Maggie, like Peggy, like Anne, he has “X-ray eyes” for the possibilities in his students, and a passionate belief that performing artists must ‘leave blood on the floor’ as they explore the deepest and truest parts of themselves.����

One of the greatest pleasures he finds in teaching is the openness of young people to exploring who they are. “As you become an adult, the mind has a way of hooking into your early life conditioning and locking in who you are. I don’t think an artist can afford to do that – I don’t think any human can afford to do that. I like to encourage risk-taking. I often say to my students, ‘There are no rules.’”

Simon Dow will performed as special Guest Artist in �������’s 60th Anniversary Gala at The Regent Theatre.