By Wendy Tuohy
Principal dancer Amy Harris celebrates the Australian Ballet’s 60th birthday.Credit:Simon Schluter
As the Australian Ballet gears up for its 60th anniversary season, subscribers explain what keeps them coming back. From a newly converted enthusiast to a woman first enchanted as a four-year-old, the audience is more mixed than you might expect …
Subscribers meet dancers from The Australian Ballet. From left, Tyler Bindloss, Yvonne Noble, Belle Urwin, Larissa Kiyoto-Ward, Jake Mangakhia, Carmel Brown, Veronica Corrigan and Lucien Xu.Credit:Simon Schluter
Tyler Bindloss
Welder and new subscriber
Tyler Bindloss, a 23-year-old tradesman, had never been to the ballet before the company came out of its year of COVID-19 hibernation to perform Summertime at the Ballet at Margaret Court arena in early 2021.
Though his mother was a pointe teacher, Bindloss had preferred boxing, which his father coached. But when he witnessed the company’s dancers performing the show’s selection of challenging, traditional and modern works, he was completely hooked.
“It was spectacular, it was just incredible,” says Bindloss, a welder and fabricator. “There was this one particular dance, Clay [by resident choreographer Alice Topp]; it was a duet between a male and female [dancers Karen Nanasca and Nathan Brook] – this long story of love.
“They almost never broke contact. It just really touched me – I’d never seen something more beautiful or more heartbreaking. I was transfixed,” he says.
Karen Nanasca and Nathan Brook in Clay.Credit:Jeff Busby
Last year, he bought his first single ticket, to see Instruments of Dance, another program curated by the company’s artistic director, David Hallberg. The contemporary triple bill was, he recalls, “incredible”; and so he subscribed under a discounted offer for under-30s.
This year, he has three tickets each for four productions, and is encouraging mates to broaden their entertainment interests and come with him, putting aside notions that the artform is too highbrow for them.
“People have this weird hesitation to go to something like that; they feel it is very high-class. To them it feels exclusionary, which of course it isn’t,” he says. The athletic ability of the dancers and their core strength help put ballet performances “on another level”, says Bindloss, who competed as a boxer at a national level and represented Australia at international events.
“They’re very unassuming in a way, and then they do something absolutely extraordinary and you’re taken aback … it’s beyond even an elite athlete, just completely beyond whatever I could imagine doing.”
The emotional impact of the performances is also a huge part of the attraction.
“I feel mainly heartache, longing and yearning,” says Bindloss of his responses to the dancers’ work. “There’s just a certain beauty about it. Even as a medium for storytelling, it’s just quite under-estimated.
“Dance is one of the earliest forms of storytelling – the ability to use dance to convey a story without saying any words. You can fill in the blanks in your own mind … There’s a certain amount of that for me with the ballet, it gets to the core of human experience.”
Veronica Corrigan
Doctor and third-generation subscriber
Some of Veronica Corrigan’s earliest memories are of going to the ballet with her mother and grandmother, wearing her special dress as a little girl aged four, with her brother in his tiny tuxedo.
“We’d get dressed up, and you’d sit very still and be very quiet – which not many four-year-olds are capable of, but apparently I was well coached,” says the medical administration registrar.
Fairytales and fantasies “all came to life on stage, it was as real to me as what happened day-to-day”.
“There were princesses living in castles, fighting off monsters and turning into swans, you’re a little kid, and you believe that happens; but unlike reading it in a book, I actually watched it play out.”
The three generations of subscribers would wait for the dancers to exit post-performance, to gather their autographs.
Love your work: subscribers and dancers meet backstage.Credit:Simon Schluter
“Religiously, as a little kid, I would get to go and buy a program and then after the performance we’d go and hang out at the lifts where we knew they come out, and get their signatures,” she says. “We’ve still got the programs, and I still get one and store it away every time.”
In the three decades since then, Corrigan’s connection with the ballet has become so close that as well as meeting dancers and attending post-show talks, she has met the Australian Ballet’s medical and physiotherapy team.Now a ballet ambassador, she has even visited the company’s vast production centre in Altona, where $40 million worth of props, sets and costumes are held.
That one of the world’s busiest companies allows close interaction with its subscribers contributes to the bond they feel to it, she says, and makes the ballet experience “go far beyond just the performance that you buy a ticket to, turn up to and enjoy”.
“They’ve done a wonderful job, compared to when I was a little girl, at opening up every aspect of the ballet for you to explore,” she says.
She still feels transported while watching the company perform, saying: “You can get caught up in those idealised worlds the ballet creates; it’s a heightened reality, but they’re real emotions that we feel.
“I just think the Australian Ballet has done an amazing job of taking what was perhaps seen as very traditional and exclusive, and maintaining the serenity and beauty of it, but also making it accessible to everyone, which I love.”
Carmel Brown
Retiree
Having grown up as one of 11 children living in commission housing, Carmel Brown’s background did not include family subscriptions to arts companies, and she describes herself as “a dabbler”.
“If there was a joint subscription for musical theatre and ballet, I’d go, ‘Wow, that’s for me!’ I do represent people who are a bit more mainstream in their theatre connection, though this other aspect of me just goes, ‘Some people might say it’s elitist, I don’t care, I’m going!’”
Brown, 68, recalls the thrill of being chosen by her father to see prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn at one of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl’s free concerts.
Her interest in ballet came in part from being “singled out to go to the ballet – from a public housing area in Preston”, in part because a neighbour gave the children one pointe shoe (“we pretended we were ballerinas and danced around the kitchen”), and in part from a library book about ballet dancing.
But it was not until she retired recently from her work in criminal justice policy and education, and considered what she wanted from the next stage of life, that Brown decided to make ballet a regular thing.
“Ouch”: David Hallberg in <i>Kunstkamer</i>.Credit:Jeff Busby
She chose her first show well: the acclaimed contemporary ballet, Kunstkamer in 2022, in a production being performed for the first time outside the Nederlands Dans Theater’s home country.
A highly demanding work by four legendary Dutch choreographers, it received critical acclaim here and was striking enough to inspire Brown to buy a D-reserve “create your own” subscription. She chose the show because she wanted to see Hallberg in action.
“I’m a bit of a sucker for seeing the big stars [having also gone to see the French superstar, Sylvie Guillem, on the Australian leg of her farewell tour in 2015].
“I just love being amazed by what people can do.”
Kunstkamer was, she says, “a breakthrough moment in my understanding of dance”.
The moment Hallberg “comes on stage, and he does the splits, and says ‘ouch’” had her sold.
“Another reason why I subscribed was [that] during COVID I started to think, ‘Oh, the [impact on the arts world], God’. So I have been to a few more things, like Hamilton and Hairspray.”
She will see Don Quixote, Giselle and Swan Lake this year, and expects to once again be “completely in it; if not open-mouthed literally, then in my head – and anticipatory. Like, ‘Oh, what’s going to happen next?’
“I just love that feeling of being completely in awe.”
Yvonne Noble
Long-time fan
Yvonne Noble is such a ballet fan she rolls off the names of her favourite dancers like they are friends. Lana Jones, Amber Scott, Dimity Azoury “and Sharni [Spencer a principal artist], she is always going to have a place in my heart”; all elicit joyful memories from a woman who has been coming to see Australian ballet performances since before the company was formed 60 years ago.
For our interview, she has retrieved a stack of programs from shows she has attended over the decades, laying them out on the kitchen bench.
Noble, who is in her 80s, had a long-standing tradition of attending productions with a group of 12 close friends from her home in regional Victoria; just four of them remain.
“From our 30s on, our group has been together… From having two rows of six up in the circle, we moved to premium A seating – none of us could afford that, but it was our thing for the year, that and the Australian Open were the two things we all went for,” she says.
She was the common link among the women, many of whom had met at their church youth group “back in the day”, some via their school and some through their husbands’ shared summer sailing hobby.
The Australian Ballet’s Sharni Spencer and Callum Linnane in Romeo and Juliet.Credit:Daniel Boud
She recalls the time she was accompanying a now-wheelchair bound friend after a show, when they encountered Sharni Spencer and her mother.
“Sharni’s got her beautiful bunch of roses that were presented to her, and we all thanked her because it was such a beautiful performance and we all felt uplifted,” says Noble. “And she came over and gave the flowers to my friend, Susan, and she was so overwhelmed. Not just one rose, which would have made her day anyway, the whole bouquet.”
Noble says she loves the “absolute escapism” of sitting at the ballet.
“We’d had some shocking times on the farm in the midst of the seven-year drought, when I really shouldn’t have been spending money. I thought, ‘I shouldn’t be taking time off doing this’, but it’s uplifting.
“And some of the ballets … you’d come out and you’d look at people; I love seeing them smiling.”
The Australian Ballet’s 2023 season opens with Don Quixote, at Melbourne’s State Theatre, March 15-25, and Sydney Opera House, April 8-25. https://australianballet.com.au/
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