This week out of the blue The Australian commissioned me to interview Maina Gielgud for a feature piece on her return to Australia to remount her famous Giselle. There was, as the arts editor cheerfully put it, no-one else in town who could do it. I could hardly say no — either to the money, the prestige of the engagement, or the chance to confront an old nemesis.
Gielgud began her often-stormy fourteen-year directorship of the Australian Ballet (1983-1996) a year into my own three years in the company. I am supposed to be an articulate and authoritative dance writer, but walking the warren of corridors at the Opera House to interview my former boss, the distinctive smell and texture of the backstage atmosphere is triggering flashbacks, and I am shrinking. I have hardly seen her since I left, apart from one exquisitely awkward moment a year or two later, when we met in the street on a warm Kings Cross evening, both alone; Maina on her way to dinner, me in a white dress selling roses restaurant to restaurant in the direst year of my life. It’s now twenty years on, and so much water under the bridge.
But I still blew the interview. I thought I knew her (I remembered her so vividly) but actually she was this great throbbing blind spot, and I had only the vaguest idea of what she’d done in the intervening years. I couldn’t actually have told you that she’d spent longer in Australia than she’d ever lived anywhere, that she was our longest-serving director till it all went pearshaped and the board declined to renew her contract, or even that she’d left her next three major appointments (Royal Danish, Boston, Houston) early and was freelancing again. Yet I had the temerity not to do any research before the interview.
Not so much temerity, of course, as sheer post-existential terror. I didn’t need research. I was going to a psychic confrontation. She was going to explain herself. I asked polite open-ended questions and got polite friendly answers; she explained herself and her ballet well. I even, outrageously, helped her skirt a hard issue, by saying (I have it on record) ‘I won’t ask’. Thank god I denied being a journalist.
Then of course I started the research and knew I’d fucked up — almost. I did know beforehand that I’d need to ask a couple more questions; I just hadn’t realised what they’d be. She’d been nice enough to give me her number; I had to admit my idiocy but we talked and then emailed. She was generous; I got the information I needed, just in time to get my head around it all and write the damn thing. It’s informative, if hardly incisive. At least I learned something.
Here is the link to the story in Monday’s Australian. I was impressed to see it also had a little par and photo on the main page — golly, I thought, I was expecting to have to search.
Why did I leave, all those years ago? The company itself was in transition; I was restless, uncomfortable, frustrated. Missing class is the cardinal sin in a ballet company; I started misbehaving. Lost, confused about how best to work, I was desperate for a sympathetic mentor: she told me I was talented, cried with me about my troubles, but didn’t like my attitude. I was trying to learn about life: the texture of its mysteries; its diversions and questions and contradictions. She believed we should stick to ballet. The intensity of her belief was legendary. The intensity of my certainty that it wasn’t the right way for me was its equal, but I knew and cared for nothing else except how to dance, and suddenly that was looking shaky.
Because of her famous version of a classic ballet about betrayal, I went to see a woman by whom, let’s say it, I felt betrayed. I stood before her with my customary bare minimum of competence, looked her in the eye, and finally understood. I may or may not have been wrong, but she was right. The pangs of time have taught me a just little grace; I’m ashamed now that the road back from that other, bitter place was so long and hard, but at least, at last, I know it really wasn’t her fault.
