So, this tightness, this old scar tissue in the left side of my neck, which I vaguely feel has something to do with the Queensland Ballet…
QB represents the point in my life when I realised that everything had gone irretrievably wrong. I went there to escape a disastrous relationship and a two-year period of lame-assed unemployment induced in my early twenties by the tailspin life had put me into. While in the Australian Ballet I’d lost my religion and my virginity more or less simultaneously, and it was not an entirely happy experience. Things weren’t going well for me in the company either; I was hurt and tight, retreating. I ran away overseas on a study grant from a trust fund, friends of friends, but despite some outrageous behaviour couldn’t break the belief I belonged with that first lover, the one I didn’t much like. I went back; it didn’t work. We couldn’t cure each other’s loneliness, I ended up doing lingerie parades in a seedy bar and bitterness was on the rise, so I ran off to join the first person who’d offer me a featured artist contract.
Which turned out to be Harold Collins. What a character. He used to say of his dance career that the critics called him ‘promising’ until he retired, but he undersells himself. As a director he was quixotic, showing moments of astonishing sensitivity and moments of sheer madness. I know I drove him mad on several occasions. When I first heard he was looking for a principal, Sydneysider that I am, I had to sit down for ten minutes and decide whether I really wanted to go up there, to a second-rate company in a third-rate state (Bjelke Petersen was still in power, just). Then I realised I was in no position to be picky. Lessons in humility.
And god knows, as it turned out I was erratic enough onstage. Occasional moments of brilliance hardly made up for nights of staggering insecurity that whole audiences must have sweated through with me. The other day Leigh Warren said on the phone that he remembers me as someone who could really dance, a natural, a born dancer, and when I got off the phone I burst into tears. He must have seen a good night.
If I’d had any fucking sense I’d've been working with Leigh, but I had ‘classical’ written all over my body and so didn’t know any better than forced navigation of the Byzantine psychopolitics of a ballet company. At least that’s how I see it now. I hadn’t really thought I’d have to manage my own career; I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know how to get help.
How this relates to the neck injury I’m not sure; maybe it began then, in that time of loneliness, loss, uncertainty and struggle. Back then, I didn’t know how to find a mentor. Now, there’s no-one who has done what I’m trying to do…and I’m still learning how to find those who can help me.
