by Helen Garner
Half an hour later I walk out of the building into hot sun, in the wake of three dancers. The middle one is the girl from the fitting room. On either side of her strolls a boy from the corps. I follow them, admiring their slender hips and loose, free, maritime gait. They’re dressed in the street clothes you’d see on any slummock their age, but they walk like physical aristocrats, striding easily and with a flow. I speed up to pass them. They’re talking about food. ‘Chips,’ says one. ‘Crisps,’ replies another. ‘Camembert.’ At the end of three graceful arms burn three cigarettes.
My last moment of glory this week is to watch two versions of another scene from Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake: the Prince’s pas de deux with a certain Baroness, the older woman who draws him away from Odette, his innocent young wife. The first pair is Heathcote with fellow principal Lynette Wills. Wills appears in the studio in perfect makeup, a stiffened fringe and a bun. She is everyman’s fantasy of the ballerina—ethereal, otherworldly, evolved differently from the rest of us. She is tall, and thin, thin, thin, with tiny breasts and endless limbs and elongated fingers, feet that curve outrageously, immense eyes, pale flawless skin, and a large mouth—features so generous that they threaten to overburden her fragile face. At thirty-three Wills is thought of as a mature dancer. She has not performed for six months since hip surgery, but the flexibility of her joints is terrifying. One admiring critic has described her legs as ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
Once the piano starts, the fantasy dissolves and the real woman emerges. She and Stephen Heathcote know each other on a deep professional level: they are two masterly artists in full flower. Their dance, a daring and very sexy sort of tango, is full of adult darkness, a flirtation you know can only end by tearing somebody’s heart out.
But then the second pair takes a turn: Matthew Lawrence and Lucinda Dunn. It’s astonishing to see how differently they dance the exact same steps. Younger, cheekier, juicier, they bring to the scene a less tragic mood. This Prince and this Baroness are still robust enough to survive whatever they will do to each other. They sizzle, while Heathcote and Wills smoulder. Dunn is more rounded than Wills, even bosomy, but Wills’s dancing has a devastating, deep, mature sexiness that you would not imagine residing in such an attenuated body.
This is when I realise that these last five days have made me a convert. I rush straight home and book a flight to Brisbane. I have to see this ballet on stage. I can’t bear not to.
That night a violent storm batters Melbourne, uprooting huge elms and wrecking buildings. At 3 a.m. the wind wakes me to thoughts of death and destruction. I can’t get back to sleep. It’s shaping up to be a night of horror. The only thing that calms me is to think of the dancers, to try to find meaning in them and what they do.
I like to remember how eager and fearless the young ones are, while those in their thirties, already past their peak (though not their prime) and having learnt the painful lessons of injury, seem to radiate reason and patience—yet something in them, too, is still burning, a tough spirit under rigorous self-command.
And it heartens me to recall how, at the end of each morning’s class, the dancers split into bunches of four or five and rush in diagonal leaping surges across the studio. Group after group they come, without pause or hesitation, driven by the music in an endless stream of energy. They manifest the tremendous onwardrushingness of life, which has only one destination and yet constantly renews itself, full of a joy that transcends words.
2005
With the exception of ‘Whisper and Hum’, ‘Before Whatever Else Happens’ and ‘Suburbia’, the stories in this collection have previously appeared in the following publications:
‘Some Furniture’, Kitchen Table Memoirs, ABC Books/Harper Collins, 2013
‘White Paint and Calico’, Monthly, 2005
‘Dear Mrs Dunkley’, Sincerely, Women of Letters, Penguin, 2011
‘Eight Views of Tim Winton’, Tim Winton: A Celebration, National Library of Australia, 1999
‘Notes from a Brief Friendship’, Singing for All He’s Worth: Essays in Honour of Jacob Rosenberg, Picador, 2011
‘From Frogmore, Victoria’, Monthly, 2007
‘My Dear Lift-Rat’, Age, 2005
‘While Not Writing a Book’, Monthly, 2011
‘Red Dog: A Mutiny’, Monthly, 2012
‘Funk Paradise’, Age, 2011
‘Dreams of Her Real Self’, My Mother, My Father, Allen and Unwin, 2013
‘Punishing Karen’, Monthly, 2005
‘The Singular Rosie’, Monthly, 2014
‘The City at Night’, Monthly, 2012
‘The Man in the Dock’, Monthly, 2012
‘On Darkness’, (address to Sydney Writers’ Festival), Monthly, 2015
‘The Journey of the Stamp Animals’, Lost Classics, Vintage Canada, 2002
‘Worse Things than Writers Can Invent’, Independent Monthly, 1995
‘How to Marry Your Daughters’, Age, 2013
‘X-ray of a Pianist at Work’, Independent Monthly, 1994
‘Gall and Barefaced Daring’, Introduction to Bush Studies, Text Publishing, 2012
‘The Rules of Engagement’, Monthly, 2006
‘The Rapture of Firsthand Encounters’, Introduction to Forty-One False Starts, Text Publishing, 2013
‘Hit Me’, Monthly, 2005
‘My First Baby’, Elle, 2000
‘Big Brass Bed’, Big Issue, 2007
‘Dawn Service’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2006
‘A Party’, Age, 2004
‘The Insults of Age’, Monthly, 2015
‘In the Wings’, Age, 2005