After training with Edouard Borovansky, Laurel Martyn and Paul Hammond, Michela Kirkaldie was accepted into The Australian Ballet School. Her childhood dream of dancing Swan Lake came true during her career at The Australian Ballet, where she achieved the rank of principal artist. She also danced with London Festival Ballet before returning to her home company. At the age of 33, a persistent injury and the urge to have children prompted her to retire from the stage. In 1991, she joined The Australian Ballet School, where she has explored her interest in biomechanics and the foundation of technique as a specialist coach; she also trains teachers.  

As a dancer, Michela Kirkaldie was ahead of her time. In an era when dance training and even professional coaching was often a matter of direction – “Now you put your arm here, now you turn on the diagonal” – she was always seeking more depth, searching for the structure of ballet technique. Today, it’s widely recognised that a detailed anatomical knowledge is the necessary foundation of a dancer’s art. As a teacher of teachers and a coach to The Australian Ballet School’s students, Michela is still sounding the depths of that knowledge.

 

Our History Makers – Michela Kirkaldie

By Rose Mulready

 

Ballet had Michela’s heart from the beginning. At the age of three, she was jumping around the house and over the furniture. “My mother thought, ‘I’ll send her to ballet – that will fix her!’” The school she chose was run by Edouard Borovansky (who also ran the company that would later become The Australian Ballet), and his wife. “Madame Borovansky used to go round the class with a stick and tap you on the bottom!”

 

The taps did nothing to deter Michela. “What captivated me was the music. I’d sit down at home and put on ballet record after ballet record, that beautiful Tchaikovsky. From my earliest recollection, I just wanted to do ballet. There was no other plan. I wanted to be a ballerina, and I wanted to dance Swan Lake. And I did!”

 

Michela had her first experiences of performance when she went to study with Laurel Martyn, who ran the Victorian Ballet Guild. Martyn had a little ballet company, and would give the students small parts in her productions. Michela tasted the adrenaline of the stage, and found it addictive. At the age of 13, she went to study with Paul Hammond. “He was an inspiration, he knew so much about ballet, and would tell us the history of each step. He showed us film of Russian dancers – Galina Ulanova, Yuri Soloviev. They had so much passion, so much gusto, they threw themselves into it – just ate up the stage with their jumps and leaps.”

 

Even though she’d been dancing since she was three, Michela got a shock when she was accepted into The Australian Ballet School. “The first year was hard – I hadn’t done full-time ballet before. Suddenly I was doing ballet all day long, as well as character, contemporary, music … it was a very formal environment, you had a timetable, a school uniform. It was mentally challenging, too, suddenly being in a class with the cream of the country.” Of her teachers at the School, Michela best remembers Douglas Gilchrist and Leon Kellaway, who by that time was very old. “He would sit in a chair with his hands on his stick, and sort of wiggle his fingers, and you’d have to understand what steps he wanted you to do. You got to know the language! He always had a lot to tell us about the art of ballet.”

Although the teachers of the 1970s had much to impart about stagecraft, musicality and emotional depth, they didn’t have today’s understanding of biomechanics. “In those days, we didn’t know what we know now about technique, about the body. We didn’t know about deep abdominals or deep rotators. Our teachers would just say, ‘Spot with your head … point your feet … turn out!’ Yes, but how do I turn out? These days we can tell our students how, and so precisely. For instance, with a pirouette, you’ll teach them how to get onto their axis, how to hold their rotation, how to go into their deep core, how to hold their back, how their back will support their arms, how to whip their head around. We have access to a whole lot more information, a lot of it taken from sports medicine, and it’s wonderful. But in those days we were taught so much about the art of ballet, and what it should feel like to do it.”

 

Michela’s second year was easier. At last, she was learning the choreography for the corps in her beloved Swan Lake, as well as for the wilis in Giselle. She bloomed, and at the age of 18, she was offered a place in The Australian Ballet, along with only one other girl and three boys (an illustrious trio: John Meehan, David Burch and Leigh Warren). What happened to those who weren’t accepted into the company?

 

“Our kids these days are taught how to write CVs, how to reach out to companies, they get a portfolio of photographs and footage. In our day, you’d just sit down with Dame Peggy and she’d say ‘Yes, I want you in the company!’ or ‘No, I don’t want you.’ If you didn’t get in, you had to completely restart your life, all by yourself, often with nothing more than a Year 10 education. Now, we’re a global community, and there are so many other ballet companies to try. But for us, it was The Australian Ballet or nothing. The idea of travelling by yourself, at that age, to Europe and trying to make it there – people just didn’t do it.”

 

As one of the lucky ones, Michela started adjusting to professional life. “Everyone would smoke. The rehearsal rooms were full of smoke! The dancers would carry a matchbox to use as an ashtray. The ballet masters would smoke.” (This wasn’t completely new to Michela – the director of The Australian Ballet School, Margaret Scott, used to smoke while she was teaching.)

 

Peggy van Praagh had lately been joined by Robert Helpmann as co-artistic director, and neither of these huge personalities were best pleased about the arrangement. There was tension in the studio. “Bobby would remember a step being done a certain way at The Royal Ballet, and Peggy would disagree and say it was never done like that.” Company class was crowded. “I’d be in the back and hope that no one noticed me. There was a definite pecking order, and you had to know your place – you would never step in front of a principal.” Nor was there much attention from the ballet staff. “They would deliver the class, and you either picked it up or you didn’t. Once a year or so you might get a correction! I remember Dame Peggy said something to me in class one day and I was so upset – I could feel the tears coming, so I left the room. Kathleen Geldard, one of the principals, came out into the corridor and said, ‘Don’t let her see that you’re upset. Take it on the chin!’ She was so sweet to me.”

 

The performance schedule was another huge adjustment. In 1970, Michela’s first year with the company, The Australian Ballet were performing with Rudolf Nureyev, dancing his Don Quixote at the Adelaide Festival, then embarking on a three-month American tour with him. To the normal rigours of professional life – late nights of performance followed by morning class and hours of rehearsal – was added a relentless touring schedule of six-day weeks with two performances on Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. But when the dancers felt exhausted, they only had to look to their stars, Nureyev and Lucette Aldous, who danced the principal roles in every performance. “I thought, if they can do that, I can dance in the corps! Rudy pushed himself and he pushed us. He never expected more of us than he asked of himself – and that was five hundred per cent. I remember in Don Quixote, we would be dancing in the Dryad scene. It was the only scene that Rudy wasn’t in, and he could have been in his dressing room, resting, but instead he would be walking up and down in the wings, saying, ‘Turn out supporting foot! Hold backs!’ That’s how he kept the standard up through all those performances.” 

 

Nureyev’s film of Don Quixote was filmed in an aeroplane hangar with a concrete floor, at the height of summer, and the set was sweltering. “He went over his solos again, and again, and again, because they weren’t perfect. He’d run to the camera and look at the film, and say ‘No – not good enough,’ and run back to the set to repeat the whole thing.” As well as his work ethic, Nureyev brought new excitement and inspiration to the company, elevating the men’s virtuosity. Aldous was a match for him: “He and Lucette were like fire together – constantly daring each other, bouncing off each other. She really knew what she was doing, and she coached some of us. They were eye-opening, and things really changed during that time.”

 

Michela got more comfortable in the company, learning little tricks like lining up her foot with the heel of the corps de ballet girl in front of her, so that she could be stay in the right position without moving her head. And still, she searched for the roots of technique. The company dancers mainly worked through problems with steps on their own, sometimes helped along by more senior dancers. “Sometimes dancers would practice endlessly, and just cement the fault, and maybe injure themselves … these days we would deconstruct the step, and build it up again.”

 

The dancers bonded on a tour of Soviet states in 1976. Marilyn Rowe and Kelvin Coe had put The Australian Ballet on the Russian radar when they won silver at the Moscow International Ballet Competition in 1973. The company was invited to dance in St Petersburg and Odessa, as well as in Romania, Yugoslavia and Poland. The audiences loved them, but the dancers’ every move was policed, and they would wait for hours to be served grim, watery meals. When they emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, they binged on Coca Cola and Kit-Kats. 

 

The next year, Michela realised her dream: she was cast as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. Anne Woolliams, by then The Australian Ballet’s artistic director, had created a new production for the company. The Marilyns – Jones and Rowe – were first and second cast; Michela was third. But on the night of the dress rehearsal, in front of a full audience, Jones leapt onto stage for her first entrance and promptly snapped her Achilles tendon. Michela and her partner Ross Stretton, who were sitting in the audience, were rushed into their costumes and danced the performance. Both were promoted to principal artist that season.

 

Although she’d reached the pinnacle she’d always dreamed of, Michela was still on a mission to find out more about technique. “I still felt that I didn’t understand how to do things well. I wanted to know how to be consistent and strong.” When Eileen Ward came out from London for a six-week stint of teaching at The Australian Ballet, Michela found the approach she’d been looking for. Ward, a former dancer with Ballet Rambert, had a strong emphasis on the body and was sought out by the likes of the Russian star Natalia Makarova. Michela went to study with her for three months in New York, and followed her to London. Eventually, she joined the London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet).

 

Michela found herself adjusting to another punishing schedule. The company, which constantly toured to regional centres, would leave London on an early-morning train, travel for several hours to cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds, and perform a matinee before travelling home the same day. “It was grim, it was cold, there was very little sunshine. Britain had just joined the common market and all the shelves in the shops were empty, you couldn’t get a fresh apple to save your life. In your ‘digs’, as they called them, you’d need to put money in the gas meter to get hot water, and it would run out before you could fill a bath. I was homesick and miserable.”

 

It was time to return to The Australian Ballet. Michela found that other dancers had returned too – Kelvin Coe, who partnered her in Nureyev’s full-length Raymonda; Simon Dow and Jonathan Kelly, who both danced Swan Lake with her; her old classmate John Meehan, who partnered her in The Lady and the Fool. She worked with Woolliams on Romeo and Juliet and Onegin, two of her dream ballets. But she was troubled by a persistent foot injury that, even after surgery, wouldn’t heal. “I thought – I’m 33. I need to just stop and have a family.”

 

When Michela’s two daughters were old enough, she went back to work as a teacher. She was at the Victorian College of the Arts when Gailene Stock, the director of The Australian Ballet School, invited her to join the staff in 1991. 

 

After years of deep-diving into the minutiae of technique, teaching felt like a natural progression. Michela loved the Vaganova method taught by the school: “It’s such an expressive style, it’s generous and expansive, it’s all about the upper back, the total integration of legs, arms, head, everything.”  She loved feeling out “the different ways in” to each student, assessing the approach that would best help them to learn. “With some it’s questioning. With others you deliver some information then give them time to practise it slowly. With others you don’t say a lot, just look, see what you’ve got, and give the odd targeted comment. Some people really love imagery. Others are more kinesthetic – they concentrate on the sensation in their bodies. Our aim for the students is for them to become self-directed, so they understand how their bodies work and are motivated to explore on their own, and to keep on trying. That’s what you have to do in professional life.”

These days, Michela teaches the teachers in the School’s Graduate Diploma of Elite Ballet Instruction, as well as giving one-on-one coaching to students who are working on particular technical problems. “You need to be able to diagnose, then sometimes deconstruct and rebuild. I love it.”

 

Even after three decades of teaching, she is still learning. “You’ve got to be open, you’ve got to be flexible, and you’ve got to love the art of ballet. Because if you don’t love it, you won’t have the persistence to teach. Ballet is a really slow process. It’s like water dripping on a rock. You have to have resilience. You have to have patience.”