Ty King-Wall came to The Australian Ballet School from New Zealand, and after a career as a principal artist with The Australian Ballet, dancing major classical roles and partnering numerous international guest stars, he returned to the School as a teacher. We spoke to Ty on the eve of him travelling back to his homeland to take up the role of artistic director at Royal New Zealand Ballet.

 

Our History Makers – Ty King-Wall

By Rose Mulready

 

Many young boys fall into ballet by accident, and that’s exactly what happened to Ty King-Wall. Growing up in Tauranga, a rural town on the North Island of New Zealand, Ty didn’t know the first thing about ballet. But when he was seven, a friend from his local primary school started classes, and discovered he would be the only boy there. “He was after some moral support, so he asked me to come along with him. After a few weeks he decided it wasn’t for him – but I took to it from the get-go.” 

Initially, Ty was just enjoying the freedom of movement, but then his mother took him to see a Royal New Zealand Ballet (RNZB) performance of Cinderella. “We were in the cheap seats, right up the back, but I absolutely loved it – being taken to another world, the magic of it all. My mum could see how much I enjoyed it, so she kept taking me to RNZB shows. In that first year, I saw Russell Kerr’s Swan Lake, and I can distinctly remember watching Ou Lu dance Prince Siegfried and thinking, ‘That’s what I want to do when I grow up.’ I couldn’t believe the turns, the jumps, the ballon, but also the storytelling. Both Swan Lake and Royal New Zealand Ballet have a special place in my heart, because from then on I was sold.” It was an hour’s trek to get to the theatre from their country home, but after that night Ty’s mother took him to see all of RNZB’s productions.

As a home-schooled child, Ty managed to avoid most of the abuse that young male dancers often endure from their peers. In his adolescence, he took up field hockey and gymnastics as well as ballet. At the Dance Education Centre in Tauranga, he met a crucially important teacher – Scott Milham – who rekindled his love for the art form. “At the time I had zero technique – I didn’t know how to turn out my feet or stretch my knees. But the great part of working with Scott was that he kept the fire burning for the art form for me – I learnt about virtuosity, and he showed me videos of the greats: Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Bujones, Schaufuss.” With this inspiration, Ty gradually dropped his other pastimes and homed in on ballet.

 

When he was 16, Ty went to Melbourne to audition for The Australian Ballet School. “I got to watch a Level 6 class, and I had never seen so many gents together in one studio – it was a big intake that year. My audition was very intense: I was so green and naïve. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I was such a novice, it was eye-opening! They obviously saw something in me, though.”

 

Like many dancers in their first year (especially boys, who have often been the only male dancer in their school), Ty found his first year at the School something of a shock. Technically, he felt far behind his peers. “My strength was that I was fearless – way before I was ready to do the big turns and jumps technically, I would have a crack. What I didn’t have was the precision or accuracy. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. I was also quite inflexible, which I struggled to overcome.”

 

However, the adversity only strengthened Ty’s resolve. “As a family we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and ballet isn’t cheap. My parents had to make quite a few sacrifices for me to study in Melbourne, even though the School was very supportive through scholarships. It was a big driver for me: I knew I was lucky to be there. I was also competitive, so those factors really brought out the hunger to succeed in me.” 

When Ty began at the School, Marilyn Rowe, the director, had just introduced the eight-year Vaganova curriculum. “It was a very different way of moving for me, and the technical rigour was very high. Vaganova starts with the fundamentals - you repeat and repeat until you master those basics before you move on. Everything is progressively built – there’s no skipping ahead – and that gives you the muscle memory and the instincts for later in your career, when you have to execute in full flight.”

 

Joanne Michel, Irina Konstantinova, Sergey Konstantinov, Michela Kirkaldie, Leigh Rowles, Oleg Timursin and Mark Annear were all memorable teachers for Ty, but perhaps his most formative influence was Dale Baker. “He was very philosophical in the way he taught. Everything had to have a reason: otherwise why do it? You’re just moving in space with no intention. There was a clarity and simplicity in the way he delivered information that made it really easy to understand. And as a pas de deux teacher he was second to none.

 

“One of his catchphrases was ‘Ballet’s simple, but it’s not easy’. Another was ‘Ballet’s like golf’, which I never understood until I started playing golf myself. In ballet, with pirouettes for example, it’s like a golf swing: you’ll come in and analyse it, you’ll break it down, and you’ll feel like you’ve cracked the code; then you come back the next day and do what feels like the exact same thing, and it doesn’t work at all. It’s infuriating! Ballet is very technical, and it’s easy to over-analyse, but you do need to remember that ultimately it’s about dancing, and that’s about freedom. Don’t over-complicate things!”

 

His years at the School gave Ty an awareness of what it takes to be a professional dancer. He watched The Australian Ballet’s rehearsals, and also performed as an extra in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake (he remembers being knocked off balance in a jump by the dancer behind him and falling over on centre stage, much to his embarrassment). Every chance he got, Ty took up opportunities to watch the company dance at the State Theatre, seeing four or five different casts for each production. “You were constantly reminded of where you were going and what it was going to take to get there. I would watch, and watch, and watch, and that’s so valuable. These days, with the amount of stimulation in our digital world, our attention spans have really contracted. We want everything now, but there are no shortcuts in ballet – it takes time and patience to do it well.” 

 

In 2006, when he was offered a contract by the company, Ty realised that all his years at the School were only the beginning of his watching and learning. “I went from performing grand pas de deux to holding a spear up the back – which is all part of it, as a first-year corps dancer. I was always quite a shy kid, and when I first joined the Company I was pretty quiet, I tried not to get in anyone’s way! I learnt so much in that first year though – we didn’t have smart phones back then, there were no mobiles in the studio, so in those long rehearsals when I wasn’t dancing, I’d just spend the time watching the action up front. I was fortunate to have an amazing generation of male dancers as role models in the company at the time: Steven Heathcote, Robert Curran, Matthew Lawrence, Damien Welch, Tim Harbour, Marc Cassidy – it was a master class not only in dancing, but in partnering and character development.

 

“As a young dancer I hadn’t been interested in partnering, I was obsessed with virtuosity. I didn’t have the maturity to know what it took to build a character and be a strong, reliable, supportive partner, or to realise how rewarding that could be. In my first year the penny dropped, and I realised that becoming a confident partner would open up all the doors.”

 

 Ty’s first big opportunity as a company dancer was with the School. He was invited back by Marilyn Rowe to partner a promising graduating student, Stephanie Williams (who would go on to dance with The Australian Ballet and American Ballet Theatre), in an adaptation of Anne Woolliams’ Swan Lake. It was his first full-length ballet. The performance was danced outdoors at the Myer Music Bowl in 40-degree heat, and dancers were fainting on stage; he and Stephanie managed to keep their feet. The next year, in The Australian Ballet’s gala program, Ty danced the pyrotechnic Diana and Acteon pas de deux with Miwako Kubota. “As a young dancer, I was fortunate to work with a number of principal artists – Kirsty Martin, Rachel Rawlins, Danielle Rowe. My first principal role with the company was partnering Dani in Stanton Welch’s The Sleeping Beauty. Drawing on their experience was so formative in my early years as a professional.” Ty also made a splash dancing with Lucinda Dunn in the first-night cast of Graeme Murphy’s The Silver Rose. “It was definitely intimidating – Luci is such a legend of the company. But she was so supportive and encouraging.”

 

The dramatic increase in workload and travel was “a shock” for Ty’s body. He tore the meniscus in his knee in his early years with the company, and later found himself with a herniated disc in his lumbar spine. “Genetically, I think my body was predisposed to that injury, and I probably took on too much work, too early. I was hungry for it, but I think I was too keen for my own good: I didn’t know my limits. And there were a few technical deficiencies in the way I was working that I hadn’t addressed. The combination of all of these things was a perfect storm that led to my back injury, which was almost career-ending. The first time, I was off for six months; then, two years later, it went again and I was off for eight months. That was very confronting. Your whole career, your identity is bound up in your body. It’s all you’ve ever known. But going through that experience makes you truly understand how much the art form means to you.”

 

With the help of the medical team, Ty worked back to full strength. He particularly credits working with sports psychologists, who helped him identify the mental components of pain and develop strategies to improve pain management. He returned to the stage in 2014 in the lead role of George Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial.

 

Other career highlights include being promoted to principal in 2013, after a performance of Don Quixote with Leanne Stojmenov, and partnering illustrious international guest artists like Marianela Núñez, Stella Abrera and Gillian Murphy. “Building a rapport and chemistry with your partners – there’s nothing like it, and it’s the thing I miss the most about dancing.” When the American Ballet Theatre star Ethan Steifel was directing RNZB, he invited Ty to guest with the company in Russell Kerr’s Swan Lake, the ballet that had first captured his imagination. “It was such a surreal experience – it was like I could see and feel my younger self up in the Gods watching – it was a real full-circle moment.”

 

After having two daughters with his wife Amber Scott, a fellow principal artist, Ty started thinking about winding down his career. “The Australian Ballet is very supportive of parents and it is such a family-friendly environment now: introducing the parental leave policy was a game-changer and allowed parents to continue their professional careers. But it is tremendously difficult, being in a touring company, and sustaining the constant movement between Melbourne and Sydney, with a young family.” He retired in 2022, dancing his last role with Valerie Tereschenko in Yuri Possokhov’s Anna Karenina.

 

Rather than take a breath, Ty was eager “to keep my feet moving, to have something to do. I was really happy to get the call from Lisa Pavane asking me to teach at the School, and so lucky that the opportunity to return arose.” Ty worked alongside some of his former teachers, absorbing their wisdom, and learning not only the art of instruction but the importance of managing the students’ personal ups and downs. “That can be a real emotional rollercoaster, and it’s exhausting to go on that ride – you learn to be that constant, a solid rock for them, every day.”

 

Returning to his alma mater as a teacher was a precious experience. “The opportunity to close the circle was amazing, I wish I could have done it for longer.” But after nine months, Ty was offered the artistic directorship of RNZB – and leapt at it. “As that seven-year-old in the Gods … if you told me then I’d one day I’d be artistic director of the company, I would never have believed it. Starting out in the role, I felt that responsibility on my shoulders immediately – not in a bad way, that’s exactly where it should be. You’ve got a company of dancers and staff, you want to look after them and get the best outcomes for them. But also, you’re a custodian, you have a responsibility to look after the history of the company, everything that’s been built by the previous generations, and carry that forward into the future.”