The ballerina that won the purple Wiggle’s heart
A joyously happy Dana Stephensen has her career as a senior ballerina dancing along, a gorgeous son she adores, and a new-found love with the purple Wiggle.
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HER ARMS move delicately through the air as she gracefully glides on the tips of her pointe shoes across the room to the ballet barre. Her hair is pulled tight into a neat bun, not a strand out of place.
Her white tulle skirt swishes with every move she makes. Plie, pirouette, sauté. Again.
Brisbane-born ballerina Dana Stephensen is lost in dance. She always has been.
For the past 16 years, Stephensen, 34, has been dancing with The Australian Ballet, performing up to 200 shows a year.
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Now, as a senior artist with the company, she’s become one of their longest serving dancers, touring the country and the world, performing show after show.
It’s a career Stephensen has sacrificed so much to build.
Along the way she’s been faced with crippling setbacks, almost giving dancing away in her 20s after an ongoing battle with an auto-immune disease.
She’s also had to learn how to navigate the demanding world of dance at the same time as being a mother to her four-year-old son, Jasper.
But as much as the life of a dancer has been tough, she wouldn’t change a thing because it’s given her everything she ever wanted.
Especially so recently, after dance led her to finding love with popular Australian entertainer and purple Wiggle, Lachlan Gillespie.
“He’s just amazing and I just love him so much,’’ says Stephensen of Gillespie, who she met filming with The Wiggles in early December 2018.
As she opens up about the relationship, it’s clear the pair are in a very happy space.
“I remember being really excited to get selected for the filming, and to tell Jasper that I was going to work with The Wiggles,’’ she says.
“Then I walked in and it felt like another world – it was an amazing experience in itself – but Lachy and I just had a really beautiful connection straight away. It was between us, but after the fact quite a few people noticed.’’
The pair’s relationship came after Gillespie’s very public split with former wife and fellow Wiggle, Emma Watkins, in August 2018.
They were the golden couple of Australia’s entertainment industry and seemingly picture perfect and their marriage breakdown made headlines across the country. But both Watkins and Gillespie have bounced back in a way only a Wiggle could.
Last year, Watkins opened up on her new love with musician Oliver Brian (who is in the wider Wiggle circle) and spoke of her delight in her former husband finding love with Stephensen, someone she had predicted would be “perfect” for him.
“The way they are together and the way they look at each other, well, there’s something very special there,” Watkins told U on Sunday last year.
“She’s wonderful for him and he’s wonderful for her.”
A private Stephensen prefers a quiet life away from public attention, but she’s acutely aware of who she’s fallen in love with.
“He is a well-known and an extremely well loved public figure on such a massive level, and part of a group that makes children and families so happy, but we’re also just us – living our interesting, busy life,” she says.
When she says “busy”, she’s not understating the disciplined and hectic schedule. But having been a dancer most of her life, she has never known life any other way.
Stephensen discovered dance at the age of three, when a teacher at her big sister’s dance class in Mansfield noticed her bopping away at the back of the class.
“She told my mum, ‘I think she really wants to dance’, and that was how I started,” she laughs.
It is a profession that has required huge sacrifices from Stephensen. At 16, after a year at the Queensland Dance School of Excellence, she left the family home in Carina Heights and moved to Melbourne to train at the Australian Ballet School.
She completed her final year of schooling while at the School, doing a few subjects
by correspondence.
“It was a pretty big step,” Stephensen says.
“I was very lucky, my mum came with me for the first six months, which I was very grateful for because it was a massive transition.”
She was young and struggled to cope at times as she faced moments of homesickness and doubt. But she knew what was needed to become a senior ballerina. And she was determined
to succeed.
“Ballet is such a discipline, and people (who) want to further their career in dance have to make that decision,” she says.
“You need the drive and determination that I guess helps you make that big decision to move interstate to do full-time training.
“I was so young, but the Australian Ballet School looks after you. It was a really big time, you are at an impressionable age and it’s a massive time of growth as you’re taking in so
much information.”
Stephensen, who was so clearly born to dance, isn’t sure where the notion to become a ballerina came from. There are no dancers in her Brisbane-based family – older brother Drew is an engineer, and older sister Bree, who she used to tag along with to dance classes, is now a surgeon.
“I’m the arty one,’’ Stephensen laughs, “but mum (Glenva) and dad (Merv) are very proud of all of us.’’
But the life of a ballerina is complex and not for the faint-hearted. It’s physically and mentally demanding. For Stephensen, it’s taken great sacrifices to get there and she knew it was never going to be just a profession but a way of life.
“You really have to look after yourself – the Australian Ballet is one of the busiest touring companies in the world,” says Stephensen, who is in the studio six days a week.
“200 shows a year, and it’s my 16th year now, you add that up now over all those years and that is a lot of classes and rehearsals – it’s quite a busy schedule.
“That does mean you have to look after yourself, to enjoy a career now and into the future. I’m quite strong in my build naturally, but there’s a lot of extra body conditioning to keep me healthy.”
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Now in her 30s, Stephensen says she has reached a point in her career where she knows how to nourish and nurture her body, and to keep her body dancing at its best.
But it took her body breaking down for her to listen.
During her 20s, Stephensen had a major battle with fatigue and describes that time in her life as feeling “not quite right”. A rollercoaster of symptoms ensued – she put on weight (11kg in one year), felt anxious and completely exhausted and was having episodes of fainting. It took until her late 20s for a medical professional to order
a thyroid test which uncovered the culprit – an auto-immune condition called Hashimoto’s disease, in which immune system cells attack the thyroid gland, reducing the thyroid’s ability to make hormones.
It was a make or break point for Stephensen, who was close to throwing it all away.
“I was feeling so low in energy and tired, I was still doing eight shows of Swan Lake a week but I knew I wasn’t quite me,” she says of that time.
For someone who thrives off a strict regimen, there were moments she felt lost and out of control. But she’s grateful she kept dancing.
The diagnosis of Hashimoto’s disease required Stephensen to re-evaluate the way she was living her life – she improved her diet, tried to reduce her stress levels and give her body more rest and listened to her body.
“In hindsight I did learn a lot through that time, it was a big life lesson,” she says.
“I had to really build myself up to be strong and accepting of my body, and proud of how I could dance, and that held me in good stead across the years to ride the waves of fluctuation.”
The other life-changing moment for Stephensen, personally and professionally, was the birth of Jasper.
She says Jasper turned her into the dancer she had always wanted to be. After his arrival, she was able to turn the sensitivity he brought out in her into her strength as a dancer. Nine months after giving birth, she was back on stage in her “dream ballerina role” of Giselle.
“Giselle is a very sensitive, really soulful and really beautiful role, and I was in such a zone of that after having Jasper,” she says.
“He really brought out a trust in myself. You have to find that as a mum; you take that little baby home and you don’t know what to do and you have to trust your instincts.
“He helped me to tap into my own creativity, and I knew, no matter what happens on stage, there was someone who gives you a big sloppy kiss and adores you.
“I just feel very lucky, the last four years of my career since Jasper have been infinitely better, it is the career I have always wanted to have.”
Stephensen shares custody of Jasper with her former partner, and describes her work-life balance – like many mothers do – as a juggle. She is still working out how she will navigate those competing demands when he begins school, given dancers at The Australian Ballet can spend almost half of the year on tour – interstate and overseas.
“Jasper tours with me sometimes, sometimes he stays home, we make a decision tour-by-tour, week-by-week. If he’s sick, I’ll often bring him to work with me here, we just make it work. I’m very fortunate that he’s so adaptable,” she says.
“He loves dancing and he loves music, and he’s spent so much time around the ballet that I think in his own way, this is just his normal. His ballet friends are part of his family and his world.”
The way Stephensen talks about her son, it’s evident he is her entire world. So when Jasper fell in love with Gillespie just as much as she did, she knew she was onto something.
“Lachy was in Melbourne and Jasper and I met him at our local cafe,” Stephensen says, recounting their first date.
“I said ‘Jasper, this is Lachy’ and he was three at the time and he couldn’t say Lachy because he couldn’t say his L’s, so he says, ‘Hi Yachy, do you want to play rocks with me?’
“So we went and sat under a fig tree, and collected rocks, and they started building
rock piles.
“Straight away, it felt so easy. He was so considerate and so accepting, and Jasper and Lachy have a very special connection and it really is the most beautiful thing seeing them together.”
Despite watching mum’s new partner on the TV many times in the past, it took Jasper a while to realise who he was.
“One day he said to me, ‘Our Yachy wears a purple jumper, mummy, our Yachy is in The Wiggles’,” she laughs.
“It’s his life, his beautiful life, he’s got so many wonderful people around him and Lachy is such a special person for him. He doesn’t tell the other kids at kindy that he’s a Wiggle, he’s just Lachy to him and they have the best fun together – he’s so great with kids and they make up the best games. Every day I am very grateful.”
The pair have been determined to make their relationship work despite the logistical difficulties.
“Lachy lives in Sydney and I live in Melbourne, and The Australian Ballet and The Wiggles are the two biggest touring companies in Australia – so we just really have to make time when we can,” she says.
“We have both been doing this for a long time, and it’s something that really means a lot to both of us and we both understand that.
“We’ve done some really quick flying trips, and a middle of the night road trip one night when he drove to my opening night but had to be at his show in the morning, so we drove through the night. It was a great road trip.”
As she talks of Gillespie, she talks not just of a partner but of a best friend as they carve out
a future together. With the pair both born in Brisbane, Stephensen says when – and if – life slows down, they wouldn’t rule out a move back home.
“Brisbane is home to both of us, both of our families are there. We love coming home and spending our summer holidays there,” she says.
“You just never know what is going to happen, so you just have to trust that everything has its own path that it will take.”
Stephensen will perform in The Australian Ballet’s performance of The Happy Prince at QPAC this week (February 25-29). Tickets available at qpac.com.au
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