Adam Bull calls time on his career with The Australian Ballet
After a long and decorated career with The Australian Ballet, Adam Bull is hanging up his shoes and looking forward to seeing what else life has to offer.
Adam Bull has danced with the Australian Ballet for 22 years, 16 of them in the company’s most senior rank of principal artist. At 1.93m, the strong and elegant dancer with the tousled blonde hair and generous smile has beautifully executed myriad ballets and roles, from the dramatic, romantic princely leads in Giselle and Manon to the fiendishly difficult, technically challenging contemporary works of Wayne McGregor or Jiri Kylian. Bull is that perennial favourite, beloved by audiences and deserving of the critics’ acclaim. So it is a shock to hear him count the number of performances that have completely satisfied him during his career.
“I’ve probably got five where I’ve come away thinking, ‘that’s all I could have done’,” he says eventually, after pondering the question. That’s five shows in more than two decades of professional dancing. It speaks volumes about the exactitude with which Bull approaches this seemingly glamorous, prestigious international career that is nonetheless relentlessly demanding, physically and mentally. It is that pursuit of elusive perfection that keeps Bull coming back, and the determination to give audiences what they deserve: only the best.
“I always say to the younger dancers, ‘you never actually make it, you can never sit there and think, ‘I’m here now, I can stop.’ It never stops. You never stop learning, your body is always changing and it probably only gets harder as you get older,” Bull says, laughing. “That’s the challenge and joy of what we do every day.”
But now, after 22 years of giving what we mere mortals would insist was Bull’s absolute best, he has called time. On June 24, the 41-year-old will take his final bow with the Australian Ballet (AB) before beginning the next chapter of his life. “You live in this reality that it can last forever, but at some stage it has to end,” Bull says. “The last couple of years under (artistic director) David Hallberg’s direction have been incredible. It’s a new era, and I feel like there are so many opportunities for a new generation of dancers. I’m very, very lucky to have had the career I’ve had and I don’t take that for granted.”
Of course, Bull once was a member of that new generation himself and the first dancer in his own family, spotted in the year one playground of Laverton Primary School in Melbourne’s west by his teacher Miss Kip, who reportedly noticed the tall lanky young boy dancing with abandon in the playground to a portable stereo. “She saw something I didn’t, and my parents didn’t. I was a really shy kid, the one hiding behind my mum’s knee, but she said, ‘Adam would really love to dance’.”
Bull began taking classes from former AB dancer Brian Nolan at a little ballet school next to a mechanic in industrial Werribee. He learned jazz for a year, then ballet, and was hooked. “I liked the structure, the formality, the discipline.” His parents saved to buy him a season subscription and something clicked. “I realised you could dance as a profession and from then I knew, ‘this is where I want to be’.”
Bull joined the Australian Ballet School Associate Program alongside future AB principals Amber Scott and Amy Harris, juggling high school with nightly ballet classes before leaving high school in year 10 to study dance full-time at Dance World 301.
Two years later, in 1999, he was accepted into the ABS under director Marilyn Rowe. In 2002, new AB artistic director David McAllister offered him a coveted spot in the company itself.
Given Bull’s height and strength he was quickly called on to partner some of the taller, much more senior ballerinas. The first lead role he danced was Albrecht, partnering principal artist Kirsty Martin’s Giselle in 2006. Bull was a coryphee, the second lowest rank. From there he was a regular partner to principal dancer Olivia Bell in Apollo, Les Presages and Nutcracker. “You get given these opportunities and you rise to the occasion, that’s how these things happen,” Bull says with a shrug. His rise through the ranks was swift, promoted to senior artist in 2008 and to principal just six months later.
Bull is without doubt a talented dancer but he is also smart, making calculated choices early on when he danced roles traditionally performed by shorter, quicker dancers in productions including Walter Bourke’s Tarantella. Soon enough he was again dancing the romantic leads in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake and John Cranko’s Onegin; while latterly he has sought out the darker, more artistically challenging roles including Diaghilev in John Neumeier’s Nijinsky and Crassus in Lucas Jervies’s Spartacus.
The Australian’s dance critic Deborah Jones has followed Bull’s career from the beginning and applauds the diversity of roles he has sought, and expertly performed. “He’s the royal from central casting – unusually tall for a dancer, uncommonly handsome and with a degree of reserve that makes him intriguing,” Jones says.
“But you don’t make a career as long and strong as Bull’s by being typecast and he’s also been a force to be reckoned with in ballets that ask for a completely different kind of physicality,” she says, citing memorable performances in demanding contemporary works including William Forsythe’s Artifact Suite and Alice Topp’s Aurum. “Post-Covid Bull looked positively rejuvenated and most recently delivered a masterclass in how to command the stage as Tybalt in Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet.”
One of the people who knows Bull best is his fellow principal and dear friend, Amber Scott, also the ballerina with whom he has enjoyed a celebrated and enduring on-stage partnership. She describes a popular, inclusive leader and mentor who nevertheless has a wicked sense of humour. “I have so many memories of rehearsals where my stomach is aching from laughing so much, he’ll have the whole room in stitches. Ad’s a big kid, in the best way,” she says.
On-stage Scott describes a partner who is reliable, invested and wholly lacking in ego. “You have complete trust in him on stage, he’s completely there for his ballerina and I feel better dancing with Adam than I do by myself. There’s been a lot of life and a lot of friendship, adventures, scary moments, the biggest highs and lots of intense pressure,” Scott says. “Our friendship will continue for life, he’s an absolute gem of a person and genuinely irreplaceable.”
Indeed, Scott features among Bull’s five-odd satisfying performances, and both reference Murphy’s Swan Lake in New York in 2008 as a career highlight. “We were in the Lincoln Centre performing an iconic Australian work and we were completely in the moment, one of those shows where it was all we could have done,” Bull recalls. “Mum had flown over and my partner Guy (Evatt) was there. It was one of those pinch-yourself moments, and I remember seeing my mum afterwards and mum burst into tears, I burst into tears. You hark back to the boy from Laverton, and here we are in New York.”
There have been myriad other highlights in a deeply fulfilling career Bull knows he is charmed to have had. “It’s been a good run,” he says with characteristic modesty. “The cruel thing about ballet is you only have a limited timeframe and I’ve pushed this window as wide open as I could. At some stage it has to end.”
Fittingly, Bull’s last season will be in resident choreographer Topp’s new work Paragon, part of the company’s 60th birthday anniversary that will reunite former and current dancers on stage including a final pas de deux for Bull and Scott. “Sharing these moments with people I’ve admired, leaving my legacy on stage and giving it to the next generation feels completely perfect,” Bull says. “It’s always been about the company, never about one person out front, for me that’s always been the most important thing.”
Rather than sit around and mope Bull will be taking off in a campervan he and Evatt recently purchased for an 18-month road trip around Australia. It will provide much-needed time for the couple to relax and ponder the future. “The ballet is a selfish profession, it’s all about you and Guy has been by my side allowing me selfishly to give myself to this career. Now it’s about the two of us moving forward together and seeing what Australia has to offer.”
Bull is completely at peace with his decision and knows how rare it is in professional ballet to be able to decide your future, rather than have injury force an early exit.
“I’m very happy and content and satisfied and proud. I’ve ticked off things I never thought possible, I’ve been part of productions and ballets that will stand the test of time, created friendships that will last forever. It’s been a dream,” Bull says. “I’m hanging up the shoes with a big smile on my face.”
Adam Bull will perform in Paragon, part of the Australian Ballet’s production Identity in Sydney and Melbourne. His final performance will be on June 24 at the Arts Centre Melbourne.
Can the non-verbal be telepathic? This podcast says yes
Hugely popular The Telepathy Tapes explores the alleged telepathic abilities of some spellers in the autism community but lacks balance in the telling.
Pope on faith, hope … and girls
Pope Francis is the first Pope to publish a memoir during his lifetimes, writes former priest, Michael Costigan