David McAllister of the Australian Ballet tells how he found his feet
A new memoir, timed with his retirement as artistic director, reveals how David McAllister struggled with self-doubt and confusion about his sexuality.
It says something of David McAllister’s longevity at the Australian Ballet that he leaves at the end of the year, after 19 at the helm, without a skerrick of scandal or hint of the unseemly conduct that has blighted other parts of the ballet world.
He must have learned a thing or two during the four decades he has been in and around the company. He was a first-year student at the Australian Ballet School in 1981 when the Australian Ballet’s dancers went on strike, leading to the resignation of artistic director Marilyn Jones.
The next artistic director, Maina Gielgud, promoted him to the principal rank, but also caused him anguish about his appearance. Her contract wasn’t renewed after reports started to leak about her overbearing manner with dancers. And her successor, Ross Stretton, ruffled his share of feathers during his short time with the company. “I was determined I was not going to leave in that way,” McAllister says of former artistic directors, here and elsewhere. “When I was appointed to this job, I was like, ‘You have seen this go really badly, and don’t let that happen to you.’ I feel happy about the fact that my departure has been … warm and fuzzy, rather than cold and prickly.”
McAllister has published a memoir with an aspirational title — Soar — to coincide with his departure from the Australian Ballet after 40 years. He doesn’t skimp on the warm and fuzzies — he is discreet, almost to a fault, about the inner workings of one of Australia’s biggest arts companies — but he is disarmingly candid about his personal life: the bullying he endured at school, his intimate relationships with other dancers, his gradual acceptance of his sexuality.
Reading it, the book could almost be a primer for other gay boys who are coming through, shrugging off the abuse and name-calling and being more determined than ever to make their own way.
“I hate to say the word bullying because I think people bandy that around,” McAllister says of his school years. “But, you know, it wasn’t great. I didn’t have a great time at school and I feel that did affect my relationship with myself, and wanting to please people … I was really just trying to be normal.”
The revelations start on the first pages, as McAllister describes how, as a ballet-mad eight-year-old in Perth, he was taken to a performance of Cinderella — the Australian Ballet was on tour, playing at His Majesty’s Theatre — and developed a crush on the leading man, Kelvin Coe. Years later, when McAllister was 19 and in third year at the Ballet School, he danced on stage alongside his hero in Beyond Twelve. A friendship developed and before long McAllister was having an affair with the older dancer.
McAllister is never sexually explicit in the book but confusion about his sexuality is a recurring motif. He is now in a long-term relationship with Wesley Enoch, a playwright and director of the Sydney Festival. But early on he also had relationships with women, particularly with dancer Elizabeth Toohey, who remains a close friend.
With Coe the friendship continued and McAllister says the older man gave him valuable advice to sort himself out, to know himself. He recalls the day Coe told him he was HIV positive and the terrifying visit McAllister made to a doctor, fearing that he also might have what was, at the time, the “ticking bomb” virus. McAllister’s test was negative. Coe died in 1992, aged 45, one of several high-profile Australian artists lost to that terrible disease.
“He certainly was an incredibly important influence on me as a young man,” McAllister says. “You know, if it wasn’t for ballet, I may have been an HIV victim. I just knuckled down into my career and just sort of didn’t look either way.”
McAllister also is frank about the insecurity that can haunt dancers, male and female, about their body image. He saw himself as too bottom-heavy, his legs muscular like a footballer’s, when he wanted the long elegant lines of some ideal danseur. Gielgud, as artistic director, recognised his ability and promoted him within the company but McAllister worried that she didn’t think of him as a “prince”, suitable for romantic roles. On their first meeting, McAllister reports, she wondered aloud whether he should do something about his big nose.
If the Australian Ballet has changed in a definitive way under McAllister’s leadership, it’s possibly because of his belief that appearances are less important in a ballet dancer than their talent. He still believes in a strongly Australian aesthetic, the kind of outdoorsy athleticism that has been a hallmark of the company for decades. But he also recognises that Australians are not only of Anglo-Celtic origin, just as they are not all constructed with the elongated physique traditionally favoured in classical ballet.
“You can be a tall girl or you can be a short boy, you can be quite muscular or slim, but it’s really the talent that is the defining requirement to be in the company,” he says. “I think that by excluding certain types of people, you’re limiting your possibilities, or you’re putting people through a whole lot of emotional trauma and you don’t get the best out of them.”
Bringing into the company dancers from different backgrounds — including Indigenous Australian and Asian dancers — was a no-brainer as far as McAllister is concerned. Conversely, a uniformly Caucasian ensemble these days would provoke a “huge amount of criticism”. “We always talk about trying not to have ballet become a museum piece,” he says. “To have a living company, you have to have a cross-section of diversity, or you’re just eliminating a whole lot of talent. It’s just not an option.”
McAllister has had some notable successes with commissioned ballets and presentations of new work by some of the major choreographers of our day. He scored a hit with his first commission from Graeme Murphy, a version of Swan Lake built around a love triangle that resembled the story of Charles, Diana and Camilla. More recently there has been a new Cinderella, commissioned from Alexei Ratmansky, a co-production of Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Wayne McGregor’s Chroma and Dyad 1929. He has continued to work with Murphy and with mid-career and emerging choreographers, in particular resident artists Stanton Welch, Stephen Baynes, Tim Harbour and Alice Topp.
A regret of McAllister’s is that he was not able to commission what might be called the Great Australian Ballet. It’s a missing piece in the repertoire that he refers to as ballet’s The Secret River, an Australian story that could be adapted for the ballet stage, as Kate Grenville’s novel has been adapted for theatre and television. He tried, but says he could not find a suitable story that would translate successfully to the ballet stage.
And he acknowledges a criticism, from others, that he has largely played it safe in his choices as artistic leader. The Australian Ballet is a not-for-profit company but operates on a “commercial model”, he says, meaning that it must play to houses of at least 75 per cent capacity to make budget. The company also has a very healthy balance sheet (pre-pandemic, that is), but presumably those commercial pressures have ruled out taking dancers and audiences to a more exciting place.
Did the bean-counters ever get in the way of his ambitions for the company? McAllister says there were occasions when he had to make a decision of one production over another: a matter of pragmatism rather than risk minimisation. But his book, and some readers may be frustrated at this, never really gives an insider’s account of the complexities and competing interests at play in a major arts organisation. His uppermost concern, he says, was the ongoing security of the national company. “I think that I probably could have pushed the envelope a bit and, you know, and challenged the governance of the company to be a bit more adventurous,” he says.
McAllister describes, with heartbreaking understatement, the weeks in 2000 when he was preparing his application for the artistic director’s job and he was summoned home to Perth to be at the bedside of his mother, Olive, who was dying of myeloid leukaemia. He spent many hours with her and told her he needed to return to Melbourne. The day after he submitted his application, his father called to say his mother had died.
The transition to McAllister’s successor, David Hallberg, a principal with American Ballet Theatre, has been seamless. In the handover period they’ve become known, respectively, as David 7 and David 8, their order of succession as artistic directors at the Australian Ballet.
McAllister already is moving on to new projects. He is choreographing a new Swan Lake for Finnish National Ballet in February and has some work lined up with the Australian Ballet School. A big international company came knocking earlier this year to offer a leadership role, he says, but he decided he needed some time away from running a company.
McAllister rounds out his career with the Australian Ballet with a sense of happy accomplishment: he is both the longest serving artistic director and the first homegrown leader to have risen through the company’s ranks. One of his legacies may be a form of enlightened artistic leadership that inspires co-operation rather than fear. “My modus operandi is to be harmonious,” he says. “I don’t like living in a world of conflict, and I really like people — I like working in a team.”
Soar: A Life Freed by Dance by David McAllister with Amanda Dunn (Thames & Hudson, $39.99).
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Soar: A Life Freed by Dance
By David McAllister with Amanda Dunn
Thames & Hudson, 247pp. $39.99 (HB)
Reviewed by Deborah Jones
“It was Richard Evans who outed me, firstly to myself,” writes David McAllister. It was 2002, not long after McAllister had become artistic director of the Australian Ballet and Evans had joined the company as executive director.
It wasn’t exactly a revelation to McAllister that he was gay but he’d been struggling to accept the fact for decades, even in as accommodating a world as the ballet. “Finally, I had admitted it to myself, as well as to a friend and colleague.”
It was a relief — and it would be another six years before he could tell his father. By then he was in his mid-40s.
McAllister’s memoir, Soar, is the unpacking of that struggle. He had a stellar career as a dancer and a surprise second act as the AB’s longest serving artistic director, a role he leaves at the end of this year, but this book is only peripherally about those successes. McAllister’s public life furnishes the setting but the through-line is a quest to be at peace with himself.
McAllister was born in Perth in November 1963 to Olive and Don, who had met as teenagers while working at the Bank of NSW. They married young and had five children, with David slap-bang in the centre. He suggests it was middle-child syndrome that led him to be a show-off on an industrial scale but, whatever the reason, he was a performer from the start.
In perhaps his earliest memory he recalls watching himself move, reflected in the screen of the big family television set. He soon graduated to needing an audience and at his grandfather’s 60th birthday party, when he was about four, he jumped on top of the backyard septic tank and tap-danced for far, far too long. Already he loved being in the spotlight.
McAllister draws a vivid picture of 1960s suburban family life, its deep ordinariness transfigured by loving memory and a sharp eye for detail: the scent of Olive’s Oil of Ulan, the delights of being an altar boy (so theatrical), the “matching green chenille bedspreads that were upgraded to a very on-trend gold and teal floral in the 1970s”, the manner in which the sheets were rotated on washing day, the always filled cake tin in case there were visitors. School was not quite so pleasant. The early days passed “in a fog of misery” and there was worse to come. His parents gave into his nagging and off he went to the Progress Hall in Scarborough to take a ballet lesson with Miss Hodgkinson and 30 little girls.
To his profound joy he understood this was where he belonged and couldn’t wait for show-and-tell on Monday. His news did not go down well with the class and McAllister, never popular to start with, would be punished for years. He became “the class punching bag”. The words pansy and poofter were employed. He was seven and didn’t know what they meant.
It must have been terrifying for a small child, but McAllister carefully sticks to what happened rather than excavating the depths of his torment. He is not one to fish for pity.
He had a few friends, some understanding teachers, loving parents and an unswerving belief that ballet was his calling. McAllister writes later that his way of dealing with difficult emotional situations was to push them to the back of his mind and concentrate on ballet. It was a strategy he learned early. Ballet was the armour that protected him from others and from himself, then and later.
McAllister thought his acceptance into the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne when he was 17 meant he “was going to be free” but he swapped one kind of confinement for another. Soar opens when McAllister is 19 and just about to start his professional life. He had been seconded from the ABS to help fill gaps in the AB’s ranks left by the dancers’ strike of 1981 and was cast in Graeme Murphy’s Beyond Twelve. The star was Kelvin Coe, 17 years McAllister’s senior and his idol.
McAllister writes that he knew Coe was gay. And then comes an agonisingly tortuous sentence that sums up how McAllister would feel for so long: “I guess I probably suspected that I might have been [gay] too, but I didn’t want to be.” It didn’t stop him from having an affair with Coe but he couldn’t commit as Coe wished him to. “I was not ready to be known.”
He had serious relationships with women in an effort to be straight and it speaks volumes that he has remained good friends with them. What he couldn’t do was acknowledge what he’d long suspected; not to himself and not to his family. When his younger brother Paul came out in the late 1990s Olive said to David, “I always thought it would be you.” He didn’t seize the moment. A few years later his beloved mother died of leukaemia, still in the dark.
In all of this Soar is refreshingly candid and immediate. It’s often a great deal of fun too. Humour was always another shield.
McAllister is rather less forthcoming, however, when it comes to his work life. There’s a spirited section on the marvellous time he and Elizabeth Toohey had when invited to dance in Russia (Toohey was his first girlfriend — “A girlfriend!”) but once McAllister becomes artistic director a dutiful air hangs over Soar.
He’ll certainly make no enemies with this book. Those seeking juicy gobbets of gossip about others must go without. If names are named there’s always something generous said to leaven any hint of criticism, and while McAllister admits to having commissioned “my fair share of underperforming ballets” there’s no chapter and verse on the choreographers who made them.
Such discretion provides evidence for McAllister’s assertion that he is a people-pleaser who likes to be liked but doesn’t make for thrilling reading. Fortunately romance comes to the rescue. McAllister, finally comfortable with his sexuality, meets the man he wants to grow old with. He movingly describes the development of his relationship with director and writer Wesley Enoch and the moment when he breaks the news to his father. At last McAllister could say he was blissfully happy.
Deborah Jones is national dance critic for The Australian.
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