Guardian of genius, beauty and truth

JOHN Cranko's romantic vision is in safe hands in Australia, says the man with charge of his estate.

Dieter Graefe

WHEN South African choreographer John Cranko died in 1973, his worldly possessions -- including the copyright to some of his acclaimed ballets -- were bequeathed to an unlikely candidate.

Dieter Graefe, then secretary at the Cranko-directed Stuttgart Ballet, was 33 when his friend, former housemate and colleague choked to death during a trans-Atlantic flight, leaving the dance world reeling.

"John's loss was a big shock to everybody, just tragic," Graefe says in Sydney ahead of the Australian Ballet's opening performance tonight of Cranko's Onegin. "At that time I was just a no one. A nobody. I'm not a dancer or a choreographer. I was a secretary. I didn't even know John had made a will, let alone (declared me its sole benefactor). Suddenly, I had all this responsibility."

For the past 39 years, that responsibility has involved Graefe travelling the world ensuring new productions of Cranko's ballets, which include The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet and Onegin, remain true to the choreographer's original vision.

"This year I've been to San Francisco, Berlin, now Sydney, and then I'll go to Lyons (where companies are staging Cranko works)," says Graefe, whose powers also extend to making casting decisions. "Often in the course of these productions we have to step in and say: 'No, you can't do it like that; you must do it like this.' "

But the 72-year-old German says Onegin, Cranko's famous adaptation of the Alexander Pushkin verse novel Eugene Onegin, is in safe hands at the national company.

"I haven't had to step in at all. Artistic director David McAllister and this company are just incredible," he says. "The Australian Ballet is so very good, and they understand and respect John's vision. They get it."

AB principal dancer Amber Scott will perform the lead role of Tatiana on opening night in the company's take on a tale of unrequited love between a provincial girl and a playboy aristocrat. It is the Australian Ballet's sixth production of Onegin since the popular work premiered in this country in 1976. "The story has real emotion . . . it's a story you feel," says Graefe, who is the life partner of Stuttgart Ballet artistic director Reid Anderson. "That's why it is so popular around the world."

Graefe, who says he has seen Onegin more than 1000 times and is still enraptured by it, reflects on the life of the man whose legacy he has made his life's work to protect.

"John's works are often about love and loss -- Onegin, Lady and the Fool, Romeo and Juliet -- and that was actually a part of his life," Graefe says.

"He was a wonderful man and we celebrate his life every day. But he was very lonely. He was always looking for love. He was always looking, looking, looking. And he never found it."

The Australian Ballet's production of Onegin opens at the Sydney Opera House tonight.