Stephen McRae: jeté propelled

Nothing was going to stop Steven McRae from dancing. Graeme Blundell hears his remarkable story

STEVEN McRae is clowning around in the wet streets the way he must have as a kid. Inside his home in Sydney's western suburbs, his mother is making tea, turning to smile as hollers of delight from the dancer with the startling quiff of red hair echo across the small suburban cul-de-sac.

McRae, 23, is happily doing Fred Astaire impersonations for our photographer, soft-shoeing up and down the street with an umbrella, dancing in the rain, making his girlfriend, Liz Harrod, get fits of the giggles. He improvises freely, fluently moving from the erect formality of classical dance to the rhythmic, explosive stepping of modern jazz, then back to his Astaire, all aristocratic-looking body, his shoes making polite tapping sounds.

At one point he suddenly bends back, spreads his arms wide and tap dances all the way to the next corner.

It's hard to believe this exuberant young man is a ballet star but here he is, dancing with one of the world's greatest companies at the highest level. He has gone from being a student in Sydney to principal dancer with the Royal Ballet in just six years. The promotion came in the middle of this year but the notoriously tough British critics have had their eye on him for some time. The really big break came in 2007: McRae made headlines when he danced the role of Romeo for the first time at short notice, taking over from injured luminary Johan Kobborg. McRae danced "with the kind of passion and promise that marks him out for stardom", London's The Times reported. And so it turned out to be.

But out in the Plumpton street he looks just like a big kid who can't stop entertaining anyone who happens to be looking. We're talking as he's back for the first time since his promotion, returning to dance in a gala in Melbourne and to be a judge and guest artist at the McDonald's Ballet Scholarship for young performers. He competed regularly in the event as an aspiring student but never won the main prize, although the cuttings feature his name frequently as a place-getter and winner of subsidiary awards. When he joins us in the kitchen, his old friend Bernadette Wilkinson, with whom he danced as a teenager in countless local competitions, is helping his mother organise afternoon tea. She's dressed in a streamlined, rather snazzy tracksuit advertising her new dance studio, holding two-and-a-half-year-old Charlie Rose, who is already wearing ballet shoes.

McRae plays and jokes with Wilkinson's daughter, twisting his strong rubbery body, his face fixed in an expression of surprise as if he can't really believe his limbs are making such shapes. There is something about him when he fools around that evokes the tang of the circus ring as much as the world of red plush.

Charlie Rose tells me she is impressed that McRae wears make-up when he works. "When you go on stage you have to look the part," the little girl says.

"Bernie is four years older than me and I really grew up with her," McRae says of his former dancing partner with an almost wistful smile when we move into the small sitting room. "Now she has her own children and we live totally different lives."

But if his life has changed, McRae's is no Billy Elliot story, that of a boy who is forced to fight for his love of dancing in the face of limited expectations, poverty, stifled self-expression and a disintegrating community. This is not another heart-warming narrative of an individual swimming against the tide of expected and required behaviour.

But neither is it a story without surprises. McRae defies plenty of stereotypes in being a boy from a family whose business is in auto-electrics and who went to Rooty Hill Primary School in a suburb a long way from the culture palaces of the city.

Most of all it is a story of extraordinary determination to succeed in a field most would not have expected a lad such as him to choose. You simply can't imagine McRae doing anything at all he didn't want to do, at any age. His was no hidden talent waiting to be discovered.

He created the ability and learned the skills that have taken him to the top of the classical dance world through sheer will and mental control. It is a mesmerising story. His sister Kelly was more than seven years older and already adept at gymnastics, aerobics and dance when McRae's life changed. "When I was aged seven I watched her and said to my parents, 'I want to have a go, too.' "

He's quite adamant about one thing here, as if setting some personal record straight. "They weren't the ones to take me; I asked," he says firmly. His mother interrupts from the other room. "I told him he would last a week if he was lucky," she says. He uses the pause to grab another chocolate biscuit from the tray he has brought from his mum's kitchen, attacking them resolutely during the next half-hour.

His sister inspired him to start jazz and tap lessons with her teacher, Naticha Celio, who ended up teaching him for the next eight years.

"Apart from my sister, she was my first inspiration, the reason I'm dancing today," he says in the slightly reedy, British-inflected accent you hear from Australian-born soccer players; that tone that belongs everywhere but has no real home.

"My accent is far more Aussie this week than it was when I got here," he says, grimacing slightly before laughing.

He can still remember his first lesson with Celio, very clearly.

"She made such an impact on my life, a brilliant woman," he says, eyes widening. "I was very shy, nervous, the kid hiding behind his mum, but this teacher threw a whole world at me from the start, suggesting anything was possible."

He still remembers vividly how she had him stretching and jumping and spinning from the corners of the room, things he didn't think he could possibly do. She constantly pushed the boy. "You are capable of so much more," she kept saying to him. "You can do it; you can do it."

He pauses for several long moments and I get the impression he never wants to forget the feeling of elation that came over him when his consciousness was set into flight for the first time. That it is the defining moment in his life.

McRae attended Celio's classes twice a week after school and continued his studies until year 10. "I did normal academics and then dancing in the afternoons," he says.

I rather ingenuously ask him if he was good at any of his classes. He fixes me with his game face, suddenly very deadpan, very serious. "I am competitive, very competitive, and I love the feeling of being at the top of the class. I wanted to get the report full of As because that made me happy."

He says his parents had always supported whatever he wanted to do, but his studies came first. "Basically, if I didn't get the As, the dancing would have to be cut back, so I made sure I got the As."

There were no compromises: he just made sure that it happened. "I did whatever it took," he says simply. ("But he had good backing from us all the way through," his father Phil tells me later.)

"As I got older and the dancing got busier I was doing assignments at 3am ... because that was the only time I had," McRae says. "I was dancing or rehearsing or coaching others, always in the car driving or on the train to somewhere."

He competed in countless eisteddfods across Sydney, sometimes entered into as many as 20 sections in each competition. He had no fear.

He was taught he could do anything; all he had to do was go for it. His tap teachers were male and taught him to dance a certain way because they said, "As a boy, you should dance like a boy."

His tapping was noticed. Part of the opening ceremony for the Sydney Olympics with hundreds of other young dancers, he was picked out by director Dein Perry and sent to join New York performances of Perry's famous Tap Dogs, a group of tap-dancing men in work boots.

"I was away for a week, just to get a taste, in a spot they adapted for me as the kid just joining them," he says. "I was the Tap Puppy, so to speak."

He has maintained the moniker as an email address, though it brings raised eyebrows whenever it's time to sign international contracts. "It's good to hang on to some things, the important ones; it keeps you human," he says. Then he comically spells out the name Tap Puppy aloud as if trying to impress a room full of wheelers and dealers.

It was at the time of his Tap Dogs experience that classical dance began to get more serious and he found himself having to choose. "I was 13 when I started to take classical seriously but at the same time the Tap Dogs experience beckoned," he says.

After he completed year 10, he was sent to classical teachers Hilary Kaplan and Archibald McKenzie, who had set up a studio called Alegria near Sydney's Central Station. "The minute he walked in he was special; he absorbed everything we taught him, determined to get there as quickly as possible," Kaplan tells me later.

"He simply wanted everything right away, nothing was going to get in his way; he never stopped improving and maintaining his technique."

McRae pauses as he recalls the influence of the Alegria teachers, especially Kaplan. "Hilary showed me a whole new world. The ballet world simply was not in my family; we were a motorsport family."

He laughs as he remembers how his father once raced drag cars at Sydney's Eastern Creek Raceway.

"Ballet was never mentioned; in fact, I never watched a full night of ballet until I was 16 and I saw a performance of the touring Royal Ballet."

His inspiration came from many other sources, especially the car races he watched as child on video. "I memorised every single word of all the commentaries and can still quote lines," he says.

He loved the exploits of Shirley Muldowney, the first famous American female drag racer and John Force, a 14-time Auto Racing All-America selection and 1996 driver of the year for all of American motor racing.

"They wanted to achieve something and they went out and did it; no one handed them anything on a silver platter," McRae says emphatically. "That's where my inspiration came from: they would race and fail and then try again; it's not always a case of things being easy for people."

He segues away from his memories of motor racing, though his father later tells me his son has maintained his obsession with it, and talks about how he's reading Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book Outliers.

The young dancer is fascinated by Gladwell's theory that anyone who has excelled has put in at least 10,000 hours work on their craft.

"It's the extra hours that make you better so that you stand out every step of the way, which means that teachers see more in you and help you develop it."

He fully subscribes to Gladwell's notion that it is not the best and the brightest who succeed but those who are given opportunities and have the presence of mind to seize them. This appears to have been McRae's overarching narrative from an early age in fact. Before he had ever read Gladwell's book this is the story that has always driven him. He is capable of a sort of self-help chirpiness, but as soon as he's aware it has entered his conversation a self-deflecting jokiness shifts the earnestness that has suddenly embarrassed him.

"When I teach, I try to instil in kids that the mind is the most important tool a dancer has and the body is second," he says. "When you are dancing you can never think of the step you are doing, you must already have moved ahead."

He is often performing up to nine ballets in repertoire in a season, but he has done that since the age of seven. "It's an art of memory and from a young age I've memorised countless solo routines and it never stops." He visualises every step off stage. "I picture it all perfectly, never thinking that I could fall here, or here, or here, but telling myself that this is the way I will do it."

McRae is a fine talker for someone so young. His belief is that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. He believes success is too often attributed to natural talent and that it arrives through a series of explainable, fortunate circumstances that we should be grateful for.

Like earlier generations of Commonwealth dancers, McRae's Australian teachers saw the Royal Ballet as the natural aim for the talented 16-year-old. It was where Robert Helpmann turned up and, much later, another Australian principal artist with the Royal, the stellar Leanne Benjamin.

"I didn't know what any of that meant; I had never heard of the company then," he says. "I was like: 'What's that? Is it somewhere else in Sydney or Melbourne?'"

After a year of losing every competition he entered, he won the 2002 Genee International Ballet Competition, that year being held in Sydney. He danced the virtuosic solo from Le Corsaire as well as a contemporary piece created by Australian choreographer Natalie Weir, and Danse Concertantes to music by Stravinsky, for the final when he won the gold medal.

The next year, with Kaplan unable to attend, his mother escorted him to Switzerland for another, grander, competition, the Prix de Lausanne. He knew that if he was to enter the Royal Ballet he had to win one of the scholarships awarded to winners. "There are rankings after the finals, rather like the AFL draft," McRae says. "They can kick-start careers instantly."

One of 14 finalists, he won first prize and flew to England the next day with his mother to join the Royal Ballet School on a full scholarship. He was just 17. He had no idea how hard he would find it. "Mum stayed two days and then I was on the footpath with a suitcase," he says, grinning wryly. "No one walking past knew I had won scholarships and the ballet world could not have cared less. For months I struggled with homesickness, desperate to come back."

He found a student hostel in Hampstead, "surrounded by wonderful homes and cars" until five months later he began to share digs with other male students from the school. Three years further on he was offered a contract with the company, one of only three to receive the nod.

Hit by homesickness once more when most of his fellow students went to other companies across the world, he felt as if he were starting again. "When you join a company of 100 dancers you are at the bottom of the fish bowl; they don't care how many competitions you might have won." But McRae kept working hard, winning his first key role in 2005, when Japanese dancer Yohei Sasaki injured himself before a performance of Frederick Ashton's Symphonic Variations, a signature RB work. "I was understudy and they threw me on for the opening night with only two days notice, but I had made sure I knew all the steps to all the roles," he says.

Then came the chance to dance Romeo when Kobborg sprained his ankle, and he filled in for Kobborg again in Tokyo, dancing Oberon in The Dream. Leading choreographers such as Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor and Alastair Marriott started to create roles for him.

 "A lot of luck has to come into play, but a lot of hard work also helps," he says. "As I went through the company, more and more opportunities arose, which I grabbed." And of course he started to fit in. His girlfriend Liz is also a dancer with the RB.

His fizzing, spinning turns impressed the critics; his extrovert enthusiasm and acrobatic agility too. "I love jumping and there's something about watching someone just take off that's fascinating," he says. "Watching someone float or hold a position in the air so that you can take 10 pictures of them before they land is breathtaking." And McRae - take a glimpse at his technique on YouTube - can soar high, holding his "freeze frames" in the air in spectacular fashion.

When leading RB ballerina Alina Cojocaru asked him to partner her in performances across the world, the young dancer already known as "the flying guy" had arrived. She helped him with partnering, that effort by both the male and female dancer to achieve a harmony of movement and interpretation.

Technique, though, is just a means to an end. "Character is a constant struggle, because choreography is steps and the convention is a strict interpretation of the original choreographer's wishes," he says. "But I want the audience to be aware of how I have interpreted those steps, not think that I look like a principal who has done the same thing for 10 years. I want it to be real."

He listens to the music many times on his own and broods about how to express the vulnerable side of his character.

He never tries to copy, though he will watch many videos of dancers playing the same roles. And he never tries to be like anyone else; McRae wants to be himself. "I love going on stage and doing abstract dance where there is no story, love looking for the reason for the steps and movements, the emotional subtext of moving a certain way."

He says it's just too easy for dancers to become bogged down in the technical element of dance, the physicality. "We are artists, not gymnasts. I try to be the character, to inhabit them completely, to always live in the moment and be alive to the chemistry on stage. Dancers have to listen to each other."

An injury last year made him think about his future. "I now appreciate my body a little better and understand that every performance could be my last," he says.

He's very young to be thinking this way - men often dance at elite level well beyond 40 - but it means he won't be one of those dancers completely lost when he can no longer perform. He is completing a business management and leadership course by correspondence at London's Open University, in the hope of one day directing a dance company, perhaps in Australia. "Understanding the business of art is vital," he says.

So McRae, wise beyond his years, has his insurance lined up. Ballet fans will be hoping he doesn't need to cash it in for a long time.

Steven McRae dances in The Sleeping Beauty as a guest artist with the Australian Ballet in Sydney on December 21 and 23.