Larry Schwartz
Australian Ballet star Steven Heathcote is still dancing at 42. Larry Schwartz asks how he does it.
STEVEN Heathcote laughs at the suggestion he could keep dancing for a decade. “I don’t know about 10,” says the Australian Ballet’s leading man and the longest-serving artist in its 45 years.
Just a few weeks from his 42nd birthday, Heathcote is a veteran of Australian dance who will next year celebrate his 25th year with the company.
“To have that sort of longevity with the incredible workload that our dancers do is quite extraordinary,” says Australian Ballet director and former dancer David McAllister.
While many dancers reach an age where they can no longer do so, Heathcote, as the prince in Raymonda opening at the Arts Centre next week, “continue(s) to develop in a way that he’s still giving extraordinary performances even . . . as a mature artist, which is so impressive”.
Heathcote, a star here and overseas and renowned for his partnering skills, will revisit his first encounter with ballet while performing in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite next year.
“The Nutcracker worked its magic,” says Heathcote, son of a solicitor and “stay at home mum”, who was just nine when he accompanied his primary school class to a performance at Perth Concert Hall.
“It was at home that night that I spoke to Mum about how much I loved it and I really wanted to do it.” She had expressed “not resistance, just a little bit of sensitive parental caution”. She waited six months before finding a teacher and at 10, he was on his way.
Heathcote and his wife, Kathy, have two children, Mia, 11, and 13-year-old Sam who is “not in the slightest bit interested” in ballet. He keeps in shape with a rigorous routine that starts with an hour-and-a-quarter workout and can last until rehearsals finish at 6.30pm.
“It’s a physical day,” he says. “So its a kind of self-perpetuating fitness.”
He has been aware of increasing physical limitations. “There are some roles that I won’t do now that I might have done when I was 18 or 25,” he says. He’d think twice before taking on Don Quixote, another among eight pieces scheduled for next year. “I’d have to look pretty seriously at whether or not its a wise choice to take on a role like that because it’s highly ballistic, highly athletic and it’s a role that really is designed for a younger body. So that’s something I’ll be talking to David about.”
He has been the Ballet’s principal artist for almost 20 years, won a clutch of awards and made guest appearances with companies such as American Ballet Theatre, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Ballet Nacional de Cuba, the Kirov Ballet and The Royal Danish Ballet.
“He scaled all of the classical repertoire and a lot of the fantastic contemporary repertoire,” McAllister says. “He is a versatile artist.”
Heathcote’s repertoire includes Madame Butterfly by Stanton Welch; Beyond Bach and 1914 by Stephen Baynes; Alchemy by Stephen Page; Mirror Mirror by Natalie Weir and Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake.
He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1991 for his services to dance; has received Mo and Helpmann Awards for Best Male Dancer; won enthusiastic reviews for his performances in the role of Siegfried in last year’s Swan Lake tour to London and Cardiff and is executive producer of a documentary about that tour.
He remembers fondly working with “some of the greats”, choreographers Glen Tetley, Jiri Kylian, Nacho Duarte, Page, Murphy and Baynes.
“All of them have such a different way of expressing their vision,” he says, “and for the dancer what’s fascinating . . . is tapping into the choreographer’s vision. Trying to get inside their minds and see what they see and then to try and encapsulate that in the way you move.”
In the world premiere of Raymonda, Baynes’ “homage to the style and glamour of screen-goddess-turned-princess Grace Kelly”, Heathcote plays a prince, fiance of a movie star, torn between her exciting life and future obligations and responsibilities as member of a European royal family.
“It’s quite demanding,” he says. “But the good thing about Raymonda . . . is that it’s been created from the ground up by Stephen Baynes. To a certain degree, along with Stephen, I can tailor the choreography to suit my abilities. You have a bit more control over how ballistic and how strenuous a role is when you’re actually creating it.
“It’s a lot more difficult to do it when you’ve inherited a ballet from another company or another choreographer and it is what it is and you have to do it step for step.”
He’s been thinking about life after ballet. “To some degree you can have ideas about what you’d like to do,” he muses. “The other side of that is there’s a lot that you don’t know about the future, which is partly scary and partly exciting. It’s nice to have something of a plan. But then it’s good to have the flexibility to say, ‘Well, OK, if something comes up, I can go with that.’ Currently I have no firm plans.
“I’ve always said I’d like to spend more time with people in the acting profession. It’s something that fascinates me. I think there’s a huge amount of learning that we as dancers can take from the acting profession because really what we’re doing, especially in story ballets, is acting in the absence of word.”
Might this be his future direction? “Ah look, if someone turned up tomorrow and says, ‘I’d like you to look at a film script’, absolutely! I wouldn’t be knocking that back. It’s the craft of acting that I’m in awe of, I think.”
McAllister notes that some dancers, including Rudolph Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn danced for many years. But he says no-one has danced for as long with the ballet as Heathcote, who is “blessed with fantastic physical fortitude”.
“The Russians used to have quite longevity of careers,” McAllister says. “Especially in Russia (where) they do four performances a month. In Australia we do seven or eight shows a week most weeks. So to have that sort of longevity with the incredible workload that our dancers do, is quite extraordinary.”
If not 10 years, then how long? Heathcote is not sure how long he can keep going.
“It’s a question of repertoire. It depends on what it is that you choose to do and how good a shape can I keep myself in. It’s certainly in my interests to keep myself in as good a shape as possible.”
Raymonda is at the Arts Centre from September 19.
LINK
· australianballet.com.au
Larry Schwartz Writer 