Ballet careers skew young, but flamenco dancers can continue into old age. In Toronto, will Jurgita Dronina, principal ballerina with the National Ballet of Canada, and flamenco artist Carmen Romero find common ground?

Deirdre Kelly It’s said that flamenco dancers get better with age. Jurgita, is ballet just for the young? 

Jurgita Dronina That’s a great question. I’m 37. Until I hit 33, your body can do anything and you feel unbreakable, invincible. But then maturity crept in, and that’s when I really began to understand how to do things and had freedom to experiment. It’s what ballerinas call the golden middle, where your technique peaks with your maturity and artistry. Those are probably the best years in a ballerina’s career. I doubt I’ll be able to continue past my 40s, because ballet doesn’t go on forever. Carmen is lucky in that she can go on if she wants to.  

Carmen Romero I’ve been dancing since the age of eight. Flamenco training is very different to classical dance. As an art form, it celebrates different parts of life: birth, youth, maturity and death. I once served as a translator to a reporter interviewing [the great flamenco dancer] Antonio Gades and I’ll never forget something he said. When asked how long he would continue dancing, he said, ‘until they put the tag on my toe’! I just turned 56 and I’m still at it.

I would agree with Jurgita, that the older you become, the more you have to offer. It’s my belief that artists are messengers, the muse to the audience. People come to dance to escape in the moment, or to fly in the air with Jurgita and experience that freedom in their mind. Or when I hit the floor really hard, to feel that vibration deep inside. 

Jurgita The knowledge and life experience that comes through your soul, your energy, is the biggest lesson you can give to the young ones. When I joined the Royal Swedish Ballet as a 20-year-old, there were so many fantastic older dancers who came from John Neumeier and Maurice Béjart. It was like a masterclass. I watched every single show and my jaw would drop. That raised me as a dancer. 

Carmen Jurgita, I like how we align. We are in entirely different worlds but our approach to our art is similar. Recently, I had an invitation to work with apprentice dancers at the National Ballet of Canada. It was like a dream to hear the music and see the dancers run across the floor in their pointe shoes. I immediately got a sense of community and legacy building. As an independent artist, I don’t have that kind of support. I have to create my own community. I’ve nurtured dancers and musicians through my school. People that came to me as beginners are now fully-fledged, award-winning artists – that is my relevance. 

Jurgita We come from such different art forms and yet we value the same things and strive for the same stage catharsis. 

Carmen I love that: stage catharsis. That’s really powerful. I believe as artists we are chosen. There is no quitting time for us.

Jurgita Not when you can still give something. Maybe one day, I won’t be able to dance at the top level. But I see myself still giving back to the art form. ‘Until they put the tag on my toe’ – I’m going to use that line!

Deirdre Jurgita, what role have teachers have played in your life?

Jurgita Good training at a young age is key to longevity in dance. I was 10 when I started ballet and still do the same basic class my fantastic teachers taught me as a girl. I would say it’s the discipline of never giving yourself a day off or an excuse. That early training has carried the career. I’m super grateful to every single teacher along the way. 

Carmen Flamenco is only one dance under the whole umbrella of Spanish dance. Technique is your foundation, but there’s no standardised training. Different dancers come up with their own pedagogy, and the way flamenco is expressed can vary person to person. 

Jurgita When we did Don Quixote, I watched countless videos of flamenco: how to communicate with a fan and use the shoulders. Before ballet, I did ballroom dancing and hip-hop, which played a huge role later in my repertoire, especially in contemporary. In ballet, if you don’t know other dance forms, you won’t go very far. 

Michiko Nishimura, 33, formerly a ballerina in Japan, has been teaching for three years in Toronto, Canada. Barbara Peters, 85, has been teaching almost continuously for close to 65 years in Yorkshire, England. Do the two RAD teachers share an approach?

Barbara Peters I started training in 1956 and graduated as an RAD teacher in 1959. About 15 years ago I started teaching a syllabus called babyballet with my daughter, and still advise on that. I teach a Syllabus 1 class to adults working on the RAD’s Discovering Repertoire syllabus. We started in lockdown – I was able to teach online from home and it was quite popular. The youngest in class is 40 and the oldest is 85 – and that’s me. 

Michiko Nishimura I graduated from the teacher certificate program at Canada’s National Ballet School in 2020, just as the pandemic was coming in. I started my ballet studies in Japan when I was seven years old and sometimes went to Russia to study – in Japan most schools do the Russian style. But I wanted to learn something different. I did not know anatomy or how to teach musicality to a young student to become a professional dancer. At Canada’s National Ballet School, I chose RAD because it is very good for young students. Everyone enjoys it and I can really see the students develop.

Barbara I didn’t start ballet until I was nine years old. Mine was an RAD teacher and I passed all my exams. I was often asked to help teach the little children, which I liked. I was quite small and knew that physically I wouldn’t be a ballerina, so at 16 I applied to the RAD teacher training course. Unfortunately, because everybody thought dancing was a truly trivial pursuit, I couldn’t get any funding. My parents were not wealthy, so I had to leave school and worked for a whole year to get money for my fees. A grant was only awarded in my third year, because they could see I was serious about doing something worthwhile. It led to becoming a senior student of RAD and then an examiner – I was steeped in the Royal Academy of Dance.

Michiko Presently, I teach at the Conservatory of Dance & Music in Toronto, and before I was – still am – a dancer and a choreographer in Japan, and also a choreographer at the Okada Sumina Ballet Company.

Barbara Do you dance for your students?

Michiko Yes. I put on pointe shoes in front of them and show them how I dance and they have such bright eyes! The other teachers tell me it is inspiring. I think it is very helpful to help others improve and to show how to perform. 

Barbara The students must think it wonderful to watch you dance, but I think there is a very fine line to make sure that you adjust your demonstration to suit your students – if you’re not careful, you can make them feel a little inadequate.

Michiko I think there needs to be a bigger emphasis on showing students how to perform. If you use the same music over and over to prepare for exams, I sometimes feel that they stop feeling anything and look stiff and robotic. It is harder to teach them expression, and how to use the body. Sometimes I give periods of free dance to loosen them up because if you only use the syllabus, it’s very hard to perform on stage. 

Barbara Free dance classes and alternative music alongside the syllabus are definitely important. If you’re working with children, you must mix it up to develop musicality.

Clarke MacIntosh, National Director of RAD Canada, compares notes with Maria do Carmo Kenny, National Director in Brazil and South America, about how the RAD helps to develop a sense of community.

Deirdre Kelly What were your first impressions of the RAD?

Clarke MacIntosh My background is not in dance. It’s in the arts and classical music. When I started at RAD in 2011, I had a lot of discussions and interviews with members, examiners, and teachers. I wanted to learn what made the RAD meaningful and special for them. Overwhelmingly, there was this recurring theme: the sense of family, the sense of community. I could name at least a dozen high-profile members who were not initially RAD students but who ended up joining the organisation as professional teachers because there was this much greater sense of support, collaboration and community than they had encountered elsewhere. 

Maria do Carmo Kenny Like Clarke, I am not from a dance background. I was a secretary at the Hilton hotel and took the RAD position without knowing anything about dance, but now I love it.

Deirdre How did the pandemic affect the way you developed the RAD community?

Clarke The pandemic made us pivot to online right away. Having town hall sessions for members so they didn’t feel quite so alone was important. You learn dance in a social group and setting – you learn and progress with the same cohort, perhaps for years and years, and create friendships that last your entire lifetime. The RAD gives that same experience to teachers – by adopting and embracing technology in new and creative ways, we have created this opportunity to bring that sense of community back.

Maria We were able to do exams in December 2020. The teachers were thankful that they could close that terrible year with something to offer the students.

We are now much more linked to students and their parents, using social media tools like Instagram and Facebook in ways we hadn’t before. When the quarantine was implemented in Brazil in March 2020, I said to the students, Why don’t you let us see you dancing at home? At that time, we had only 400 followers on Instagram, but within three months, we had 4,000 – now we have 11,000. This has changed the way the RAD operates in Brazil. WhatsApp is also very popular here, so we created several groups – for teachers, students and examiners, plus regional groups. If a teacher has a question, she will put it in the group chat, and a colleague or tutor will answer and add to the conversation. It creates a feeling of family.

Brazil is a big market for the RAD to conquer. In 2021, we offered 27 online courses for teachers across South America, and 950 teachers participated. Our Instagram shows how we offer support and how our students enjoy our exams and summer courses. Technology enables the organisation to grow. 

Deirdre How is dance a socially and emotionally bonding experience, from your perspectives? 

Clarke Parents often wonder about the legitimacy of dance in their children’s education. I remind them that very few people become engineers, but we don’t question whether math is important. Education in the arts builds personal and social skills, and appreciation and empathy that serve people for a lifetime. For us at the RAD, the value of dance is as a life preparation activity for young people.

Maria I was at a birthday party last week for one of our examiners, and all her students – maybe 60 of them – were there! Students regard their dance teacher with love and tenderness because that’s the person who connected them to art, music and a way of expressing themselves. That makes us a family – a shared love of the art form. 

Clarke You end up with these bonds where a teacher celebrates their 60th birthday and students across three generations show up to celebrate. It makes it all worthwhile. 

Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based dance critic and author of Ballerina. She has twice won the Nathan Cohen Award for criticism. Her next book, Fashioning the Beatles, will be published later this year by Sutherland House Books.

‘I’ve trained with the RAD since I was four – so taking part in The Fonteyn feels like a nice circle.’ Valentino Zucchetti’s ballet career is studded with RAD landmarks. Now an established soloist and increasingly ambitious choreographer at the Royal Ballet, the Italian’s RAD roots remain strong. The former gold medallist in the Genée International Ballet Competition is now the first guest choreographer in its new incarnation as The Fonteyn.

Zucchetti currently sports a devilishly trim goatee – a sign, he grimaces, of the injury he’s carrying, as he must be clean-shaven on stage. His eyes glint, but can’t suppress the thrumming frustration of recovery. He’s a sharp, candid interviewee.

A perfect fit for the RAD flagship (as RAD Artistic Director Gerard Charles points out, ‘there’s even a studio in RAD Italy’s summer school named after him!’), Zucchetti notched up all the RAD exams from Pre-Primary to the Solo Seal, and won his gold medal in 2006, when the Genée was held in Hong Kong. ‘I have hugely fond memories,’ he recalls. ‘At La Scala Ballet School, we weren’t allowed to do competitions. It was one of the reasons I left. So when I came to the Royal Ballet School, the first thing I did was spearhead into competitions.’ 

Some events felt ruthless, but the Genée, he says, ‘was a different experience altogether, more nurturing – it didn’t feel like a cutthroat competition, more like a summer course that ended with a performance.’ He relished creating work with guest choreographer Yuri Ng, and being coached by Christopher Hampson (now Artistic Director of Scottish Ballet). ‘It was definitely one of the best experiences I’ve had.’

‘I had no idea I was going to win,’ he says now. ‘There were a couple of dancers that were just killer.’ On stage, Zucchetti was ‘dazzling,’ reported Olivia Swift for Dance Gazette. ‘Compared to longer-limbed male finalists, the 18 year-old is small. Yet he is also strong, controlled, and above all, devastatingly charismatic.’ The gold medal, predicted Swift, would be ‘the start of so much more.’

Zucchetti made good on the prediction, dancing in Oslo and Zurich, and for the past 13 years with the Royal Ballet. Now a First Soloist, he’s notable in roles with dash: Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Lensky in Onegin or Puck in The Dream. Alongside, since winning the Ursula Moreton Choreographic Award at the Royal Ballet School, he’s made regular pieces for the Royal Ballet’s Draft Works and increasingly for the main stage – Anemoi returns next year.

Choreographers at the Genée formerly made male and female solos, which all candidates would learn. This time, everyone participates in a single group piece. ‘Solos were great for the first group that got created on,’ Gerard Charles explains, ‘but each subsequent group was basically taught what was already set.’ At his first Genée, in Toronto, choreographer Gioconda Barbuto initially worked on material with all the candidates: ‘but although 70 dancers learned it, only the finalists got to perform it on stage.’

‘This time,’ he continues, ‘I thought it would be great if the choreographer made a piece everybody could be in. They may not be a finalist, but they will still dance at the finals, they won’t be forgotten.’ An ensemble work also gives a taste of ‘creating as a group. No one will know who will be a finalist when the choreography is set, so they’ll all be featured equally. Part of this event is to give people experiences – making this together will be a very exciting experience.’ Zucchetti seemed ‘perfect’ for this commission: ‘he understands young people. He will challenge them. They’ll learn what it is like not to be spoon fed.’

When we speak, applications for The Fonteyn are still open, so Zucchetti has no idea how large a cast he’ll have. Is he planning for 40 dancers, he wonders, or 90? Creating a big number will be demanding, ‘because we are asking a lot in very little time. I’m looking to display the dancers, to make sure they’re all involved. I will try my best while creating to make it educative, so they learn as much as possible. I have to make it challenging, but not impossible.’

It sounds daunting, but ‘I’m quite used to thinking on my feet,’ he says. ‘I use limitations almost as an exercise. I started my craft at the Royal Ballet School, but mostly in the main company, when time is non-existent. I’ve learned to structure rehearsals well, with no time-wasting.’ He hasn’t yet selected music for The Fonteyn: ‘it will be exciting music for sure. I spend a ridiculous amount of time researching music and have a playlist of about 400 tracks ready to choreograph. Music is never the problem.’

Having been there himself, how would he advise the candidates? ‘The ballet landscape has become very acrobatic, but the way to stand out is combining your technique with an innate, natural sense of performing. By all means, show us what you’ve got technically – but the judges have seen it all. They want to see you perform, demonstrating that you could be a valuable member of a company. It’s often in the way you respond to music, new choreography, or to teachers in class – things which to a young dancer might feel marginal are actually key.’

As a choreographer, Zucchetti has showcased ballet stars: Prima (2022) was made for Royal Ballet principals, including former Genée medallist Francesca Hayward. But he also responds to eager youngsters – evident in Anemoi (2021). Named for the Greek gods of the winds, its breezy ensemble moves in gusts and swoops. Big companies, he feels, can keep dancers in their place, but Anemoi was made especially for the corps de ballet. ‘They understood how special that was. That’s why they went all guns blazing, because they were like, this is our chance.’

He enjoys ensemble creations? ‘One hundred percent. Great scores require great structure: the bigger the orchestra, the bigger the cast, and there’s so much you can do within it. My focus is on constantly shifting structure while surfing the musical phrasing. That’s what I like, and what I appreciate in other choreographers.’ 

I sense a restless itch to create dance. ‘I’m a very hyperactive person,’ Zucchetti confirms. ‘A workaholic, constantly grinding to create more. I think my itch started when I first choreographed, at 16.’ As a dancer he has also watched many other choreographers at work. ‘I have been so lucky, I’ve worked on a ridiculous amount of new creations. Ultimately, each choreographer has their own style. Ideas come from different people or places, and the way you manifest those is very individual.’

He believes ‘everything in my career as a dancer has benefited me, in one way or another. Even bad experiences taught me a lot. You learn how to help a choreographer – I can sense when a choreographer is stuck, and the last thing you want is a sassy dancer looking at you like: what’s next? I gravitate towards dancers with musicality or enthusiasm, or a palpable sense of appreciation for my work. If they’re enjoying it, I’m enjoying it.’

‘I was 35 in May, so definitely heading towards the sunset of my dancing career,’ he adds. ‘I’m so fortunate that I have this other passion. It has limitless growth – as a dancer, all I can do is try to last as long as I can, but I can keep improving as a choreographer until I die.’

He keeps an eye on older dancing colleagues, to see ‘how they exit and how they feel about it. For some people, ballet is all they have – they throw themselves heart and soul into it and can’t see an alternative. Psychologically that can be very difficult. I definitely don’t want to find myself psychologically unprepared when the day comes.’ 

Finally, why does choreography appeal to Zucchetti? ‘It’s actually very basic,’ he says. ‘Whenever an idea is in my head, it keeps bouncing like a ray of light inside a room of mirrors. One pleasure is the relief of transferring it out of my head. I remember watching something I made for the Royal Ballet School, and I was like, eight months ago this was in my head and now it’s at the Royal Opera House. Genuinely amazing.’

He also loves ‘seeing dancers really engaging with my work. Let me tell you, as a dancer you dance a hell of a lot of things you don’t fully enjoy. But when a dancer’s fully with you, and you see them on stage genuinely feeling the piece – that’s great. And for me, it’s all about what the audience feels. I get such a kick every time.’

On my way to meet the RAD’s new Chief Executive, one question above all demands an answer. Not how the role follows a career which embraces theatre, publishing and finance. Not how he plans to develop the RAD’s work from its new global home. No, I burn to know whether Tim Arthur, as an online biography claims, really is ‘an almost award winning burlesque dancer’?

Arthur winces and then grins. ‘That is great,’ he says. ‘Yes, I was the second best male burlesque dancer in Britain in 2008.’ He was invited to cover a burlesque competition for the London listings magazine Time Out, only to realise he’d been entered into the Male Tournament of Tease. ‘I said, alright then. I was trained by Bearlesque, a phenomenal male burlesque troupe. Every night for six weeks, for four hours a night I trained and trained. Somehow I won my heat, so had to come back for the grand final.’ The final was packed with friends and family. ‘There is something peculiar about hearing your own mum shouting, “That’s my boy!” halfway through a burlesque routine,’ he muses.

Somewhat to his surprise, he says, ‘I loved it. Loads of other people did the competition, largely to overcome something. It’s very exposing, quite literally.’ For Arthur, who began his routine dressed as a bowler-hatted London businessman, ‘I had a lot of body confidence issues to overcome. And I took it really seriously – if I commit to something, I really commit. It was a complicated eight-minute routine. I’d danced when I was a kid, ballet and tap up to about eight or nine, but not anything since, so I was remarkably proud of myself.’ He was even offered a couple of professional gigs.

Vegas beckoned, but here he is in Battersea. And what does his burlesque moment reveal about the RAD’s new boss? He’s not afraid of a challenge, or of looking daft. He’s a showman, a grafter, and if you put him in a corner with only a bowler hat to protect his dignity, he’ll still give his all.

We’re sitting in the RAD’s new global headquarters during the handover from Arthur’s predecessor Luke Rittner. ‘This is Luke’s legacy,’ he says admiringly. ‘Luke has created a state of the art, incredible space. The studios are the best in London. I want our members to feel proud that we’ve created this for them and also for the community here in Wandsworth. We’re a global entity, so for members from around the world, this is their home in London – I’ll give them personal tours!’

Only weeks into his new role, Arthur is still ‘in the listening phase.’ When he first applied for the job, he admits, ‘I had an awareness of the RAD, but had no idea about its scale and global reach. This is an amazing organisation touching lives every day.’ Progressing through the rounds of interviewees, he met RAD staff, teachers and members. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever come into a business where people feel more passionate about an organisation,’ he marvels. ‘People love it with a passion and ownership that I’ve never come across. It’s an amazing gift and responsibility to take the organisation to the next level, but keep everything that people hold dear: all the DNA, all the values. The legacy that Luke leaves is incredibly impressive, you don’t want to screw it up.’

Guy Perricone, the RAD’s Chairman, believes the Academy is in safe hands. ‘Tim has both commercial and artistic experience,’ he says, ‘with great sympathy and sensitivity for the RAD’s cultural, educational and artistic value. The importance he attached to the membership was critical. And, to be blunt, he’s a really nice person. There is an ambassadorial aspect to the CEO role – somebody who can present the RAD in the best possible light.’

Arthur is an undeniably amiable presence, willingly changing his jacket and bopping about the RAD’s new building for the Dance Gazette photoshoot. There are no diva antics to report. He grew up in London, and his mother Toni appeared on Play Away, a vastly popular British children’s tv programme in the 1970s. ‘I often get people saying, I grew up with your mum – I tend to say, and so did I.’ Toni and his father, Dave, were folk musicians, and young Tim toured with them as, he says, their precocious lighting designer.

A lasting love for the arts was implanted early. ‘It was all my childhood,’ he says. ‘The importance of the arts ran through it like words in a stick of rock – how they could transform or fulfil your life. Our house was full of music, there was no getting away from it.’ Folk dance too: ‘My dad taught me clog dancing when I was three or four, in actual Lancashire wooden clogs. We were part of a Morris dancing group. We used to sing as a family, four-part harmonies around the piano.’ He thinks for a second. ‘It sounds a bit like an English Von Trapp family, now I say it out loud.’

Although his university degree was in religious studies (‘I’m fascinated in the psychology of what motivates people’), Arthur’s first job was ‘teaching drama to the long term unemployed in Greenwich.’ It wasn’t easy. ‘There were people who didn’t want to be there at all,’ he remembers. ‘I was potentially out of my depth, but they were really generous – they gave me a go. By the time I left, we had 40 people, doing some amazing performances.’ The experience taught him that ‘you can transform people’s lives with the arts, but only if you’re open and engaging – it’s a two-way relationship.’

Similar lessons thrummed though his leadership of Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company working with the homeless. ‘I’m still friends with loads of those amazing people,’ he beams. ‘When I see them around London, they’ll give me a big hug.’ But what can the arts offer those in urgent need of food or shelter? ‘Often, when you work with homeless people, they are in survival mode – they lose hope or a sense of worth, they don’t feel part of a community. In Cardboard Citizens, they could feel valued. The arts have profound impact on people and their understanding of what they’re capable of, with a huge effect on the rest of their life.’

From theatre, Arthur moved to join Time Out, with its listings magazines and city guides, ending as its Global CEO. ‘The great thing Time Out does is help people discover great art,’ he says. Less predictable was a shift into banking, as Creative Director at Virgin Money. ‘For people who knew me, that was the biggest swerve,’ he concedes. But he describes Virgin’s then chief executive, Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia, as ‘one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever worked with. She told me that she wanted to create a bank that people loved and was there for them, looking after them at the worst times and also helping them to build and celebrate. She would make business decisions – worth millions or billions of pounds – based on her values, which were: does this make people better off? She’s probably the best boss I’ve ever had.’

If there is a thread through these disparate careers, he considers, ‘it’s always people, and how you create positive change’ – he’s also training as a psychotherapist. ‘If your motivation is to make people’s lives better, you can do that in hundreds of ways. Dance is an amazing way to do it.’

This is a message Arthur hears from RAD members. ‘That has got me most excited, because of their passion,’ he says. ‘I’m going out to dance schools, talking to examiners. I want to know, what could we do better? How has the world changed, and how should we respond? The membership will know the answers.’ He already feels very much at home. ‘I ran my own drama school. I’ve been meeting RAD teachers and it feels so familiar. I know exactly what it’s like to go with a set of keys to open up a cold hall. I know the juggling act of being creative and a great teacher, but also running a business. Everything we do at the RAD is based on the desire to build an organisation that members will be proud of, and that is useful and helpful to them.’

We run through challenges facing the RAD as it settles into the 21st century. As in all arts organisations, safeguarding has become a key concern. ‘Student safety is first and foremost,’ Arthur declares. ‘Every child should feel safe, and my number one issue is that we continue to improve our safeguarding practices, and help our members with them.’ The Academy has appointed its first full time safeguarding officer: ‘it’s beholden on the RAD to lead the way as a beacon.’ He is also keen to consult with members for their ideas: ‘we are one family and should learn from everybody.’

Expectations on this issue may differ across the RAD’s territories – is it possible to produce consistent practises for over 80 diverse countries? ‘Different cultures have different expectations, different needs,’ Arthur acknowledges. ‘At Time Out we had a core set of values, and tried to make sure that all the Time Outs around the world felt part of one family. But they were given enough freedom to thrive in their own cultures. Having taken my first RAD trip, to Australia, I sense it’s very similar. We’ve got to listen to people around the world because they will know their market best.’

Ballet’s poor record on diversity – on and off stage – is another urgent issue. Does Arthur’s appointment reflect that urgency? ‘It’s a valid question,’ he says. ‘There’s no getting away from it, I’m a white, middle aged man, I’m not the most diverse choice. But I’m passionate that there is diversity and equality, not just within the organisation and membership, but also within our student base. How do we reach out to different audiences and celebrate different cultures? All I can do is promote inclusivity, equality and diversity with everything we do.’

How does Perricone imagine Arthur’s RAD? ‘Obviously, it’s early days,’ he responds. ‘But I’ve already sensed his openness – he wants to go out and be our ambassador. He’s also grasped that if we’re not serving our members we are missing a very big trick.’ And for Arthur himself, a road that has passed through clog dancing, theatre for the homeless and, yes, burlesque seems to lead logically to the RAD. ‘It just feels like a dream job for me,’ he says. ‘What an opportunity, what a gift.’

‘I was just born to be a fan of things.’ Brandon Taylor is smiling down the Zoom. The American writer is a fan of, among other things, medieval European history; 19th-century Russian portraiture; 20th-century literary theory – and, it turns out, ballet.

None of these are necessarily passions you might expect to animate a 32-year-old novelist from Iowa, but Taylor – whose debut Real Life was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year – is your man for recondite enthusiasms. ‘I tried being the very cool, very aloof artist,’ he says. ‘I tried looking down my nose, but I don’t enjoy it. I’m such a nerd about things that I enjoy – I have no cool.’

I would happily quiz Taylor about his strong views on the Tudors (‘usurper trash’) but ballet calls. What ignited that particular enthusiasm? He dates it precisely – to World Ballet Day 2016. WBD is when international classical companies and institutions including the RAD open a window not on performance but on their daily grind – the routine of class and rehearsal. ‘I’d always had an interest in dance, but it never occurred to me that it could be something you could write or do a story about,’ Taylor says. He was working long days as a graduate student in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, and ‘one of the things I was doing to keep sane in the middle of the night was I’d browse YouTube, and I came across the video of World Ballet Day in late fall 2016. And I was like, wait, there’s a video of the entire morning class? It was the best thing I’d ever seen.’

He enjoys staged ballet, but admits that his devoted nerding is drawn to ‘nitty-gritty process-oriented stuff. I felt incredibly privileged to get a behind-the-scenes sneak peek into how these dancers start their day. Everyone’s got a slightly different ritual: some people take the legwarmers off when they move to centre, some people leave them on, some shed layers as they get warmer. When people think of dance it’s like going to the museum, this distant, cold art form – but you get this glimpse into the human behind the artistry and I loved it so much. And I was like: oh, now I know how to write about this.’

That realisation bears fruit in Filthy Animals, his first short story collection. Six of the stories track a fraught triangle between three young people at a midwestern university, as Lionel, struggling with his emotional health and career prospects, becomes emotionally tangled with Sophie and her boyfriend Charles, both dance students.

Bodies, their fragility and needs, are at the heart of these stories. ‘Flesh’ tracks morning class when Charles stumbles in, hungover after late-night sex. He feels rough, his injured knee twinges – but all dancers know you don’t skip class, no matter what. ‘It is mind-blowing to me,’ Taylor admits. ‘I used to work in a lab, and you could tell after the summer vacation who hadn’t been in lab all summer. Their pipetting wasn’t as crisp, their experiments didn’t run as smoothly. For dance, where your craft literally lives in your body, I do think you have to be in it continuously, otherwise you lose your touch and feel.’

‘I know what it’s like to be young and have a passion and want to be an artist,’ he muses. ‘Now I had access to a visual vocabulary, a way into this form that I’d loved for so long but didn’t know how to write about.’ Watching dancers all over the world go through their morning motions was key. ‘You can see they’re working on things. You see the bones but also the spontaneous play of it.’ Whether they’re in lab, in bed or in class, Taylor homes in on the tensions that bodies carry. In the studio, dancers size each other up (Sophie is the acknowledged star of her cohort, while Charles is second-tier, as long as his knee holds out) and are unillusioned about their bodies. ‘It is an unsentimental attitude towards oneself, like, “I’ve just got to get this hunk of meat into the air for 2.5 seconds and down again”. So much of dance is paying attention to your body until it’s less a body and more a machine that does things.’

In a pre-interview email exchange, Taylor named Justin Peck, Wayne McGregor and  Charlotte Edmonds among favourite choreographers: ‘neoclassical and modern-adjacent stuff.’ Perhaps unexpectedly for a storyteller, these aren’t primarily narrative artists. ‘I’m as non-abstract as a contemporary writer can be,’ he agrees. ‘But one of the things I love most is when a piece bears some mark of its composition.’ In these dance makers, ‘you can see the sketch line, like artists who work in charcoal. I love the human mark of it.’

Taylor writes cool but reads scalding hot. Does he respond physically to the emotions that scorch through his work? ‘When I was younger I would feel emotion very keenly,’ he admits. ‘I had no means of separation, I was in it. Now there is more of a separation, but I know I’ve hit on something really good when I feel a spike of anxiety – when it cuts through the distance I’ve managed to make for myself. The Lionel stories look into some dark, complicated places, and there were moments in the revision of Filthy Animals when I had to get up from my table and walk it off. But when I do feel a flush of anxiety when I’m writing, I try to pay attention. It’s about maintaining the emotional torque but not losing the artistry.’

World Ballet Day and the obsession it unleashed ultimately shaped Filthy Animals. Taylor wanted to follow characters through several stories (‘I have a hard time letting go’), and standalone tales alternate with Lionel’s encounters with the dancers. Their coffee chats and hook-ups feel unbearably high-stakes, especially whenever food is involved. A campus potluck, an unnerving shared pasta, the calamitous student supper in Real Life: Taylor’s dinner scenes are goosebumpingly tense. ‘I’m drawn to meal scenes because they’re one of life’s great locked rooms,’ he explains. ‘You go to someone’s house and eat their food – you can’t just get up from the table and go. All of us have been at the dinner table where someone says the thing they were not supposed to say. That’s where the real juice comes from. I love social tension, I love social conflict – not in my real life, but in my art.’

The publication of Filthy Animals will hopefully be less fraught for Taylor than his novel’s entry into the world last year. ‘It was a weird and brutal year,’ he reflects. Lockdown in early 2020 coincided with a period of illness. ‘I started having these horrible anxiety attacks and developed this panic disorder. I went to the ER 10 times over a three-month period.’ Prioritising health over self-promotion, he assumed Real Life would disappear without trace, only for it to hit the Booker shortlist. The story of a Black, gay scientist’s response to aggressions, micro- and otherwise, in grad school was often taken as autobiographical, yet Filthy Animals, ‘in many ways is a much more personal book. It was born out of the darkest period of my life.’ And he chuckles.

Filthy Animals is far more than dance lit, yet it gets to the heart of something about a life in dance – its immediacy and precarity. At one point, Charles realises he’s being honest, ‘because something in him hurt, and for a dancer pain is always the way you know something is true.’ How does Taylor intuit this so acutely? ‘It comes from that enthusiasm,’ he explains. ‘Once I get into a thing I get into it. It comes from a lot of watching dance, documentaries, interviews with dancers. And then thinking about the analogues in my own life – working in lab, pursuing with fanatical dedication a singular pursuit, and what it costs you.’ We’re back to the rewards of curiosity and enthusiasm. ‘I’m a super fan of things,’ he says happily. ‘When I engage with something I engage with it fully. I commit.’

Amber Scott may be one of Australia’s most acclaimed dancers, with a long and storied career as a principal dancer with the Australian Ballet (AB), but one of her most cherished memories stems from the RAD’s Genée International Ballet Competition. She was only 15 years old, a student with the Australian Ballet School (ABS), and the excitement at being named a Genée finalist was enhanced by the fact that the finals were being held in London.

‘It was my first trip overseas, so I got my first passport!’ Scott tells me today. ‘Going to London was amazing. Most of the competition was held in Battersea but the final was in the city and the taxi drove past Buckingham Palace, it was so special. It really hit home we were in London.’ It was 1998 and the bronze medal she received almost paled into insignificance alongside the excitement of that trip.

Fast forward to 2021 and Scott was hoping to return to London in person as a member of the coaching team for this year’s Margot Fonteyn International Ballet Competition, as the Genée is now known, but is nevertheless happy at being able to bring the past 22 years’ experience to the role.

The Brisbane-born ballerina was five years old when she began ballet classes. Her family relocated to Melbourne after Scott was accepted into the ABS aged 11, clearly showing promise as just nine years later she received a coveted position with the main company. Since that first trip to London, Scott’s career has taken her all over the world, from New York to Paris, London and Shanghai, including four months in Copenhagen with the Royal Danish Ballet on dancer exchange. She was promoted to principal artist in 2011, a dancer renowned for her artistry, grace, intelligence and ability to bring alive some of the classical canon’s most beloved roles, Swan Lake’s Odette/Odile, Onegin’s Tatiana and Giselle among them. Most recently she and husband and fellow AB principal artist Ty King-Wall added ‘parent’ to their respective roles, welcoming baby Bonnie into their family.

In person Scott is and has always been overwhelmingly humble and gracious. Little wonder new artistic director David Hallberg speaks so highly of her. ‘Amber is a beautiful ballerina but [also] sees herself as having a responsibility to nurture younger talent,’ says Hallberg, who took over as the AB’s eighth artistic director following the retirement of David McAllister last year after 20 years at the helm. ‘Amber’s humanness and empathy and warmth bodes well to inspiring and leading and mentoring younger talent,’ Hallberg says of her role as a Fonteyn coach.

When it comes to Hallberg’s respect for Scott’s abilities as a dancer you need look no further than the fact that the then-American Ballet Theater and Bolshoi Ballet principal artist requested Scott partner him when he staged his astonishing comeback from a career-threatening ankle injury in 2016, dancing Coppélia together in Sydney. He had been off-stage for two and a half years.

Now celebrating her 21st year as a professional dancer, Scott reflects on some significant changes in the world of classical ballet, most of them welcome and not before time.

‘We all questioned everything last year – ballet’s place in the world environmentally, politically and in terms of the gender balance’

‘We all questioned everything last year – ballet’s place in the world environmentally, politically and in terms of the gender balance. Ballet is such a beautiful artform and has its traditions, but it will be interesting to see how it’s updated,’ she says. In the past 12 months she has had the opportunity to watch both Queensland Ballet and West Australian Ballet and is pleased to see the continually evolving face of those companies, and the AB, to better reflect the culturally diverse world we live in.

When it comes to teaching and coaching Scott is relieved to see the back of some unacceptable practices. ‘I definitely encountered some methods I certainly wouldn’t be using myself these days. I was fortunate I got through relatively unscathed but teaching and learning and how we look after young people has really evolved and that’s great,’ she says. ‘The way we used to teach or be taught, you hear stories from our ballet teachers about things that are just not acceptable these days. I think there’s a lot more thought about interactions with students, it’s really important that we have the highest level of care for our young dancers.’

Scott is quick to point out how instrumental many of her teachers and coaches were in helping her become the well-rounded dancer she is today, many of them encountered through the dance competitions she was encouraged to enter. While she typically found her exposure to these guest coaches helpful, she admits to finding the competitions themselves mentally challenging.

‘I didn’t really love the feeling of competing, I found it overwhelming to be somewhere new and have to just come out and do a solo,’ she says. ‘It was exciting and you’d want to watch everyone else, but I also felt I had to concentrate really hard to do what I needed to do. I did the Genée and Asian Pacific Competition  [which she won] in the Australian Ballet School and was really well prepared for both and learnt a lot but I definitely preferred the feeling of performing with a company. You get a high from performing but I like it when it’s within a context and not about a prize.’

Despite this she recognises how important competitions are in the development of a young dancer, for a multitude of reasons. ‘The overall experience was what was important. Maybe being taken out of my comfort zone was what I needed, because even now what we do gives you a lot of nerves and adrenaline and you need to know how to cope with that. So competitions do give you a lot of skills for later life.’

Scott says the logistics have at times been challenging – juggling multiple time zones, working from makeshift ‘home studios’, typically the kitchen or living room (in Scott’s case the garage) and of course the restrictions of not being physically present in an artform that is the very definition of physicality – but the rewards are manifold.

‘I’ve really enjoyed it, I’ve loved teaching and coaching,’ she says of the half-hour Zoom sessions. ‘I felt I had a nice rapport with the students I worked with, they were receptive to new ideas.’ Given the brevity of the sessions Scott was mindful not to overload the students with too many corrections, instead focusing on giving them positive feedback to leave them confident and capable of striving for something new. ‘It can be difficult when you’re not familiar with a student and you’re just watching them online,’ she says. ‘You want to create a positive learning environment because a computer screen is always challenging.’

Hallberg adds that as a teacher, creating a positive learning environment requires a nuanced balancing act between nurturing and pushing, knowing where the line is and when not to cross it. ‘If you push too hard they crumble but if you’re too soft they don’t improve,’ he says. ‘That’s something even I am finding as a new artistic director.’

Scott would have liked to have taken on more Fonteyn finalists but, with Australia in the incredibly fortunate position of being relatively Covid-free, some performing artists have been back on stage since the second half of last year, while the Australian Ballet resumed performances in February. ‘I was very happy to be doing that but guilty not to have more time because I was performing,’ she says.

To this day Scott is grateful for the ‘many amazing coaches’ who have guided her along the way, from a shy corps de ballet member to today’s veteran dancer who nevertheless still strives for improvement. ‘They’ve taught me for 21 years now, it’s like a family, we’ve been through really good times and challenging times like last year,’ she says. ‘I have a lot of fun in the studios with the coaches, they see us trying really hard but sometimes it all goes horribly wrong and is really funny. But they want to see us growing as artists and I really appreciate when they watch you closely enough to offer something new, help you grow into each stage of your career, because you need different things at different stages.’

As she takes on more of a coaching role herself Scott is hopeful she can impart to her students some of the knowledge and experience and joy she has had in over two decades of dancing professionally in this rapidly shifting world.

‘The world has changed compared to when I joined the company at 20. There was no Google, there was no social media, you couldn’t YouTube a ballet up the back of the rehearsal, we sat and knitted!’ she laughs. ‘There’s so much more now young people have to contend with and we’ve got to do our best to nourish them in the right way.’

Jane Albert, an author and journalist specialising in the arts, writes for the Weekend Australian, Australian Financial Review and others.