Amber Scott in the Nutcracker Photo: Jeff Busby.

Her time at The Australian Ballet School prepared Amber Scott for a long, rich career as a principal artist with The Australian Ballet, where she shone as the quintessential classical and Romantic ballerina.  

Our History Makers - Amber Scott

By Rose Mulready

Appropriately for a ballerina who would become one of The Australian Ballet’s most acclaimed Odette/Odiles, Amber Scott’s love of dance began with Swan Lake. When she was five, her mother and father took her to Brisbane’s Lyric Theatre to see a performance by The Royal Ballet. Amber loved the swans, and mimicked their arm movements from her seat. Her day was made when she and her parents went to a café after the matinee and saw the Prince eating lunch there. He signed an autograph for Amber on his serviette.  

Taking Amber to ballet classes seemed the obvious next move, but at first it was not quite what she expected. “I didn’t love the strict discipline of it! I remember having to sit on a chair at the front of the class and watch the other students a fair bit at first. I’d just learnt to whistle and wouldn’t stop!” A few years later, with patient teaching from her first teacher Anne Fraser and some more maturity, Amber grew to love the challenge of exams and concerts, and spent many concentrated hours in the studio.  

When she was eleven, Amber’s family moved from the Sunshine Coast to Melbourne, and she was able to enrol in The Australian Ballet School’s junior associate program, as well as taking classes at the National Theatre in St Kilda. She also auditioned to be in The Australian Ballet’s production of Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker – The Story of Clara, which had a large cast of children. “I was chosen to be one of the trio of girls who are playing in the street outside Clara’s house at the start of the ballet. I remember my role involved poking my tongue out at Colin Peasley on stage! For the ABC simulcast they needed someone to scream extra-loudly when the rats take Clara away. I volunteered and they had me scream into a microphone offstage. That’s my scream in the video!” 

Amber loved the glamour of the State Theatre, and the stars who were playing the lead roles – Vicki Attard, David McAllister, Steven Heathcote, Justine Summers. The ballerinas signed their pointe shoes as gifts for the children at the end of the season. “I can remember being driven home late at night, on an absolute high, and all the trees on St Kilda Road were strung with fairy lights – it was magical. That was when I first realised I wanted to be a ballerina in The Australian Ballet.”

The Australian Ballet's The Nutcracker. Adam Bull and Amber Scott. Photo by Jeff Busby

As a member of the junior associate program, Amber was impressed by the air of discipline at the School. “There was a gravity to it. I came to understand that I’d have to work very hard and be very focused if I wanted to pursue ballet as a career. There were some really talented people in the associate program that I looked up to – Adam Bull, Amy Harris. We juniors would run down the corridor to watch the principals in the company studios. I was just tall enough to see in the windows.” 

Amber’s family moved back to Queensland for a time, and she continued her training from there, trying to visit Melbourne as often as possible. During this period Gailene Stock offered her a place in the School. Amber was only 14, a year younger than the usual entry age. 

Amber’s first year teacher was Madame Tang, who had trained in Beijing. “She was a very sweet woman, and she worked us very hard, she’d set us really long combinations. I remember her saying to me, ‘Amber, you are like noodle – stop stretching!’ She was right, I was always stretching. I had Michela Kirkaldie in my second year, and she was such an amazing mentor. She treated us like women, and expected us to be self-sufficient and professional. I learnt a lot from her about being mature.” In her third year, Dale Baker was another significant mentor. “He doesn’t say a lot, but what he says is so meaningful. He also explained to us what it would be like in the professional world. You know, dancers leave the School when they’re 18, and they go straight into a workplace. There’s no gap year, no messy years – you have to have it together straight away.”  

When Amber was in the School, the course was three years long (it is now eight). That meant that there were a lot of students of different ages mixed into the same year. It happened that in Amber’s year there were a lot more mature boys, which was a boon for her pas de deux training. “They could do difficult partnering, and I learnt a lot of lifts and throws that I had to do later as a principal.”  

In her third year of training, Amber’s teacher for many years, Leigh Rowles, created a ballet on the dancers in her year level. Ascension was a work for one woman and four men. “It was such a valuable experience to be part of that creative process.” Ascencion has become a performance staple for the School. 

Amber was lucky enough to be taught by the two legendary Marilyns – Marilyn Jones at the National Theatre, and Marilyn Rowe at the School. During her second year, Rowe coached her in the Act II variation from La Fille mal gardée, teaching her the flowing, intricate Ashton style, which she also learnt from Dale Baker and his wife, the English ballerina Anne Jenner; both had danced at The Royal Ballet, and taught the grand pas de deux from the Ashton version of Cinderella at the School. “I still think about all these things my teachers shared now, as I’m teaching. Marilyn coached me in the role of Aurora for a competition when I was 16, and then when I danced The Sleeping Beauty years later, I was still remembering things she’d said to me back then. She told me, ‘Aurora is like a pearl – not like a diamond. She glows.’ Marilyn ‘travelled’, she was a real mover, great at running – running on stage is actually really hard. She told me about dancing Cranko’s Juliet, and how she would run with her cape flowing out behind her, and how there was that feeling of freedom and abandonment.” Later, when Amber was in the company, Rowe would coach her in Ronald Hynd’s The Merry Widow (her first principal role) and Glen Tetley’s Gemini, both ballets that had been made on Rowe.  

As Amber was graduating, The Australian Ballet was changing. Ross Stretton was handing over the artistic directorship to David McAllister, and the company was expanding its numbers. A large group of dancers from the School was offered contracts, Amber among them. Moving into company life with a gaggle of her friends eased the feeling of intimidation, and she enjoyed the “shock of freedom: you could wear what you wanted, you could do whatever kind of warm-up you wanted.” However, the pace at which she was expected to pick up and perform new choreography was ferocious, and she was thrown in the deep end, having to learn the devilish complexity of George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations in her first week.   

 Amber Scott and Dancers of The Australian Ballet in Swan Lake. Photo by Jeff Busby.

When she was 19, Amber travelled on exchange to The Royal Danish Ballet. She shared a dressing room there with a group of friendly women, who looked after the newcomer. (One of them, Amy Watson, is now the company’s artistic director.) Amber wanted to improve her petit allegro. “I was a naturally lyrical dancer, but you have to be such an all-rounder in ballet.” She learnt the graceful Danish style, and the secret of its soft jump – “You articulate through the feet to soften the landings. The movement of the upper body, and the way you emphasise angles of the head and hands, can give the impression of weightlessness.” 

After ten years with the company, Amber was promoted to the rank of principal artist after an opening-night performance in the Second Movement of Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto. It took her by surprise. “It was my first time dancing a major pas de deux for an opening night with Robert Curran, and it’s a very long, demanding pas. I was just focused on getting through it!” Andrew Killian and Leanne Stojmenov were made principals on the same night, which made the moment even more special. “I went through the ranks with a really great group of women – Jane Casson, Danielle Rowe, Lana Jones, Gina Brescianini, Miwako Kubota, Amy Harris and Leanne Stojmenov – they had grit, they had drive, and we were genuinely proud of each other’s achievements.”  

Amber danced just about all the major roles of the classical repertoire, as well as contemporary works by Alexei Ratmansky, Wayne McGregor and Jiří Kylián, but she will perhaps be best remembered as a swan. She danced Odette in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake in China, France, England and the US, performing on opening night at the London Coliseum. Her Siegfried, Adam Bull, was also her partner when Stephen Baynes made a new production of the traditional Swan Lake for The Australian Ballet’s 50th anniversary, and chose Amber and Adam as his opening-night cast. Her natural lyricism reached its fullest expression in that role.  

In 2018, Amber married a fellow principal artist, Ty King-Wall; they now have two daughters, Bonnie and Marion. Towards the end of her career, Amber was driving with the girls and heard the Act IV ‘apotheosis’ music from Swan Lake on the radio. “I decided that was the last music I wanted to feel as a ballerina onstage. I thought it would be a beautiful ballet to go out on and complete the journey of my career in a truly meaningful way.” Amber had been dancing with the company for 22 years. The double role of Odette/Odile would be “a huge challenge, physically”. She received a wonderful parting gift when the illustrious French ballerina Sylvie Guillem was invited to coach the principals, including Amber and her partner, Callum Linnane. 

“Sylvie was very down-to-earth, with a wonderful eye for detail and fierce intelligence. Her very generous coaching didn’t concentrate so much on technical details, but rather the whole feel of the choreography. She would say, ‘This should feel beautiful, it should feel pleasurable, it should feel good to dance.’ She showed me how to make my ports de bras more interesting by moving through a rounding of the shoulders instead of keeping them pulled back. And she was very logical! In my first entrance, where you lean towards the ground, I’d always imagined that I was looking at my reflection in the lake, watching my transformation from a bird into a woman. Sylvie said to me, “Ok … but actually, the lake is behind you!” 

TAB Amber Scott performing Swan Lake for the last time. 2023

Marilyn Rowe, one of Wooliams’ original Odettes, also came back to share her knowledge with the company, and Amber treasured this final rehearsal period with her long-time coach. 

After dancing, Amber had considered studying podiatry at La Trobe University (The Australian Ballet’s Research Partner), but one day her former teacher, Michela Kirkaldie, caught her, quite symbolically, on the bridge between the city and the Ballet, and asked her if she had any thoughts of doing the teaching course that Kirkaldie ran at the School. “She asked me, ‘Won’t you miss the music, the beauty, the art form?’ I decided that I would. I’d taught summer schools before, and I wanted to improve my teaching. And studying with Michela was a beautiful circle back to my School days.” Amber did the course over four years, through two pregnancies and the COVID pandemic. She set up a small ballet-coaching business with her husband during her last year of dancing before moving with her family to New Zealand, where King-Wall was taking on the directorship of the Royal New Zealand Ballet. These days, Amber is a classical tutor at the New Zealand School of Dance and a guest teacher at RNZB. She has also enjoyed returning to Australia to teach at The Australian Ballet School’s Winter and Summer Schools. 

“I love that teaching is all about helping the dancers reach their goals. Also, I like that teaching is much more collaborative these days: while clear demonstration is still a very important part of teaching, the students are invited to discuss their discoveries with the teacher, to investigate, to share their thoughts. And ultimately I feel the learning is more deeply embedded when you’re taught that way.”