The Australian Ballet’s first Indigenous dancer has drawn on both her First Nations heritage and her classical training to become a unique artist.
Like many ballet dancers, Ella Havelka can trace her fascination with the art form back to an early encounter with Swan Lake. Her mother Janna decided, for no particular reason, to borrow an old VHS of the production from the library. “I saw movement with a story, a purpose,” says Ella. “I thought, ‘I want to try that!’”
Ella was always an active child. Janna did physical culture (a mix of dance and exercise), and her daughter would mimic her. “Mum put me in a lot of different types of sports and activities to see what I’d like, but nothing stuck. When I went to my first ballet class, I’d at last found something I wasn’t bored by – unlike Physical Culture or Little Athletics!” Ella’s ballet journey began at The Dubbo Ballet Studio, founded by Joyce Schneider. At the time it was run by Jacqueline Hoole and Suzanne Duffy; it later passed to Anna Gardner. Her teachers could see that she had some excellent attributes for ballet – turnout, well-shaped feet, passion – and kept encouraging Janna to bring her back.
Ella attended summer workshops given by The Australian Ballet School, as well as masterclasses with Bangarra Dance Theatre, but she didn’t think vocationally about dance until she was 13, when the Dubbo Ballet Studio took its students on an excursion to attend a performance at Sydney Opera House. It was Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake. “That was when I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’ The ability to tell stories was always the selling point for me. In athletics, you’re always trying to be better. But ballet is about reaching beyond that – and about the process.”
For Ella, this aspect of ballet made a “beautiful juxtaposition” with First Nations culture. “My mother always talked about how we used to tell stories through our bodies, and through dance, so it was something that I wanted to continue as a legacy.”
Ella’s teachers suggested to Janna that she audition for The Australian Ballet School Interstate Training Program. Not wanting her daughter to be nervous, Janna told her she was just driving her to Sydney for a masterclass. “She wanted to protect me from being rejected at such a young age.” As it turned out, there was no need to worry – Ella was accepted into the School’s Training Program, and began to travel to Melbourne twice a year for a week at the School. “It just felt surreal to be chosen from among all those people at the audition.” In 2004, newly turned 15, she and Janna moved to Melbourne, and Ella started full-time studies at the School.
After spending the first years of her life in a country town, Ella scrambled to adapt. “I’d always been driven everywhere by Mum, very coddled. Suddenly I was catching trains everywhere, doing this long commute in and out to Glen Waverley. I was severely homesick, and really missed the slow pace of Dubbo.”
Fortunately, Ella found solace in her studies and support from her teachers, particularly her first-year classical teacher, Irina Konstantinova. “I’d had Miss Irina a lot in the Interstate Training Program, so I was already very familiar with her teaching style. She was always so lovely and kind, and genuinely invested in supporting me and helping me improve my technique. I have such fond memories of her teaching our class. We would create special surprise dances to perform for her during reverence at the start of class. We'd all arrive early to co-ordinate everything with our pianist, Emma Lippa, and have an absolute ball showing her our creations."
For someone who was “really obsessed” with ballet, full-time training came as a relief. “It’s not that I didn’t like school, but because I loved dancing so much, I’d often find myself sitting around at school looking forward to going to ballet. Training was fun for me, so I just wanted to do that. At The Australian Ballet School, I really enjoyed learning about my body, and about technique, and how to enhance my ability as a dancer.”
However, Ella still had academic studies to contend with. “All these subjects that I hadn’t even thought about! Anatomy, Psychology, Dance Perspectives – it was just a lot. I thought I was already pretty disciplined, but then I had to go up another whole level. But I never once questioned being there – I wanted to stay. That whole first half of the year was about proving that I could make it into the senior school. I was determined not to go back to Dubbo!”
As a dancer, Ella had always been bursting with energy. When she began doing classes with Anne Jenner, a celebrated British ballerina who had been a principal dancer of The Royal Ballet, she found a kindred spirit. “People were always telling me to calm down, to soften. I just wanted to do allegro, sharp things, push my jumps. It was just the way my body worked, and she got that, and always gave me repertoire that suited what I could do; but she also knew how to pick rep that challenged me to soften in ways that weren’t boring.” When Jenner withdrew from teaching for health reasons halfway through the year, Ella was devastated. However, there were many other teachers who shaped her growing artistry.
“Dale Baker [Jenner’s husband, who taught pas de deux classes] was a great teacher. Leigh Rowles had great energy, and a desire to bring people into the ballet world in such a fun and positive way. She used to make me laugh so much! Margaret Wilson, our contemporary teacher, was fantastic. Before I met her, I had no idea what Martha Graham technique was. When she would demonstrate, I would think, ‘How is this woman doing these things?’”
Like Jenner, the Character teacher Christine Howard saw Ella’s qualities and how to handle them. “She understood that I really wanted to try hard, but she knew how to tone me down when I needed it. I used to think Character was quite daggy, and she changed that for me.” Later in her career, Ella would perform the Lead Hungarian Dancer in Murphy’s Swan Lake, with thrilling choreography based on traditional folk dance.
Ella’s time at the School was smoothed by Maree Strachan, executive assistant to the director, Marilyn Rowe, and a vital part of the School’s fabric for decades. “She was the head of my house, Gorham; she was all about the social element, making us all into a cohesive group. Even later, when I was in the company, I continued to catch up with her. And Lucinda Sharp [the School’s psychologist] helped me a lot in my homesick first year.”
Ella went through another difficult time in her final year. “I was still trying to work out where I stood in the dance world. Lots of tricky things were happening in my life. I was finding my identity. I was an Aboriginal person in ballet, and that was a rare thing. I was thinking about how I was going to approach that and talk about it. I felt like I was living in two different worlds.”
PART 2 COMING SOON
