In Part Two of Ella’s Story, she begins her life as a professional dancer.
“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.”
Again, the School stepped in with support, inviting artists from Bangarra Dance Theatre to deliver a workshop. “They knew I’d had that previous contact with them, and they wanted me to be able to keep that going.” But when Ella found out that she – along with many of her classmates – hadn’t been offered a place with The Australian Ballet, it was a blow. “We all knew that there were limited contracts, but actually hearing it … it’s just one of those dream-destroying moments.” To recover, Ella rejoined her mother, now living in Wagga Wagga near her Aunts and Uncles. She reconnected with family and her roots, learnt some traditional weaving practices, and took on a number of freelance opportunities. After performing in Petroglyphs with Leigh Warren & Dancers, she was offered a contract with Bangarra in 2009.
“I was still feeling a bit lost. This was a way to connect with dance, but also with my cultural heritage.” When she joined, the company was rehearsing Fire, a 20-year anniversary retrospective. Ella found herself on another steep learning curve. “I got all the company’s repertoire in one hit, so that was lucky. But it was a battle, a huge transition – I’d just spent four years training to be a ballet dancer and now I was in a contemporary company. Not only that, but I was going from being at school to being in a professional company. I really struggled to find my feet there for a while, and later I saw a couple of ballet dancers who came into Bangarra experiencing the same thing: it’s just a whole different world, a different way of working, a different lens – but at the same time, it’s great to learn multiple ways of working.”
Part of that learning was purely physical. Ella loved the challenge of leaving behind her pointe shoes and working to find the Bangarra ‘look’ in her body. But there were also markedly different processes to get her head around. “I love to ask questions if I don’t understand anything, and that tended to slow down the process in the Bangarra teaching environment. I had to learn a different way of attending or being present. It was simply because I’d been trained to notice tiny details in a ballet work, like what count something was on, but for them it was less important, it was more fluid. Every time that something was shown, it was slightly different.”
Her time at Bangarra showed Ella how spiritual stories could be translated through repertoire. “There were moments when I’d come off stage feeling so ecstatic, especially on nights when we’d perform for First Nations communities, and the crowd would be cheering for you halfway through a piece. Those were moments when it all fell into place for me, as a dancer and as a First Nations person. But I still felt like I was between two worlds, and there wasn’t a place in between.” Then came Waramuk – in the dark night.
The Stephen Page work, based on Indigenous stories of the night sky, reunited Bangarra with The Australian Ballet (the two companies had previously collaborated on Rites and Amalgamate). Ella appeared to great acclaim in ‘Eclipse’, a pas de deux with the Ballet’s Jake Mangakahia. Once again, she began to feel the pull between worlds.
“It was an exciting, full-circle moment, and a pivotal one for me. The School was right down the corridor – it felt like home. I felt this kind of sadness, this longing to be back in the world of ballet. I realised that I knew what kind of dancer I was, I knew how I liked to move. But I still wished I could do some ballet! And I guess it was in [artistic director] David McAllister’s head as well, I was on his radar. When we talked about it, and I realised he was still interested in my career and investing in me, it was like two halves aligned, and it was finally the right time. Going back home to Wagga, connecting with my family, learning about weaving, joining Bangarra: it all had helped ground me, and helped me to find my place. My general identity, but also my place as an artist.”
Ella joined The Australian Ballet in 2013, making history by becoming the first Aboriginal dancer to dance with the company. The Artistic Health team was “phenomenal in getting me back on pointe.” And in terms of her technique, the time with Bangarra had given her new facility. “My control and understanding of my body was better: for instance, I was smoother in transitions. I felt I could get more upper body movement, too. It was the same at Bangarra: if I ever had to do anything elevated there, a jump for instance, it would be enhanced by me having this incredible ballet training.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Ella was rarely cast in contemporary roles in her eight years with The Australian Ballet, although she relished performances in Tim Harbour’s Squander and Glory and Jiří Kylián’s Forgotten Land (she would perform in Kylián’s Stamping Ground when she returned to Bangarra in 2019 to dance in its 30th anniversary program). She enjoyed quirky character roles like the Turtle in Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice in Wonderland – and realised a childhood dream when she danced as a swan in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake in London, Beijing and LA. One of her primary memories is dancing in Paquita at the Sydney Opera House with her mother in the audience. With its elegant Petipa pointe work and shimmering golden tutus, Paquita is a little girl’s dream of ballet. For Janna and Ella, “there was just that sense of ‘We’ve made it!’ after all those years of hard work.”
In her time at the Ballet, Ella rediscovered a passion from her School days: choreography. “I loved that aspect of our training where we were asked to come up with our own movement.” Like many young choreographers, she had been externally focused, concentrating on shapes and patterns. Now, after her experience at Bangarra, she returned to her love of telling stories, and going beneath the surface to find layered meanings. One of the first works she made was for Bodytorque, the company’s choreographic workshop. Cypresses was a “quite classical” work set to Dvořák. Years later, she reset it on the young young developing artists of NAISDA Dance College in Gosford. “When I gave it to them, I told them to adapt it to suit their own bodies. It was incredible to see how powerfully ballet could be translated by First Nations artists, who already embody dance so deeply as part of their own culture”
Ella also made works for The Australian Ballet’s Education team. One of them, Wilaygu Ngayinybula // Possum's two minds, centres on a young boy with a possum identity. The joyful, cheeky possum in him goes away to hibernate, leaving him with the sad, serious possum. “It’s a commentary on mental health, and it aims to get young kids to realise that you have different parts of your personality; sometimes things might be dormant and sometimes things might be more accessible.” Ella enjoyed the storybook element of making dance works for children, and having the goal of “educating, inspiring, making ballet fun.” But outside of those parameters, her work is more contemporary and music-responsive.
“I think I’m still trying to work out what my choreographic practice is. Obviously, I have a lot of influence from two major arts companies in my body. I’m trying to work out what my movement is without those two influences, and it’s actually really hard to unpack.” During a recent residency, she began exploring her family tree as far back as she could, thinking about where her forebears came from and how they have informed her movement. “I’m thinking of how to create that without leaning on my ballet technique or Bangarra’s influence. Trying to get to the point of the story, the message. I’m still trying to find that. It’s a slow work in progress, and involves a lot of conversation with family members. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay in one realm – one bubble!”
One bubble, however, is not Ella’s style. As well as becoming a mother to twins, she featured in the 2016 documentary Ella, which tells the story of her return to The Australian Ballet, and began The ELLA foundation, a non-profit that offers scholarships and support to young First Nations dancers. The project began in lockdown, when she found a box full of rejection letters in her mother’s shed, all of them refusing Janna’s requests for financial support with Ella’s ballet training. Her foundation has offered over 50 scholarships in the last few years, allowing First Nations youths to access dance training across Australia. Just like Possum, who finds the balance between his two minds and the value of each, Ella Havelka continues to weave together her two worlds, discovering fertile territory in the space between.
