Joanne Michel, The Australian Ballet, Swan lake. 1980. Photo by Jeff Busby.
Joanne Michel overcame self-doubt during her time at The Australian Ballet School, making her way out of the back row to dance the lead in her graduation performance of Don Quixote. She went on to a stellar career at The Australian Ballet, becoming one of its most distinguished principal artists, before joining Nederlands Dans Theater. After her return to Australia, she was invited to join The Australian Ballet School as a teacher.
Our History Makers - Joanne Michel
By Rose Mulready
We tend to think of ballerinas as dancers from day one, moving unerringly towards their goals from childhood. But sometimes ballet chooses you. Joanne Michel, who as a principal artist with The Australian Ballet would dance with the greats and travel around the world, nearly became a nurse instead.
A fork in the road came early for Joanne, when she had to choose between ballet and athletics: she was small for her age, but fast, and she loved running and the high jump. Ballet class was just something she did, not a passion. However, when she was eleven, her family moved to another part of Canberra, and her mother told her, “You’ve been doing ballet all this time: you might as well keep it up.” She found Joanne a new school, and as fate would have it, it was run by Jennifer and Brian Lawrence, who had both been principal artists at The Australian Ballet (their school also trained future principals Ross Stretton and Adam Marchant). Joanne was out of her depth – “I didn’t know what had hit me; they were very into technique and placement” – but the Lawrences saw something in her. Much later, Brian told her that they had known they would accept her as soon as they saw her in a simple exercise where the students were asked to walk across the room. That innate movement quality soon earnt Joanne a full training scholarship that covered her whole training at the school. “I thought, well, now I have to stay!” She had to work hard to catch up, but after a few years, she found herself auditioning for The Australian Ballet School.
Joanne was 15, and it was her ambition to be a nurse. “I always had a Plan B!” She did the audition, put it aside and forgot about it. When she got her letter of acceptance, she was again torn. “I’d never thought I was good enough, I hadn’t expected it. I was 15, and suddenly I was moving out of home. I thought to myself, well, it’s only two years …”
In the 1970s, students of the School had to find their own way. Joanne’s mother brought her to Melbourne, and they found her digs in Flemington, close to the converted tire factory that housed The Australian Ballet and its School. The house, belonging to a big family who regularly took in ballet boarders, was across the road from a church and next door to a police station. “My mother thought, ‘She will be safe!’”
The old tire factory was bare-bones. The big building had timber floors and a very high ceiling with louvred windows. In winter, tiny gas heaters above the barre did very little to warm the room, and in summer a big drop-down air conditioner left a puddle in the middle of the floor. One of the company dancers, Paul de Masson, once had a floorboard collapse under him when he jumped.
The students shared the studios and the Green Room with the company dancers, and would pile against the doors to watch the stars – Marilyn Rowe, Gary Norman, Kelvin Coe – in rehearsal. Sometimes the students would get kicked out of the studios so the company could use them. While they waited to get back to the barre, they’d learn drama, notation, music and dance history. The library books that Joanne read are still in the School’s library.
There were no in-house physiotherapists or doctors, as there are today. If students were ill or injured they had to take themselves into the city to see someone, so they often didn’t bother and just pushed through. But the teachers were remarkable. “There was Bruce Morrow – a pocket rocket, really energetic, a great pas de deux teacher – he made everything seem simple. Paul Hammond was a lovely man, so gentle and kind, so funny, so enthusiastic. He would climb on chairs to demonstrate, he’d climb under the chairs! Leon Kellaway was the brother of Cecil Kellaway, the great British actor. He knew everybody. He was in his 70s, with terrible rheumatoid arthritis, and you would hear his crutches clicking as he came down the hall. He was so flamboyant: he had a toupée, glued on. He’d danced with Pavlova and had so many incredible stories.”
At first, Joanne was frightened and homesick and full of self-doubt in her classes. At the end of the first year, she was still torn, tossing up whether or not to go home. “My mother said, ‘You started it: finish it, then you can say you’ve done your best.” The second year was better. A friend from Canberra was accepted into the School, and they shared a Granny flat in the backyard of a Ukrainian family (Joanne’s mother was Polish, so she felt at home). Margaret Scott, the founder of the School, was teaching her year level, so Joanne got more time with her. At the end of the year, “out of the blue”, she was chosen to dance Kitri, the lead in Don Quixote. “I was always at the back in class, never confident enough to put myself forward. People were saying, ‘Where did you come from?’”
It was 1976. After her performance as Kitri, Joanne was handed a contract by Anne Woolliams, the director of The Australian Ballet. Suddenly, at 17, she was a professional dancer. “I thought, oh well, I’ll give it my best!” Plan B was discarded for good.
Joanne Michel - The Australian Ballet Archive.
Joanne found herself in a company with a lot of senior dancers and a hierarchical management. The Administrator, Peter Bahen, called the new intake to his office and told them, “You are the lowest on the ladder, and don’t you forget it.” In her first year in the company, Joanne never touched a barre in company class – she held onto a door, a chair, the piano, leaving the favoured spots for the older dancers. “It was emotionally and physically challenging. It took some time to find my way.” Nevertheless, her horizons were expanding. She travelled to Sydney with the company, and enjoyed the novelty of staying in a hotel. She was a nurse in The Sleeping Beauty, holding the ‘baby’ Aurora; she was cast in George Balanchine’s Serenade. Then came Swan Lake.
In 1977, Anne Woolliams was making a new version for the company, and pouring into it all the attention to detail and dramatic authenticity she had brought with her from Stuttgart Ballet, where she’d worked closely with the extraordinary choreographer John Cranko. “She was intense: when she came into a rehearsal, she meant business. When she spoke to you, she’d come right up to you to make sure you were really hearing what she was saying.” She told the girls dancing in the corps to go to the park and watch some swans, to look at how they flew, how they landed. She’d say, ‘A swan doesn’t flutter.’ She wanted that sense of giant wings, pulling the air up with you. The shape of the swan’s wing, the bone within it – that made its way into the shape of our port de bras.”
Woolliams was a hard taskmaster – “she drilled us to the last fingertip” – but when the curtain came up on Act IV and the audience, seeing the wedge of swans in formation, took one collective breath, Joanne knew that it was worth it. “That’s what you do it for.”
Swan Lake was to prove fateful for Joanne. In the 1977 season, still in her first year with the company, she was cast as a Leading Swan when a dancer was injured. At the age of 21, her first-ever principal role was Odette/Odile in the Woolliams production. The Russian defector Alexander Godunov, then at the height of his fame, had come to dance with Marilyn Rowe, but she had just become pregnant. Gudonov was tall, and so was Joanne. She, along with Michela Kirkaldie, was cast to dance with him.
Most ballerinas tackling the Everest of Odette/Odile have endless preparation time with their partner. Godunov, however, declared, ‘I no rehearse.’ As second cast, Joanne got an hour with him on the morning of the performance, and no time to adjust herself to the raked stage of the Palais Theatre. Somehow, she got through. “For years, when I did that ballet, I would shake. But gradually, dancing it with such beautiful partners – Dale Baker, Kelvin Coe, Jonathan Kelly – I was able to get over it.”
Joanne Michel - The Australian Ballet Archive.
The young girl from Canberra who was tickled to stay in a Sydney hotel found herself dancing in Spartacus at the open-air Herod Atticus Theatre in Athens, looking up to see the Parthenon lit up in the distance. She went with The Australian Ballet to Israel and Turkey and Jakarta, where she danced in Act II of Swan Lake in another open-air theatre, bombarded by bats. She survived the tumultuous weeks where the dancers went on strike to protest over-work and under-pay, refusing to dance the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She was dancing in La Sylphide on the night when the Danish star Erik Bruhn, in Australia to stage the work, gave one precious performance as the witch Madge. She was coached by the Ballets Russes ballerinas Alicia Markova and Irina Baronova, who, despite their age, demonstrated the poses in Les Sylphides (“Baronova’s nose was almost on the floor!”) In the late 1970s, when Margot Fonteyn guested with The Australian Ballet in The Merry Widow, the young Joanne was given the job of catching her champagne glass when she tossed it gaily over her shoulder. “Every time I would think ‘She touched it!’ She just had this aura. This elegance, this quiet confidence, a presence. She would walk down that staircase, and she was in her 50s, but she just looked incredible.”
In 1982, with Marilyn Jones now directing The Australian Ballet, Joanne was made a principal artist. She proceeded to dance almost every role in the classical canon. “In those days, you didn’t dance to type. You just danced everything.” Joanne, being tall and regal with an expansive jump, was a natural for roles like the Lilac Fairy and Odette/Odile, but she also danced the soubrette leads in Coppélia and La Fille mal gardée. When she was cast as Juliet in John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet, she once again encountered Anne Woolliams, who came out to coach it. She recalls Woolliams, in a rehearsal of the bedroom scene with her and Baker, stopping them after their first step. “He’s whispering to you,” she said. “What are you hearing? We’ve got to see what you’ve heard.” Woolliams connected Joanne, as a dancer, with her interior life. “All these things bring the depth to your roles, and that has stayed with me my whole career.”
The British ballerina Maina Gielgud took the reins of The Australian Ballet in 1983, and was determined to put her own stamp on the company. She brought in new choreographers and promoted young dancers. Joanne felt her opportunities dwindling. After a performance of Giselle with Kelvin Coe – it was, for both of them, the last – she began looking around her. Like many dancers, she had always adored the ballets of Jiří Kylián. His troupe, Nederlands Dans Theater, was perhaps the most respected contemporary ballet company in the world. He offered Joanne a contract, and she had happy (“challenging!”) months there before illness in her husband’s family took her back to Australia. “Jiří said, ‘No, you must go home. Family comes first.’”
Joanne began to teach ballet as a freelancer, learning on the job how to put a class together. She did four years at the National Ballet School. She had two children. And then, her old partner Dale Baker called her up.
Joanne Michel Teaching. The Australian Ballet School Archives. Photo by John Tsiavis.
The Dancers Company is made up of The Australian Ballet School’s final-year students, who go out with The Australian Ballet on a regional tour, an invaluable introduction to professional life. Baker, now a teacher at the School, asked Joanne to come on the tour as its ballet mistress. She had been part of The Dancers Company in its inaugural year; the idea appealed, and she accepted. Soon afterwards, Marilyn Rowe, who was now director of the School, was looking for a permanent teacher, and invited Joanne to join the staff. Again, ballet had come knocking.
“I was very blessed that I had Dale – my mate, my colleague, my dancing partner – we knew each other so well. We worked together so well as a team. I loved the time I had with him here.”
Joanne in class. The Australian Ballet School. 2025. Photo by F . Mutswagiwa
As Joanne worked with students over the years, her sense of vocation strengthened. Like Woolliams, she wants to plant something deeper than the steps.
“It's really so important that the students remember who they are and why they’re here and why they want to learn. I would like to think they leave here with confidence in themselves, that they will be true to themselves, that they won’t try to imitate someone else. And that they’ll be kind to themselves. It’s so easy for a dancer to think they’re not good enough. That’s what we’re trying to give our students: that feeling that you are good enough. You need to do it for the right reasons, for yourself. I just want my students to respect the art form, and do their best, and be open to everything that people give you. Those things you learn along the way – suddenly it comes back, and there’s a light-bulb moment.”
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