A dancer, a photographer, an actor, a teacher, a choreographer, a psychic, an artistic director, a gallery owner: Simon Dow’s remarkable life is a testament to the rewards of staying eternally curious. His travels through his many artistic identities began at The Australian Ballet School, where he found a sense of belonging, and taught for 10 years in addition to creating numerous works as Resident Choreographer.

Our History Makers - Simon Dow

By Rose Mulready

As a child, his great love was movement. Simon’s parents were British, and spent their teens in London, going to the theatre, the opera and the ballet. Like the students in The Red Shoes, they used to run up the stairs at Covent Garden to compete for the front-row seats of the Gods. “I’m an adopted child. If you feel that adopted children make choices – I chose well. They were the perfect pair of people to see the artist in me and support it.” Simon’s mother often listened to classical music on the radio. “The kitchen was filled with light, and we had a big table. I would move around the table, and under the table, and sometimes over the table. When I was about five, my parents asked me if I’d like to go and take a dance class. We went to this funny little local school in Chelsea, on the bay in Melbourne – jazz, tap and hula, singing – and I was the only boy, which was very common then. There I was, with all these girls, and this lively, energised, inspiring teacher. We tapped, we did ballet, we sang. I loved it, immediately. I’d found a place where they spoke my language. I was very quiet, verbally – deeply shy and introspective. Being physical was my way of interacting with the world.”

 

Simon was a sensitive soul, and his dance career nearly came to an unfortunate end when his teacher forgot to cue his entrance during a recital. He missed the performance, and was so inconsolable that his parents had to stop taking him to lessons. “Now I look back on it, it’s hilarious.”

Fortunately, fate intervened in the form of a Dutch couple who moved in next door. Their daughter was serious about ballet; she and Simon became great friends, and he went with her to classes at the National Ballet School in St Kilda. “That’s where I met some really formative teachers. A lot of them had been with the Borovansky Ballet and other professional companies. They just had this incredible knowledge of character and narrative. They were amazing to be around. I was eight, with all these adults. We did lots of performing. That was important for me. I’m not what is commonly called a classroom dancer: I really like being in rehearsal or on stage, losing myself.”

At that time, The Australian Ballet offered classes for boys. At twelve, Simon was at the barre with the likes of Garth Welch, Gary Norman, Colin Peasley and Brian Lawrence – a necessary antidote to his life outside the studio. “For boys to dance is still an anomaly. It still carries a stigma, to this day. I was mercilessly bullied. I kept it secret for as long as possible, and then, at the age of ten, I won a medal, and it made it into the paper, into the Age. I was outed. I knew I was alien and unusual, but then they knew it. It was just hell. There was hardly anywhere where I could turn where I didn’t encounter taunting, name-calling, physical bullying – and for no good reason, other than my difference. I had a couple of teachers who were wonderful, they were my refuge. One was a music teacher, one was an art teacher. I felt like I could go to them, I felt safe when I was in their room.”

Home was Simon’s other refuge. “I used to perform every weekend. I’d choreograph some big piece in my bedroom, and I’d decorate my room, I’d make costumes. And then I’d let my parents in and sit them down, and they were imprisoned for the next hour! I’d put on what I called ‘pantomimes’ in the back yard. I’d rope in my friends and kids from the neighbourhood. I’d produce it, I’d rehearse them and tell them what to say. And I was such a shy kid!”

At 13, Simon won a Cecchetti Medal; one of the judges on the panel was Margaret Scott, the director of The Australian Ballet School, famed for her ability to see potential in young dancers. At 14, Simon auditioned for the School, which didn’t officially take students who were under 15. The panel made an exception. When he opened the letter telling him he’d been accepted, “it was like the whole world tilted.”

Simon had been one of three boys in his ballet school. “Suddenly, there were boys everywhere. I had found my tribe. And the freedom! To walk into an educational institution and know that you wouldn’t be bullied, to feel joy, to wonder what you were going to do that day. It was transformative. I had found my place. It kind of saved my life.”

The School was at that time in a converted tire factory in Flemington, which was freezing cold in the winter, with unreliable heaters that warmed you only when you stood right under them. With limited room, the School and the company saw a lot of each other. Simon’s idols wandered the hallways. “You could peek into the studios, and you would see them working on things, and being fallible, so you learnt that dancing was a process.”

Margaret Scott was one of his teachers. “Talk about a passionate, fiery human! She had moments of being incredibly gentle and kind, but there was a wildness in her. She could come across as being very demanding, because she felt so strongly about things. I was terrified, sometimes, by the magnitude of her wildness, but I loved it – it was riveting, and so inspiring. I like to think I have a little of that about me when I’m interacting with my students. One thing Maggie had in spades was curiosity, which has always been a big driver for me as well. She would often ask you for completely different things, every day for a week. At one time she had this thing about the pelvis. ‘Darlings, we’ve got to learn how to lock it in the pubis.’ Of course, we were teenage boys, so we lost it.”

Jurgen Schneider, a celebrated teacher born in East Berlin, taught his boys the Vaganova method. “He was unrelenting, a detail person. He would come over and take your head and yank it into the right position. A real taskmaster, but boy, did we improve, and get stronger and faster.” Bruce Morrow was “a beautiful human, a gentle, kind, supportive man. He and his wife and their three children were all dancers. He always had a lot of keys in his pockets, and I remember them jingling as he’d demonstrate steps.” Leon Kellaway, who taught ballet and mime, “had a very particular nose – he looked a bit like a koala. He was wonderful: funny and eccentric. He walked with a cane, which he’d bang on the floor, and he’d tell us, ‘You have to make them believe!’ He had very bad arthritis, his fingers were twisted, so if he pointed at you, you were never sure that he was actually pointing at you. He smoked a lot, always a cigarette in those gnarled fingers.”

Another heavy smoker (there were ashtrays on the wall by the barre) was the Russian teacher Marina Berezowsky – Madame – who taught character dancing. “Always a cigarette, always a glint in her eye, and she loved teaching the boys.” Jack Manuel, the contemporary teacher, had a background in television, and choreographed a special duet for Simon and Roslyn Watson, the School’s first Indigenous student.

Over one summer, Simon grew four inches, and was partnered with Natasha, a tall Russian girl. They both had long limbs, but Simon hadn’t grown into his. In a presage lift, “she started to tilt backwards and just fell out of my hands. It was awful! But she wasn’t hurt, and she was very nice about it.”

At the end of the two-year course, Simon was still only 16. Maggie told him, “Darling, you’re like a soft, floppy puppy, frolicking through the fields. You’re so young – I think you need another year. I see something special in you, but you need more time.”

At that time, the School would teach its students the corps de ballet parts from the repertoire that The Australian Ballet was doing. That way, if there were an injury, the senior students were ready to step in. Simon stepped in to some amazing opportunities – he was a courtier in Peggy van Praagh’s production of The Sleeping Beauty when it opened the Sydney Opera House in 1973 – and was soon offered a contract with the company. Shortly after he joined, Anne Woolliams came out from Stuttgart Ballet to stage John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet.

“Anne, for me, was an absolute magician. She brought so much out of people, and she saw who you were. She had eyes that just went right in. She was very demanding, like Maggie was, like Peggy, like Helpmann, like Nureyev – he had it in spades! – they were lit. They were on fire. Anne pulled me out of the corps to do Carnival King – I was 17, and I’d only been in the company for three months. She saw something in me, some craziness, and chose me to dance first cast.”

Watching Anne work with the principals – Marilyn Roe, Kelvin Coe, Lucette Aldous, Marilyn Jones, John Meehan, Gary Norman – was a revelation. “I remember thinking, I want that: I want someone to work with me that way. Then Stuttgart Ballet came out on tour, and I saw Cranko’s Onegin, and that was it for me – I thought, I have to go to Stuttgart. Those dancers were inhabiting roles with a depth that I’d always known was possible. That’s not to say that our dancers weren’t extraordinary. Marilyn Rowe – I saw her do things on stage that were so wild and uninhibited – she would make sounds, sometimes. It was so beautiful to see. I wanted more of that.”

Simon had only been at The Australian Ballet for two years. Robert Helpmann, one of the co-directors, had been a mentor. “Bobby saw himself in me. He’d grown up in Mt Gambier in the 1930s, as a stranger in his environment. He took me under his wing. Seeing him perform as Don Quixote at the Princess Theatre, seeing him do Cinderella with Frederick Ashton, had been formative for me. When I went to tell him I was leaving, he tried really hard to convince me not to go. He offered to promote me, and talked about casting me as the lead in a revival of his Hamlet. (I was 19!) But I had to go.” He bought a one-way ticket to Germany. “I knew I wasn’t coming back.” He was accepted by Stuttgart Ballet, and stayed there for four years. 

“I was very lucky. I worked with such deeply committed artists. Anne was there for first two years. People loved her, and feared her. Like Maggie, she was this strong, powerful force, and she insisted that you leave ‘blood on the floor’. She would be your mother, and then she would be the dragon, and then she would be your psychologist, and then the clown – whatever it took to get what she knew was inside you.” Simon also watched, “glued to the wings”, as the company’s artistic director, the Brazilian ballerina Marcia Haydée, danced with the deep emotional truth that had made her the ultimate interpreter of Cranko’s works. He befriended William Forsythe, “a crazy genius” who would become one of the seminal reinventors of the art form, and danced in his first ballets. He toured all over the world. However, although he has since come to love and appreciate Germany, as a young man he found Stuttgart a stifling place to live. It seemed full of restrictions, and many of its inhabitants regarded Ausländers – foreigners – with suspicion: it was difficult to find an apartment. On tour in America, he fell in love with the energy, the “can-do optimism, the vibrant physicality of their dancers.” He made the choice to leave Stuttgart for Washington Ballet, a much smaller company with a resident choreographer, Choo San Goh.

In 1981, Simon and his dancing partner Amanda McKerrow, who had just turned 18, went to the Moscow International Ballet Competition. The Cold War was at its height; the woman assigned to be their guide turned out to be a KGB agent. Simon, who found that dance competitions made him uncomfortable, didn’t compete, but danced pas de deux with Amanda. She won the gold medal, and Simon was given a specially created award for the Best Partner of the Competition. The story of two Americans (Simon was assumed to be from the US) who had won the huge and prestigious Russian competition, art transcending politics, captured imaginations back home. Simon and Amanda appeared on the Today Show and Good Morning America. A couple of months later, Simon got a call from Marilyn Rowe, who was directing The Australian Ballet. She had heard from Margaret Scott, who had been one of the judges in Moscow, how well Simon was dancing, and she asked him to rejoin The Australian Ballet as a principal. His first role would be Romeo in Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet. It was an offer too perfect to refuse.

There were two good years at The Australian Ballet before a back injury he’d suffered in Washington flamed up again, and Simon was told to stop dancing. Needing a complete change, he went to New York and studied method acting with Lee Strasberg, then hit the boards in off-Broadway productions and summer stock. A couple of years later, a friend directed him to a teacher who rehabilitated injured dancers, and Simon was able to return to his first love. He danced as a principal with San Francisco Ballet and Boston Ballet; in 1991 he moved to New York and began freelancing. He danced until he was 46.

His teaching career began in New York, at the fabled Steps studio. He quickly built a devoted following, with up to 100 students in each class. “I had so many characters: there was a wonderful woman in her 60s who used to paint her pointe shoes.” There were dancers from both classical and contemporary companies, including Allegra Kent, one of Balanchine’s most famous ballerinas, who “just used to do her own thing.” Simon began to teach abroad; he studied butoh and photography, he choreographed. Then the 14-year-old who’d staged neighbourhood pantomimes emerged in him as an urge to direct a ballet company. He spent three years as artistic director of Milwaukee Ballet, and another three directing West Australian Ballet. Finally, Marilyn Rowe, who had taken on the directorship of The Australian Ballet School, asked him – for the fourth time – to come and teach there. Somewhat perversely, as he’d just moved from a house a short bike ride away from the School to one in the country, he said yes. “It just felt like the right time.”

For Simon, teaching ballet to teenagers is about far more than technique. ‘I would call what I do as a teacher ‘helping people recognise their own beauty’.” Like Maggie, like Peggy, like Anne, he has “X-ray eyes” for the possibilities in his students, and a passionate belief that performing artists must ‘leave blood on the floor’ as they explore the deepest and truest parts of themselves.  

One of the greatest pleasures he finds in teaching is the openness of young people to exploring who they are. “As you become an adult, the mind has a way of hooking into your early life conditioning and locking in who you are. I don’t think an artist can afford to do that – I don’t think any human can afford to do that. I like to encourage risk-taking. I often say to my students, ‘There are no rules.’”

Simon Dow will perform as special Guest Artist in The Australian Ballet School’s 60th Anniversary Gala at The Regent Theatre.
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