Gary Norman and Marilyn Rowe in Swan Lake Act 3. 1972.
Our History Maker - Marilyn Rowe AM OBE
By Rose Mulready
In the history of ballet in Australia, Marilyn Rowe AM OBE is a pioneer, with a career full of firsts. She was one of The Australian Ballet School’s first-ever intake of students; she was on The Australian Ballet’s first overseas tour, and was the first of its dancers to move all the way through its ranks to become a principal artist. Arguably, she was the company’s first entirely homegrown star. She was also the first graduate of The Australian Ballet School to become its director.
In recognition of her extraordinary contributions, she has also recently been awarded Honorary Life Membership of The Australian Ballet School.
It was fortunate that Marilyn’s urge to dance was so strong, or her early experiences may have turned her off ballet altogether. She grew up in a house full of books and music, and her ballet-loving mother sent her to classes at the age of five; however, her early training was, she says, “Draconian”.
“My teachers knew I had a lot of talent, but their approach stripped me of confidence. I was told that I wasn’t pretty, that I wasn’t intelligent – that was their way of trying to get me to be better. I was hit if I didn’t do things properly. Actually physically hit. It was psychologically damaging. But for some reason I still wanted to do it. And when I got to The Australian Ballet School, it was like an escape.”
The School’s inaugural audition must have been intimidating. The director, Margaret Scott, was joined on the panel by Peggy van Praagh, The Australian Ballet’s director, as well as the company’s ballet staff and principal dancers. Marilyn was just 16. “It was scary but exciting. When one is young, the nerves aren’t as great as they are when you’re older, when you have more responsibility. I just went for it! I think I was a very joyous dancer – I could always jump higher than everyone else.” She was accepted.
In its first years, the School was housed together with The Australian Ballet in an old building on Albert Street in East Melbourne. There were only two studios. When the company was in residence, the students had to climb out of the window, walk along the roof and climb back into another window to get to their dressing room. However, for those first students, there was always the sense of being special – of blazing a trail. Marilyn thrived. “I loved every minute.”
One of her teachers was the Danish dancer Poul Gnatt, who would later become the first artistic director of Royal New Zealand Ballet. “He called all the girls by Russian names – I was Marilynskaya. He was the most wonderful teacher, all of the students adored him. He just had a way of bringing out the best in you. He was funny – and strict, in the nicest possible way.” Marilyn was also taught by Margaret Scott and Leon Kellaway; she learnt jazz from the musical-theatre legend Betty Pounder, and character dancing from Madame Marina Berezowsky, a Russian dancer who had co-founded the West Australian Ballet. “She could scream and shout, but she was gorgeous.”
Marilyn was only at the School for a year before van Praagh asked her to join the company: she was one of only four from her cohort to be offered a place. Her excitement at starting professional life was heightened by the thrill of setting out on The Australian Ballet’s first international tour. Van Praagh insisted that the teenage dancers have a chaperone: the wife of Robert Rosen, the company’s conductor. “The company really looked after us like babies.”
For a seventeen-year-old who had never been on a plane before, the tour was a heady experience. “We performed Swan Lake in some beautiful old ruins in Lebanon. We stayed in this funny little village and it was like something out of the Bible – donkeys walking up down the street, merchants, an old hostel. It was a step back in time.” Back in Europe, van Praagh’s production of Giselle won the prestigious Prix de Paris, and Marilyn’s window-climbing skills came in handy when she got locked in a theatre in Nice after taking too long to shower after the show.
Australian Ballet School Archive. 1960s
The company was joined on the tour by some of the greatest stars of the 60s: Erik Bruhn; Margot Fonteyn; Rudolf Nureyev, who took them to a jet-set party in a chateau outside of Nice. “They carried a woman into the sunken garden in a bath full of champagne. Our eyes were on stalks! Peggy very quickly ordered the chaperone to take the ‘babies’ home.”
Van Praagh had her eye on Marilyn in more ways than one. “Peggy wanted to create her own Australian ballerina. That was her long-term plan, although I didn’t know that at the time. She held me back more than some of the others, because she really wanted me to experience the corps de ballet properly. She gave me lots of opportunities in soloist roles, but I always went back to the corps afterwards. I joined the company in 1965, and it wasn’t until 1969 that I was made a principal artist.”
When Marilyn and her partner Kelvin Coe were invited to take part in the Moscow International Ballet Competition that same year, van Praagh again held them back. She wanted them to be fully prepared to compete against the world’s best. They made it to Moscow in 1973. Conditions were difficult: Marilyn once fainted in rehearsal from lack of proper food. “Dame Peggy’s interpreter used to go down to the markets in the morning to try and find us vegetables, usually cucumber – which I loathed. There was this sort of flattened chicken. But the ice cream was extraordinarily good!”
The Royal Ballet’s choreographer Frederick Ashton had recently staged his La Fille mal gardée at The Australian Ballet. He gave Marilyn and Kelvin permission to adapt his choreography for their performance at the competition, splicing the first-act ‘ribbon’ variations with the final pas de deux. “At first, everyone thought we must be from Austria. How could Australia have dancers? It only had kangaroos. But the pas de deux from Fille brought the house down. It ends with a one-handed seated lift. Kelvin lifted me and spontaneously walked forward to where the judges were sitting, and slowly lowered me to the ground. Everyone went mad. Peggy was crying! After that we were the darlings of the competition. We were mobbed on the street.”
The couple also performed a pas de deux from Glen Tetley’s Gemini as part of the competition. It had been created just that year, and was costumed in skin-tight unitards that made the dancers look nude. “It caused a bit of a furore with the judges, but the audience loved it, and the Bolshoi dancers couldn’t get enough of it. They would crowd into the wings to watch.” There was another furore when Marilyn and Kelvin danced a pas de deux from Nureyev’s Raymonda – in the years after his defection, Nureyev was reviled as a traitor in Russia. However, Marilyn and Kelvin won the silver medals, and in illustrious company: they shared them with the Canadian ballerina Karen Kain and the Danish dancer Peter Schaufuss.
Back home after this triumph, Marilyn continued to work with Nureyev, this time on his film of Don Quixote, a notorious shoot in a stifling converted aeroplane hangar at the height of summer. Marilyn, who was cast as the Street Dancer, had her own hair wildly teased every day, and the bodice of the costume glued to her breasts – Nureyev hated the look of straps. Once, in the heat, it peeled off without her realising it. Nureyev, behind the camera, let her dance her whole solo topless, and killed himself laughing.
But despite such boorishness, and his difficult, tempestuous behaviour (punching the set’s photographer, pushing over a senior male dancer), Marilyn credits him with shaping her as a dancer. ‘He watched my performances, he gave me notes … he coached me on my footwork, and would say to me, ‘The knitting steps, Rowe, the knitting steps! Precision!’”
Nureyev’s most famous partner, Margot Fonteyn, was the calm water to his storm. “Margot was like royalty.” When she guested with The Australian Ballet in Washington, dancing Hanna Glawari in The Merry Widow on opening night, she sent Marilyn, who had created the role, a note: “To the first and most beautiful Merry Widow, with my love and admiration for your beautiful dancing.” Marilyn still has it. “That sums her up. She was gentle, humble, beautiful in every way.”
Marilyn Rowe & Gary Norman in Anna Karenina. 1979
Marilyn worked with Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann on Cinderella, and with Kenneth MacMillan (“a lovely man”) on Concerto, but it is Anne Woolliams who lives in her memory as the ultimate repetiteur. Woolliams – a Cranko expert, The Australian Ballet’s third artistic director, and the choreographer of its most enduring Swan Lake – coached Marilyn as Juliet in Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet, and as Tatiana in his Onegin. “That was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had, plumbing the depths of that character. Anne just had the gift of being able to impart the emotions of every role, even to the corps de ballet. She would go around to every dancer and ask them who they were, what story they were telling. You couldn’t pretend with Anne. It had to be real.”
Working with the American choreographer Glen Tetley on the creation of Gemini was another seminal experience. “It was a very big deal for him to come to The Australian Ballet. The administration thought they were really going to get their money’s worth, with a big ballet for the whole company. And he ended up choosing four people – John Meehan, Gary Norman, Carolyn Rappel, and me – four of the company’s most junior principal artists. He said, ‘Now, Peggy, you have to trust me. I don’t want anybody in the room while I create this work.’ He stuck paper over the windows of the studio. Peggy was beside herself – she couldn’t bear not being able to see what was going on!”
Gemini opens with the first ballerina, the role made on Marilyn, dancing an extended solo. Then there is a quartet, and then a pas de deux. The entire time, the first ballerina dances without a break. Sometimes, during a performance of Gemini, a dancer will vomit into a bucket placed strategically in the wings. “I used to end up looking like a tomato. But it was fantastic, so exciting, and we got a standing ovation at the London Coliseum when we performed it there.” The New York City Ballet choreographer Jerome Robbins came with Kenneth MacMillan to watch rehearsals. Afterwards, he told van Praagh that he would let The Australian Ballet have his treasured work Afternoon of a Faun, “if Gary and Marilyn do it.” He sent the original Faun, Francisco Moncion, to coach them.
Peggy had her Australian ballerina. Marilyn was riding high. In 1980, when she pressed pause on her career to have a baby, she had every intention of returning. “But then everything fell apart.”
Marilyn was married to Christopher Maver, a lighting designer and The Australian Ballet’s stage director. She was three months pregnant with their son when he was killed in a light-plane crash. For the latter part of her pregnancy she withdrew to a convent, where the nuns nurtured her and tried to make her eat. But it wasn’t long before ballet drew her back to the world.
In 1981, The Australian Ballet was in an uproar. The dancers were striking over poor pay and overwork. When talks with management fell apart, they refused to dance the opening night of a new production, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But they said they’d go back to work if Marilyn Rowe returned to the company as artistic advisor.
Marilyn’s baby, also called Christopher, was six months old, and her grief was fresh. But The Australian Ballet “had been my whole life. I grew up in that company. Peggy called me her artistic daughter. I had to do something. I could not let that company fold.” Her parents stepped forward to help with Christopher, and Marilyn began the difficult process of mediation, acting as a conduit between the dancers, the ballet staff and the board, and easing the exit of the artistic director, Marilyn Jones. “We were able to gain a focus on the dancers’ welfare. They had some sort of voice.” It was Marilyn’s innovation to have a dancer’s representative on the board, as there is to this day.
In addition to her roles as new mother and director of a seething company, Marilyn danced as a guest artist. “The management asked me if I would; they said it would help the company. And so I did.” The ballet she returned in was, poignantly, The Merry Widow. “When I first went back to the Sydney Opera House, having to walk past Chris’ office – that was the hardest part.”
In the end, the strain was too much, and Marilyn ended up in hospital. She relinquished her custodianship of The Australian Ballet – which was always intended to be temporary, anyway – but continued to guest with the company, and to look after The Dancers Company, an initiative of Jones’ that gave the final-year students of The Australian Ballet School a pre-professional regional tour with company dancers in the principal roles. It reacquainted her with the School, and in 1999 she became its third director.
What was her vision for The Australian Ballet School? “I had had a lot of years to think about that: to reflect on the harshness of my training, to get to know the students through The Dancers Company.” In Russia, all those years ago, she and Coe had observed the training at the Bolshoi’s school, which taught the Vaganova method. “I saw how young they started, and that the Vaganova training was sequential, like building blocks put carefully in place. I’m not saying everything about the culture was great, but the training was amazing.” Marilyn introduced the Vaganova curriculum to the School, but she saw her remit as covering much more than ballet technique. “I thought of it as body, mind and soul.”
Marilyn (Odette) and Kelvin Coe (Prince Siegfriend) Act 2. Melbourne 1977.
She arranged for her students to attend the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School, so that they would emerge with a qualification to support them after their dancing careers ended. She built up a “dream team” of health specialists – a doctor, a physio, a myotherapist. The Australian Ballet School was the first in the world to bring a psychologist onto its staff (it’s now a standard appointment globally). Marilyn also started a teacher training course. But her greatest wish was to secure a residence for students from interstate and abroad, so they could be fed good food and looked after properly. Hers was the only international school that didn’t have such a residence. It took the full 16 years of her tenure to find the right house, in the right place, at the right price. Kismet intervened: just before she retired as director, a family in Parkville put their terrace house on the market. Dame Peggy had once lived next door, and had swum in the family’s pool to ease the pain of her arthritic hips. They wanted the School to have the house, and agreed to a reasonable price.
Her dream fulfilled, Marilyn left the School, as she’d planned, in its 50th-anniversary year. Her successor, Lisa Pavane, was her favoured choice, “although Lisa very much got the role on her own merits. She has the history, the artistry, she’s intelligent, she’s resilient. In these sorts of positions there’s so much stress involved, and I knew she would be able to handle it. And she has! She’s handled COVID!”
With her School in good hands, Marilyn has been kept busy with coaching ballets (including The Merry Widow) at The Australian Ballet, and will soon travel for her regular stint of coaching at the New Zealand School of Dance. Ty King-Wall, a former student of hers, is now the artistic director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet. It’s another beautiful full-circle moment in a life elegantly shaped.
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