Soar: Australian Ballet’s David McAllister reveals himself in a poignant memoir - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Deborah Jones
David McAllister’s final year as The Australian Ballet’s longest-serving artistic director did not run to plan. In March, the company was only days into its Melbourne season when COVID-19 closed theatres. Soon, the rest of McAllister’s swan-song program was scrapped — not the ideal way to celebrate 20 years at the helm and, when you include 17 years as a dancer, close to four decades with the company.
But while the expected flurry of parties and public farewells had to be forgone, there has been considerable interest in his new memoir, Soar: A Life Freed by Dance, published by Thames & Hudson.
Soar takes a deep dive into McAllister’s personal life, set against the backdrop of his lustrous performing career and second act as an artistic director. He was born in 1963 in Perth, Western Australia, just a year after The Australian Ballet was founded. His was a loving, suburban family — his mother and father met while working at a bank — in which David was the third of five children. He was a headstrong, self-described show-off who would not stop badgering his parents until they let him start ballet classes with Miss Hodgkinson, memorably described as wearing “a pleated, woollen plaid skirt that showed off a pair of shapely calves honed, I later discovered, by a career as a champion Highland dancer.”
McAllister’s account of his childhood is lively, affectionate and evocative, although inevitably dark shadows hover. The lad was bullied mercilessly at school when he made the mistake of revealing his exciting ballet news and from that time he was excoriated for being a “poofter.” He didn’t know what it meant, except that it made him despised.
He wouldn’t come to accept his true nature until he was in his mid-40s and the burden was immense. McAllister is devastatingly candid about the turmoil he endured. He thought he was probably gay and didn’t want to be, so he tried to push that part of himself into the background and get on with dancing. It was his life raft.
At 17, he went to The Australian Ballet School in Melbourne and was good enough to get into the company after only two years instead of the usual three. McAllister touchingly describes an early affair with Kelvin Coe, a huge star at the time, and the relationships with women he so desperately hoped would succeed. At the same time as he was trying to work himself out, McAllister was working his way up the ballet ladder. He was made only more determined to get to the top when told by his director, Maina Gielgud, that he probably wouldn’t get any prince roles because his nose was too big (she later stepped back from the suggestion he should consider surgery).
Big nose notwithstanding, McAllister did make it to principal artist and princely status, enjoying great popularity with Australian audiences. He got to sit beside Princess Diana at a dinner in London when The Australian Ballet was on tour and, earlier in his career, he’d been a hit in Moscow after success in an international competition. After the misery of his school years, he’d done okay.
McAllister retired from the stage in 2001, appointed artistic director after the brief tenure of Royal Ballet-bound Ross Stretton. McAllister had no experience in leadership but The Australian Ballet gave him plenty of support and he stayed, and stayed.
McAllister wrote the memoir’s refreshingly frank intimate material himself, leaving the broader picture to his co-writer, journalist Amanda Dunn. McAllister’s voice is diluted in those parts, and the joins show. The final short section on his time in the director’s office depicts McAllister as a safe pair of hands who made many fine decisions, particularly behind the scenes, but the vim is gone. He is not one to dish the dirt, so, although McAllister presided over what he describes as “my fair share of under-performing ballets,” the details remain tantalizingly unexamined. He was also probably too risk-averse, he says, perhaps an aspect of the personality he describes as a double-edged sword. He was a people-pleaser who liked to be liked.
But as Soar: A Life Freed by Dance amply demonstrates, he also was — is — a loyal, decent and passionately committed man. He ends 2020 a contented man, too. He writes movingly of his loving partnership with writer and director Wesley Enoch and already has his next project underway, a new Swan Lake for Finnish Ballet to premiere early next year, all being well. He leaves The Australian Ballet with honour, at a time of his choosing, and with the company in strong shape for his successor, David Hallberg.
