This is the second of a four part 1986 interview with my initial ballet teacher at the Australian Dance Theatre school in Adelaide, South Australia. The interview was undertaken as part of a national sound portrait archive of Australians prominent in a range of fields. Over the audio, I have a photograph of Rex at the time I knew him, and have interspersed this with images of the people he talks about. And there is a positive panoply of illustrious names: Olga Preobrajenska, Lubov Egorova, Stanislas Idzikowski, Ram Gopal, La Comtesse Lily Pastré, Misia Sert, Marguerite Moreno, Brigitte Bardot, Leslie Caron, the choreographer Victor Gsovsky, John Gilpin, Marilyn Burr, the wife of Ivan Nagy, and the designer Kenneth Rowell, to mention just a few. What I particularly like about this interview is that we are vividly presented with the man I knew – among other things, his love of story telling, his bubbling enthusiasm and his definiteness about everything and his acute memory for detail. And his wonderful sense of humour - describing his flat in Brompton Square in London, he says ‘I had this tiny kitchen – if you bent down your backside hit the wall, if you lent forward you fell in the oven’. Rex came from the old school of dance instruction where the teacher lambasts students into progress with a rapier slashing tongue. I recall him correcting a port de bras, where my shoulders were too lifted up - 'It looks as though you are wearing Carmen Miranda’s earrings!!!’ Years later Rex became a personal friend and talked over much of the material of the interview, and introduced me to some of its luminaries, such as the Georgian Princess Natasha Watchinadze, who had left Russia with Igor Stravinsky, Alexandra Danilova and the others, settling in Paris and integrating herself into its artistic community of the 1920s. I vividly recall meeting Natasha for the first time. Her long gilt Auntie Mame-ish cigarette holder seemed to enter the room first, followed by a gold harem pants and Chinese silk jacket clad creature - blood red lips and finger nails and a Diaghilev white streak through her black hair. She was in her mid to late eighties at the time. Natasha would tell dinner party stopping stories of her extraordinary life, such as Pablo Picasso sketching her eyes on a table napkin in ‘Les Deux Magots’, remarking ‘J'ai été séduite par vos yeux’ (‘I have been seduced by your eyes’), if I recall the French correctly. The stopping part of this story was at the end when, with a flourish, she produced the napkin. She spoke of dinner parties with Marlene Dietrich in Berlin in the 1930s, where this extravert Georgian had golden cobwebs painted on her whitened face, the web interlaced with tiny mice – a make-up idea which started a minor and momentary fashion craze. Natasha later married sometime Ballets Russes set designer George Kirsta, and founded Ballet Kirsta. Rex was involved with this enterprise. Rex talks at length about the larger-than-life Natasha Kirsta in this and the next parts of the interview. In this second part, my old teacher begins to discuss his own choreography. First, there was ‘La Belle Creole’ (1949), designed by Ann Church. Next and hugely successful was 'Corroboree' (1950) for the Melbourne-based National Theatre Ballet, a work based on indigenous themes set to music especially composed by John Antill, a sample of which I have included in the video. Costumes were by Robin Lovejoy. Two other choreographers have tackled the storybook and with Antill’s music, most recently Stanton Welch in his 1995 version for the Australian Ballet. Rex also talks of the first mountings of the classics in Australia by Joyce Graeme, based on the Nicholas Sergeyev notations – much as Ninette de Valois had done in Britain for the Sadlers Wells Ballet, later the Royal Ballet. The choreographer discusses his work in musicals in the West End of London. He was the lead dancer (Ballet Jervis) in ‘Love From Judy’ (1952), which was based on Jean Webster's famous play ‘Daddy Long Legs’. As we all know, the film adaptation starred Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. But I must say, this section really comes alive Rex begins to talk at length about his long association with the extraordinary Georgian Princess Natasha Watchinadze (later Natasha Kirsta) and Ballet Kirsta and the rest, themes which are taken up again in the last two sections of this interview. Enjoy!

• published: 27 Nov 2016
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