The country’s most-honoured living dancer still has anxiety dreams
By Nick Miller
David McAllister still dreams of dancing.
“All of a sudden someone says ‘you’re on!’ and I’m putting on a costume going ‘hang on a minute, I don’t do this any more!’”
Former Australian Ballet head David McAllister, who is getting an AC in the Queen’s Birthday honoursCredit:Joe Armao
These recurring dreams are a legacy of a lifetime in ballet, though he stopped dancing in 2001, the year he began his 20-year stint as artistic director of the Australian Ballet which ended in 2020.
And now his career has been recognised with a Companion of the Order of Australia. Only a few of the country’s most prestigious dancers have received this high honour: prima ballerina Lucette Aldous and Margaret Scott, first director of the Australian Ballet School (where McAllister himself trained).
The award was made “for eminent service to the performing arts, particularly to ballet both nationally and internationally, to artistic directorship and dance education, and as a mentor”.
Only a month ago he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award – the highest award from London’s Royal Academy of Dance.
He’s very grateful. “If I had a pool room it would be overflowing,” he jokes.
The Perth-born McAllister joined the Ballet in 1983. He was promoted to senior artist in 1986 and to principal artist in January 1989, dancing the lead in productions including The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, and Romeo and Juliet.
In 1985 he won Bronze at the Fifth International Ballet Competition in Moscow. He has danced internationally with Bolshoi Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and, in 1992, as part of a Royal Gala performance in London in the presence of the Princess of Wales.
As the Australian Ballet’s longest-serving artistic director, he reinvigorated the company’s repertoire with new commissions from the world’s foremost choreographers.
McAllister says the AC “blows my mind a little bit”. He feels it is a vindication of the importance of the Australian Ballet to the country.
“It is a dream for some and a source of pure joy for others,” he says. “It is living beauty. It is the pursuit of the perfect.”
He feels his legacy is not just in the company’s artistic achievements, but in building an “amazing medical team” at the company that prevents injury, lengthens careers and looks after dancers’ personal lives as well as professional, so they leave the company as “fully rounded individuals, not just ‘ballet monks’.”
He sees his role now in helping nurture Australia’s next generation of dance directors.
“I’ve become that sort of ‘elder’,” he says.
And what photo would he put above the bar in that imaginary pool room?
“So many wonderful thing have happened, but I think [it would be] when we did the new production of Sleeping Beauty, the first time I’d actually staged a production for the company,” he says. “That was an incredible moment. And I felt the whole company had really been there to help me achieve this.”
Nick Miller is Arts Editor of The Age. He was previously The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald's European correspondent.