SOAR: A LIFE FREED BY DANCE

By David McAllister (Thames & Hudson)

McAllister was well known as principal dancer with The Australian Ballet and then artistic director of the company for 20 years.

And although this memoir covers his career – the successes and the setbacks – it opens, surprisingly, with a short chapter about his friendship and then clandestine sexual trysts with dancer Kelvin Coe when David was only 19. The sex never led to a relationship as David couldn’t commit and be open. (“I needed to sort myself out. It would take me years to do so.”) In fact, it was more like decades!

“After years and years of being called a poofter and a pansy at my all-boys Catholic school, I didn’t want these bullies to be right.”

Instead, David pushed the issue of his sexuality to the back of his mind, focused on dance, and cultivated the image of being “an enigma” when it came to sex. Although he had occasional relationships with women, it took decades for him to finally enter into a long-term relationship with another man, playwright and theatre director, Wesley Enoch.

So the memoir is very much a slow journey to self-acceptance. It’s also a thoroughly uplifting story about a conventional Australian upbringing in suburban Perth and a determined and dramatic boy who wanted to dance. After “prancing around the living room and tap dancing on the septic tank” for years, and nagging his reluctant parents to send him to ballet school, they finally agreed after seeing Rudolf Nureyev dance on television. Though McAllister concedes that they might also have caved in as they wanted some peace! – Graeme