Wind beneath her wings:
Ella Havelka, The Australian Ballet’s first indigenous company member
Ella Havelka was just a little girl when she decided to be a swan. Ethereal, graceful, perfect. Her mother brought home a video of Swan Lake. She was entranced as the swans fluttered in their tutus. “I remember watching these swans fly off,” Ella says. “That is what I wanted to feel one day.”
Yet sport, not swans, was what people did in Dubbo, in central NSW. It was football rather than fouette, netball rather than The Nutcracker. “I guess ballet wasn’t something you do in a country town,” says Ella. Especially if you were Indigenous, a descendent of the Wiradjuri people.
Ella was good at running, “but it was just so boring.” She wanted to soar. Elevation. It was in the dance studio that she found the sense of freedom that she craved. “I just loved it so much.” And it was the beginning of something both graceful and ground-breaking.
Ella is the first
Indigenous dancer to join The Australian Ballet in its
50-year history. Now she is the star of Ella, a documentary film about her life. Yet the journey from the bush to the stages of the world has been marked with both disappointment and elation. With the glamour and acclaim have come rejection and pain.
From the age of seven, Ella couldn’t wait for school to finish to go to ballet classes. “I didn’t see the need to go outside looking for other things.”
She was the energetic only child of a single mother, Janna. There wasn’t much money for extras. “Ballet wasn’t cheap,” says Janna. Yet Ella didn’t ask for much – just to dance. “As long as I was attending all the ballet classes possible, I was happy,” Ella says. >>
The first time she saw her child on stage, Janna didn’t recognise her, “the way she presented herself”. And then when Ella won her first Eisteddfod, “She was hooked. This was where she needed to be.”
By 13, Ella knew she wasn’t going to grow out of it, but Janna knew ballet was one of the hardest professions she could have chosen. The potential for heartbreak and failure was huge.
“Once it started getting serious, I asked her if she was sure and she said, ‘Yes’,” Janna says.
And so began the years of discipline, sacrifice, of striving for perfection, of practice, perseverance and dedication that go into the making of a ballerina.
Now 28, Ella sits cross-legged on a chair in the offices of The Australian Ballet in Melbourne, glowing, with her hair scraped back, a big white smile. She speaks quickly, seemingly confident, bright, but it’s a confidence she’s had to fight for. Ella has struggled to fit in, to belong. She has felt that she has to prove herself, to push herself harder than anyone else to deserve a coveted place in The Australian Ballet.
When the letter came offering her a place in the junior school of The Australian Ballet, Ella and her mother were ecstatic – only a handful of the most promising dancers got into the elite ballet school in the country. Janna hadn’t even told Ella it was an audition. She thought she was going to a masterclass in Sydney.
Pushed to the limit
It had only ever been the two of them. “We were like sisters,” says Ella. “She was everything to me at a critical age. We are both very stubborn. We can outdo each other with stubbornness.” Because she was never given opportunities herself, Janna was determined to make sure her daughter was encouraged and supported.
“Whenever I thought I couldn’t do something,” says Ella, “Mum would go out of her way to make sure I changed that thought process and could actually achieve what I wanted.”
Ella was 14 when they moved to Melbourne to go to the ballet school. It was hard. They were homesick and found the big city crushing. Janna, a nurse, struggled to find work she felt comfortable with. “She experienced racism in a few of the jobs she had here in Melbourne,” says Ella. “But she knew this was what I wanted, so the dedication came from both of us.”
Coming from being a joyful star in a country town, Ella was intimidated by the refined world of classical ballet. “It scared me, so for a long time there was this idea I couldn’t learn things,” she says, “I couldn’t pick things up as quickly as the other girls. It was usually because I was so scared of getting it wrong, or scared of the teacher.”
It was a tough, competitive environment. Ella was bigger and more athletic in build than the other girls. She came home crying every day. Her mum was worried.
“Teachers are putting you down – you are not good enough, your leg shape is bad, you are just not cutting it,” says Ella. “It was enough to make me think, ‘What is the point?’ But
I often feel I’m dancing between two worlds, struggling to find where I fit in.
they’re prepping you for company life, for the harshness of the ballet world. It tests your passions, it pushes you to see how far you are willing to go to get to where you need to be to pursue that one ultimate goal.”
Ella made it through the four years, but was not offered a contract at the end. She was devastated.
In the documentary about her, The Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director, David McAllister, says, “Ella had a bigger journey ahead of her than just coming into the company.”
Instead, she was offered a place at the Bangarra Dance Theatre and another world opened – the world of her cultural identity. It was a profound leap. Her mother had always told her to be proud of her Indigenous ancestry, but “there was this huge hole”. Bangarra was about thousands of years of stories being danced out. She had to understand what the stories meant, but at first, Ella thought her kneecaps were going to fall off. “Working on my knees was new territory,” she says. “I found it difficult to embody that kind of movement. I had to forget everything I’d ever learned at the ballet school.”
On her first trip to country, to Arnhem Land, Ella felt like she had come home. Yet in the dance studio “the challenge was getting back into my body and changing the way I moved. I was so used to being up and straight, it took a while to break down those barriers, to hone in on what the movement quality is supposed to be. I had to learn how to change my behaviour to fit in with my new family. The journey was overwhelming. It was the most enriching time of my life.”
In 2012, The Australian Ballet collaborated with Bangarra for a work called Warumuk. Ella was in the studio with the ballet dancers, admiring their lightness. She spent a year thinking about the pure world of classical ballet. “I missed the ethereal world, Swan Lake and that beautiful transcendent music,” she says. “I missed that feeling of flying through the air.”
She contacted David McAllister and he offered her a contract. “I was just over the moon.”
It was going to be hard work, mentally and physically; ballet takes great strength in the legs and feet. “I forgot what that pain felt like in my ankles and feet,” she says. Frustratingly, Ella hurt her ankles and had to take six months off.
Another act to come
She is still there, Ella says, because she is still learning. “Ballet can never be perfect, even though perfection is what you’re striving for,” she explains. “There’s always something to improve. I’m happy as long as I keep getting opportunities that inspire me. I want to try new roles, things that challenge me.”
Ella is still in the corps de ballet, not yet a soloist. There are still the tears when she is not chosen for something she has worked hard for. “I would love to move through the ranks and get featured roles,” she says, “but I just don’t know that those opportunities are going to come. It is hard to know in this company. It takes a long time for anyone to get anywhere. I will admit I have had my dark days.”
It can be isolating, “like a cocoon”, she admits, with schedules that allow no time for family and friends.
At 28, there is not much time left for her as a classical ballerina. Ella has achieved more than she or her mum expected, but you can’t help feeling that there is another act to come in the story of Ella Havelka. “I often feel I’m dancing between two worlds,” she says, “struggling to find where I fit in.”
She has a partner in Sydney and would like to have children. In her spare time, Ella reads, weaves and paints. “I’d be keen to study different types of art and I’m also an avid Oxfam supporter. I try and see the bigger picture and not always be so focussed on dance because I have found in the past when you become like that everything else falls apart. You lose your friendships and you lose the broadest perspective of the world.”
She doesn’t feel that she has to prove herself so much any more. “My path will unfold before me,” Ella says.
Until then there’s the magic and excitement when the curtain goes up. “That’s when the adrenaline kicks in,” she says. Then she’s a swan. “It’s quite a spiritual thing to be a swan.” AWW