Soloist Juliet Burnett remembers her late, great mentor, Valrene Tweedie

As The Australian Ballet revels in the pinnacle of a four-year long celebration of the Ballets Russes, having just closed the final curtain on the Firebird and other legends programme and reopening it for Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker: The Story of Clara, I have fortunately been busied with some challenging work in both programmes, but also with thoughts and memories of the lady who instilled in me the passion for the provenance of these works, Valrene Tweedie.

Throughout my ballet training with Valerie Jenkins, Miss Tweedie was an omnipresent figure, forever a bounteous fount of wisdom and fierce wit. I held her on a pedestal, and wouldn’t ever cease to do so, as I was awed by stories of her joining Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes on their 1936-1940 tour, and dancing all over the world under the stage name of Irina Lavrova. Her matter-of-fact, call-a-spade-a-spade demeanour was something very important in reigning in my acute case of stars-in-the-eyes syndrome as a young student. I used to pore over countless dance magazines and books and closely watch the more senior girls in eisteddfods, then go to great lengths to emulate their shapes and movements.

It was at the height of this obsessive period that Miss Tweedie was coaching me in Aurora’s Act III variation from The Sleeping Beauty, and the first time I danced it for her, she stopped the music when I was not even halfway through the famous diagonal petit developpe step (ballet jargon for a step where the dancer twists her wrists around while travelling on a diagonal en pointe). Her tiny frame approached me, her eyes insistent, and she took me firmly by the forearms, and said, quietly and without reproach, “My dear, the music is so delicate and simple, and so what is this flapping about and carrying on with the arms?” She made me listen to the music and asked me to respond to it, not to a preconceived idea of the aesthetic of the movement. She persisted in simplifying all of the affectations I had acquired from all these fanciful images I had floating around in my head.

Her favourite, all-encompassing phrase was “simplicity and sincerity”. It is this teaching that has guided my approach to my dancing from the day it was first uttered to me. She loathed superfluous affectations and very much admired naturalness and femininity in a female dancer. She always stressed the importance of being a human onstage, not a dancer pretending to be a human. This also extended to having the hair soft and natural around the face. One famous story Mrs Jenkins told me was about one time Miss Tweedie was adjudicating a girl’s classical solo section in an eisteddfod. She got up onstage to announce the winners, but not before commenting, “all the dancers were lovely, but it’s such a pity that they all looked like eggheads”. I still always think of her as I’m preparing my hair for a show – one too many reaches for the can of hairspray could spell a disaster of egghead proportions.

I recall Miss Tweedie as a bit of a character of contradictions. She was a finely built lady, with a tender tone to her voice. Outsiders would comment on how sweet and meek she was … and I would agree that yes, she was very sweet, but meek, no! She had fire inside her and a razor-sharp wit. She had not just an opinion but an impassioned argument about many things, something I only really learnt as I became closer to her later after I joined The Australian Ballet. I never dared to venture a challenge on these things, for fear of having my head bitten off for a start, but also because who was I to question the voice of experience? I had learnt so much from this remarkable woman; she helped instill in me a passion for this most perfect of art forms, and the importance of maintaining one’s integrity in such a crazy industry. Right up until her last days, I was amazed by her tenacity of spirit despite her ailing body.

On the opening night of Firebird and other legends in Melbourne, I felt honoured to be performing the Valse ballerina in Les Sylphides. This ballet to me epitomises the perfect marriage of music and dance – every note and breath of the music is manifested in the movements of the sylphs onstage. Fokine’s masterful choreography makes it feel just sublime to dance onstage, even the notoriously difficult solo I was performing. Miss Tweedie loved this ballet and performed it endlessly with Colonel de Basil’s company – one of their ‘bread and butter ballets’, as she put it. It was during the Sylphides rehearsal period that I began to ache with sadness at losing my mentor last year. I thought of the things she had taught me, I lamented the questions I wished I had asked her. It wasn’t until just before curtain-up on opening night that I felt resolve: a torrent of nervous energy had hit me suddenly, so I took myself to a quiet corner and forced myself to calm down. As I closed my eyes and took in breath, an inner voice awakened in me, and it sounded very familiar. It was a tender voice, eerily comforting, but its message was blunt. “My dear, only you can make it happen for yourself.”

And so I did.

Photography by Lynette Wills from Step Inside The Australian Ballet