Lucette Aldous: Lifetime Achievement Award

At Sunday’s Australian Dance Awards the elegant and diminutive (New Zealand-born) Lucette Aldous (who was trained in Brisbane and Sydney) was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Aldous now 70, has a long and truly illustrious career. She joined the Royal Ballet School in 1955 on a Royal Academy of Dancing scholarship, and in 1957 she began her professional career with Ballet Rambert. Her height (at 5 ft) could potentially have been an issue for Aldous’ career, (short ballet dancers are not the norm) but as Lucette explained when speaking to ArtsHub, a sequence of events set her career off on a high from word go. Ballet Rambert were specifically looking for a shorter dancer and Aldous was recommended to them. From that moment she became a fixture on the national British dancing scene.

After Ballet Rambert, Aldous performed with the London Festival Ballet and then with the Royal Ballet. Lead roles in Giselle, Coppelia and La Sylphide followed, and she met and worked with Rudolf Nureyev, and their working lives became intertwined for the remainder of both their careers.

Aldous refers to Nurevey as her teacher and mentor and he played a particularly influential part in both her career and her development as a renowned and demanding dance teacher. It was when Robert Helpmann in 1973 asked Nurevey and Aldous to perform in the film version of Don Quixote, which was to be filmed in Australia that the duo made history and the young Australian Ballet Company started to get some attention across the world. Aldous then worked a most creative dancers life – performing both in Australia and in productions across Europe and the United States.

Two other great highlights of her career include the 1975 Ronald Hynd created role of Valencienne (for Aldous) in his production of The Merry Widow for the Australian Ballet, and a featured role in the film The Turning Point with Michael Baryshnikov.
Lucette Aldous has been referred to as “vivacious, effervescent and technically accomplished” Aldous, but she admits she has always suffered terribly from nerves throughout her career regardless of the number of times she had performed a role. To counteract this she recounts how she would vigorously practice what she refers to as an “old Russian technique” – which involves dancing her role three times the day of a performance to quash any anxiety.

When asked to note some highlights in her career, Aldous admits that dancing by nature was a glamorous job. When living and touring across Europe and the United States in the 1970s, there was, she explains a level of commitment to the cultural development of dancers by the dance companies they performed for.