Australian Ballet's Danilo Radojevic

  

Danilo Radojevic is the Associate Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet. In lay men’s terms that makes him David McAllister’s right hand man, and whilst McAllister is more often than not the reference point for most of us when we talk about the Australian Ballet, Radojevic has been on the scene at the Australian Ballet for a long long time.

Hailing from Sydney he auditioned for the Australian Ballet school in 1973. In 1974 he was accepted and completed one year of what was then only a two year course.

According to Radojevic, when he spoke to ArtsHub about his role at the Australian Ballet and with The Dancers Company, which is this year celebrating 30 years of touring regional Australia, it was Dame Margot Scott, the then director of the school, who marked him up so he could finish his training at the ballet school in 1974. Radojevic then went on to join the Australian Ballet Company as a dancer.

Radojevic remembers it in an almost incidental manner, like it all just sort of happened, but surely it wouldn’t have been that easy to segue from student to performer with the country’s most eminent ballet company?

He agrees, this wasn’t normally the case, but the intense training prior to auditioning to the Australian Ballet School helped he says.

Radojevic credits it all to the training and couching he received in his formative years from two former dancers of the London Festival Ballet.

“These dancers taught me, not only the syllabus but also how to perform at a very young age” he recalls. “What can happen with young students is that they get into that training mentality and forget about the purpose of what the training is for – which is for them to be dancers and performers. And yes whilst you do need to get the technical aspect right, to be a successful classical dancer you also have to be a performer.

“So these teachers instilled that it me, and introduced me to a repertoire that I was lucky to know at that age like Don Quixote, as well as learning the many different styles of dance.”

At that stage of his career however it was more Radojevic’s mother who wanted him to be a dancer he admits. The European background of both is parents (his mum was born in Berlin and his father in Belgrade), could also go some way to explaining why becoming a ballet dancer was a realistic career option in his family, and at the time, he remembers it more as something he went along with and didn’t object to.

“I started ballet training and really enjoyed it, but I also wanted to play soccer and football. I was doing all this at the ages of 11 and 12… and I was doing small gigs in Sydney with the Tanya Pearson Classical Coaching Academy – which I was happy to be a part of. So I was being trained to be a classical dancer.

So when did it dawn on him that this might really be the beginning of a career?

“I committed myself or decided to follow this route when I saw Nureyev in the 1960s” Radojevic says. “My mother stood in line in Newton, Sydney for six hours at the Elizabethan theatre to get tickets to see this extraordinary man. ThenI saw him perform and there were 36 curtain calls after the pas de deux. I was in the audience there and at that age I didn’t know if he was good or not, to tell the truth, but I saw him dance and I said to my mum that night ‘I want to do what he’s doing’.”

“I was so affected by that, and I often wonder if I would have continued to be a dancer if I hadn’t seen Nureyev perform, because now even though dancers are great there isn’t the celebrity status there once was. You don’t have these front page headlines anymore, and I don’t think we will ever experience that again. These were the superstars.”

For Radojevic it almost reads like a book. He saw Nurevey and never looked back, even when some of life’s adversities got in the way (particularly for a boy wanting to be a ballet dancer).

“I went to an all boys High School and I got picked on. I was very committed though, and I never thought I didn’t want to do ballet any more. But life at school, because of this wasn’t enjoyable - like when kids find a ballet shoe in your bag.

"I went to a school with 500 boys, so what are you going to do – fight 500 boys? No, you just want to move on. So I played soccer and played it well and I was good at all the sporting activities. And I continued playing soccer, even though my dance teacher was anxious about me doing that – in the end I got injured doing dance and not soccer.”

And in the end it seems that Radojevic’s ambition was enough to spur him on. After joining the Australian Ballet Company he was asked to compete at the International Ballet Competition in Moscow in 1977 and represent the Australian Ballet there. Radojevic won gold, and is still the only Australian to win this prestigious award.

“I had a lot of help from the principle dancers of the Australian Ballet and the ballet societies, and I went there and came back with a gold medal, which I hadn’t expected. That sort of surprised me. But I think what made the difference (with that competition) was my background training which taught me to be a performer, and I think that’s what clinched it for me.”

Radojevic returned to Australia on an incredible high, and the urge to take his career to the next level together with the fear that if he didn’t make his move soon it might be too late, (in a career that is still short at the best of times), made him resign from the Australian Ballet and head off to the United States determined to get work with the American Ballet Theatre.

Radojevic had travelled to New York in 1976 with the Australian Ballet Company and as soon as he set foot in the city, saw the American Ballet Theatre, and saw Baryshnikov dance, he knew that he was meant to go back there.

“I wanted to be amongst the best dancers in the world like Nureyev and Baryshnikov - all these big names. And if there was an opportunity for me to do that is was better sooner than later as the recent gold medal of the competition in Moscow was still in people’s minds.”

So at the age of 20 he left the Australian Ballet and went to New York, leaving behind the consternation and disappointment of some from the Australian Ballet Company. Radojevic then remained in New York and California for 20 years, and his return to Australia was more coincidental than intentional.

Ross Stretton had a lot to do with it, it seems. Radojevic had danced with him at the American Ballet Theatre and when Stretton was appointed Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet he offered Radojevic a job.

“I had retired by then, I was 36, and I was teaching a lot, and I felt comfortable with that rather than choreographing. So Ross invited me to be part of his team, as Ballet Master and even though I loved New York and didn’t have any plans to come back, I thought I would do it for a year and if I didn’t enjoy it I would return to New York.”

This was over fifteen years ago and Radojevic is still at the Australian Ballet Company, now married to Principle dancer Lucinda Dunn. He even remembers David McAllister as a student of the Ballet School. Radojevic also applied for the Artistic Director role before David McAllister was given the job, and as as Associate Artistic Director his role in the company is significant.

And as The Dancers Company dances its way through its 30 year anniversary, Danilo Radojevic is one of those who made it through the ranks.