Adam's Leap Of Fate

The Sunday Age

Sunday June 22, 2008

John Bailey

A boy from Melbourne's west is now one of Australian ballet's brightest stars. John Bailey reports.

IT'S less than 12 hours since he was promoted to the highest ballet rank in the country, and Adam Bull - the newest principal artist with the Australian Ballet - is still in shock. At last Friday night's premiere of the Ballet Imperial season, Bull and fellow senior artist Danielle Rowe ascended to the top rung of ballet's ladder. It's been a long climb.

It began in the late 1980s when a quiet young boy with blond ringlets sat entranced by the hot-footing of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. Their movie-musical world seemed as exotic - and distant - as the international stage he would find himself on two decades later. Six-year-old Adam Bull was growing up in Laverton, in Melbourne's west, but his head was already in the stars.

Bull's parents knew nothing about ballet, so when their son announced his intention to become a dancer they were stunned. They turned to the only advice they could find - their son's primary school. Today, Bull's biographical notes make a special mention of the grade 1 teacher who encouraged him to follow his dream - "thank you Mrs Kip from Laverton Primary School!".

Twenty years later, Janine Kip recalls the six-year-old boy dancing on the playground asphalt with a portable stereo and his own tapes. "You could see he had a dream," she says. "He was going places and didn't care what other people thought. I'm sure he did deep down but he still did what he wanted. And he knew adults were supporting him."

Laverton doesn't breed a lot of ballet boys. "It was tough," says Kip. "The region we're in is not really conducive to accepting arts, people who are different."

When he stepped out in his first ballet classes, next to a mechanic's near Werribee, Bull found himself in a Billy Elliot-type situation - a lone boy in a sea of little ballerinas. He performed his first concert dressed as a bumblebee.

Says Kip: "He could have been destroyed emotionally at school, in the area that we're in. So to promote him we got him to perform. He didn't have any bullying, I'd say, because everyone realised how good he was."

Rather than keeping his dancing lessons a secret, the teachers at Laverton Primary arranged for Bull to show off his moves in front of the parents and classmates who could have torn him down. It was a successful move. "Everybody was just in awe of this little kid doing his own thing," says Kip.

Both Bull, 26, and his old teacher credit his success to his parents, for whom ballet was an alien world. "They've grown to love it and they're my biggest fans now," says Bull.

"They've been willing to go through all the hard times. Financially I'm sure it's been a burden to put me through full-time education but they're proud of me."

At nine, Bull began to study ballet under former Australian Ballet member Brian Nolan. During a trip to an Australian Ballet performance, he was inspired by former AB principal Steven Heathcote - who would later become a valuable mentor - but returning to his classes he was confronted with the rigour required to become a professional ballet dancer.

Nolan was a strict teacher, says Bull, "and he was quite pushy and got me scared. But he knew what he was doing. Hard man, but he got me to the point when I was 13 or 14 where I knew that this was what I wanted to do."

When I first spoke to Bull early last week, he had no idea of the leap his career was about to take. He'd only been promoted to the rank of senior artist earlier this year.

"It doesn't feel like I'm a senior member of the company," he said then. "Just this past year or two, doing classes and stuff, it used to be that we were the young ones looking up at everyone else, and now we're the old ones, we're the ones struggling and everything's hurting while all these young ones are coming up. It didn't feel that long ago that that was me, new and fresh."

But there's a professionalism that underlies his modesty. When he executes what appears to be a flawless jump during the photo shoot, he's already shaking his head as he returns to earth. An arm or leg was an inch out of place, so rule that shot out. It's not that readers will be able to tell the error if it goes to print; it's that he will.

That technical precision was there from the outset, says AB artistic director David McAllister. "He joined the company with a huge amount of potential back in 2002," he says. "When you have someone of that ability, technically, there's always a sense that this will be an interesting journey. There's no guarantee that people will develop to realise their potential, but over the course of the time Adam's been with the company his progress has always been very steady. He's lived up to every challenge we've given him, and especially over the last 18 months he's artistically matured to that point. He was always a great dancer but now he's very physically and emotionally engaging on stage as well."

There's an old joke about going to the ballet and wondering why they don't just get taller dancers. Bull is 193 centimetres - and that's when he's not up on his toes. With his shock of blond curls and an athlete's physique, he looks like a born dancer.

But when he joined the Australian Ballet he was, in his own words, a "scrawny little weed . . . so gangly and skinny I could never lift a girl up". Lifting weights in the gym soon changed that.

Even in the company's lowest ranks, Bull was dancing principal roles. The same support from parents and teachers that nurtured the six-year-old seems to have continued throughout his dancing career, but there's also been that constant push - from himself and others - to see how far he could go.

"You never give someone a role to see if it breaks them," says McAllister, "but as dancers develop you see the potential and keep challenging it. Sometimes you give a dancer a role that's a little beyond them, and if they don't quite make it you think 'that was a bit too soon, we need to rethink their progression'. With Adam he's always lived up to those challenges. His progression compared to some other dancers has been quite accelerated."

Bull doesn't consider himself famous. "A minor celebrity in the ballet world, maybe."

Nonetheless, he has stories that suggest otherwise. "I was walking down the street and some guy came up to me and said, 'Are you Adam Bull? I saw you in Swan Lake. I've never gone to the ballet before but I thought you were just amazing.' I said 'cheers, mate'."

And swimming off Sydney's Manly Beach - where he and his partner have an apartment - an unknown woman swam over to him to discuss the previous evening's performance.

When he's not in Manly, however, you might find him dropping in to Laverton, where he keeps in contact with his former teacher Mrs Kip.

"It's amazing that someone can have such an effect on you," he says. "If it wasn't for her, God knows. Just that little bit of encouragement from someone, it goes a long way."

Bull jokes that he's just "a big bumblebee now". But as he stepped off stage after Friday's announcement and met his parents, the tears began to flow.

"It was one of those things you always dream of," he says, "and it actually happened. After all these years, you've made it."

© 2008 The Sunday Age

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