Juliet Burnett- Transcript

This transcript is from an interview that was first published on 5th of March 2020. This transcript has been edited slightly to help with clarity, the audio of this episode is in two parts. Part one can be found here and part two can be found here.

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Part 1

I start by asking: ‘where did dance start?’

Juliet Burnett: From the outside it would seem that it’s that typical young girl growing up in Australia, starts ballet at age five or four or whatever, coming from a privileged background, but actually it’s not quite like that. My mum is Indonesian, she was born in Surakarta, in Solo, in Indonesia, and her mother was a dancer in the Sultan’s palace in Yogyakarta. And she was a new mum in this new country, in Sydney where I grew up, in Australia. And the way she tells it is that she saw all the other young mums were taking their girls to this ballet class and she saw that they were taking them to this church just down the road from us  in Woollahra in Sydney, and she just followed them in one day and she was like: ‘oh yeah, this seems like a good idea’, and then she also thought: ‘well, wouldn't it be interesting to see if my daughters (as I've got a younger sister) to see if my daughters had some latent dancing blood from my mother?’ So that was the genesis of it and I went into my first ballet lesson aged five. I think mum brought my sister Jasmine as well and she was like three and apparently she was crying so she had to wait until she was old enough and stopped crying. But yeah, I kind of didn’t look back since that but that’s how it all started, in the church that was like five minutes down the road, the church hall down the road, and it was quite cute to imagine actually, mum walking me down the road with my little ballet shoes from their apartment up the road and in the local church hall. Yeah, I have happy memories of starting to learn ballet and it was just ballet that we did from that age. I don’t know, I never knew what would happen twenty years down the track. Such innocent beings!

Andrew: So, when was that point where you thought, or you fell into that routine of ballet becoming something that then took over your life? In a way that… your career and everything. Was there a turning point?

Juliet Burnett: It’s kind of funny because mum and dad brought us up really more on theatre and contemporary dance. That was their taste and that was what they were interested in. Nobody really knew what ballet was in my family, like classical ballet, you know? Mum was an actress and her brother was for the foremost playwright, an actor himself, poet, in Indonesia, and she was in his theatre group. So she grew up with this very artistic surround and theatre all around. So she very much brought that into my sister’s and my upbringing as well. We were read Shakespeare and poetry by my dad and from her from infancy basically.

Dad was working at Qantas but he was a painter as well in the 70s. So, we grew up in this very Bohemian, artistic environment where something like classical ballet, certainly in Australia, has always been a rather elite sort of art form. The elite art form that my parents were more interested in was the opera. They would go to see the opera every now and again. Classical ballet didn’t really have a place so it was really interesting…  I don’t know, it was just a weird thing to follow. I actually remember super clearly that when I was ten years old ,my teacher brought my mum in after one of my lessons and just said to mum: ‘I think Juliet has a lot of potential and would you be interested in bringing her in for some more private lessons, for her to start learning contemporary dance and national dancing and all this other stuff to round out her dancing because I think she could really maybe think about taking it more seriously’. And I just remember not really understanding what was going on, but I do remember being really excited because she said that I was going to be playing Tinkerbell in the end of year production of Peter Pan. So I got to do my first solo role and I got to wear these really cool yellow fairy wings and I think I was a little bit more in love with my costume and the idea of it and the hard work that I had to put in to do a solo role at the age of 10. I just remember that sequence of events super clearly somehow. And mom and dad both being very supportive of that. And I think that that is a nice analogy for how they both supported my career throughout the years. They were learning about classical ballet as I got further and further into it. My sister as well was taking it very seriously up until age eighteen. She went to the Australian Ballet School as well. So my parents were really on the learning curve with us about what is classical ballet and what does it mean in Australia and what it means in our lives growing up on this rich tapestry of other art forms and things. So they were on that learning curve and really just excited and supporting the fact that their daughters wanted to dance. Who cares what kind of dance form that was.

We all got really into the idea of classical ballet and we started to go to the shows of the Australian Ballet and I think my first one was when I was about fourteen. The first time I saw the ballet and I was like ‘wow, this is amazing’  I didn’t really think that this is something I really want to do. I just thought it was amazing. There’s no bloody way I could do that, probably. Knowing me. But that was one turning point and the story that ensued. But then the other turning point I very vaguely remember, not so vividly, was seeing a show of the Australian Ballet Dancing Onegin this very famous John Cranko ballet and the guest artist that was performing Tatiana was Alessandra Ferri, the Italian ballerina. I do remember just thinking ‘OK, I used to think that classical ballet was really pretty, like magical and fairy-tale’, and here was like quite a raw story and very dramatic, dramatic music and lots of drama. And I remember being quite amazed that you could tell a really human story with classical ballet. And I must have been 15 or so at the time because that was the point in which I was like ‘oh, this is something that I'm really interested in’. I was a little Pina Bausch nerd doing classical ballet and wanting to find already at that age some sort of human purpose in what I was doing. Then the trajectory into classical ballet made more sense for me as a teenager is like exploring and wanting all the answers and probably thinking I know everything and all that kind of stuff that, you know, we all do as teenagers. They’re the two turning points I can really think of. (09:00)

Andrew: And are your parents ballet fans now?

Juliet Burnett: I would say there are. They watch all of my shows, any production. They’ve even flown over here several times to see me dance some landmark roles over here in Antwerp. They've come to see as much as they can and they are incredible, for sure my number one fans, there's no doubt about it. And all my bosses that I’ve worked with and choreographers and everything they all get to know my parents and they just know that they’re gonna be at the show and it’s so nice. And even when we’re doing Café Müller, the Pina Bausch piece, here in Antwerp, I just remember how much the Pina Bausch dancers who were staging it just loved my parents. It was such a touching moment because my family all love Pina Bausch as well. They were just so over the moon more than any other choreographer or stager or boss I’ve worked with. They were like ‘oh my gosh’, the Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers, most of the original cast of Café Müller was there saying ‘oh, you’re such wonderful people’ and I’m like ‘oh my gosh is this actually happening?’ So I would say that’s a bit of a fanning moment for them. So they’re for sure massive dance fans. We went to see a lot of Sydney Dance Company in the 80s and 90s when Graeme Murphy was the artistic director and we really saw a lot of that. Now huge fans of Graeme’s work. And Stephen Page at Bangarra, we used to see a lot of that. So yeah, they’re fans for sure.

Andrew: You were marinated in a lot of different dance, then? And other art forms as well by the sound of it.

Juliet Burnett: Totally! Yeah, for sure. Very nice mixed marinade. (10:57)

Andrew: So you danced for the Australian Ballet for a number of years in Australia. And then you moved overseas. And I was just wondering… why the move? What drew you to Europe or out of Australia?

Juliet Burnett: I’d been with the Australian Ballet for nearly thirteen years. And honestly, when I first joined, I was excited about classical ballet. I was excited and very much on this sort of momentum that you have after those three intense years of training and I was really focused. I don't think I really had a goal to be a ballerina, but I had this very firm focus that I would like to work in a ballet company. When I say to be a “ballerina” I mean when everyone aspires to be the principal ballerina and all that kind of thing. I didn’t really want to be a star like many of my peers might have liked. I think I just wanted to dance and I wanted the opportunity of a ballet company. And I think also because we'd seen so many shows of the Australian Ballet and I was at the Australian Ballet School that's what I aspired to. It was maybe about age 25, about 100 years ago (no I’m joking, I’m not that old!) When I was about 25, I just had a bit of… after that momentum, you know: you joined the company and you're doing lots and lots and lots and you're just like working around the clock and the Aussie Ballet is doing like 200 shows a year and touring everywhere. And it was actually quite a ridiculous workload there. It was crazy. Mad respect to all the dancers who have gone through the Australian Ballet, it’s a very, very, very, very hard working environment.  I think I just got to this point where I had a bit of an existential crisis, basically. And I was like ‘what the hell Am I doing here? Do I really love ballet?’ I was starting to look at the dancers around me and the ballets that I was dancing and feeling really lost and really not at all into my work. I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with tutus, for example, and mostly hate. And I was cast in a lot of the stuff with tutus like doing solo, principal roles, because I could do it, you know, that kind of thing? It's like, ‘because I can do it’. Is that a good enough reason to be doing it. And all of the perennial questioning like ‘what the hell am I doing here? What do I want to put my... what do I want to invest my best dancing in?’

So I was thinking then about leaving already. It wasn't that I was not enjoying all of my work. There were certainly some moments and I realised that those moments were when I was either in a creation or when I was doing something more modern. It came about that time that Wayne McGregor came to create a work. And we were also dancing Jiří Kylián, Nacho Duato and Nicolo Fonte as well. So there were some more modern choreographers coming through and that started to pique my interest again in dancing. So it was starting to tell me that maybe, because these opportunities were sort of few and far between and a big classical ballet company, that I should maybe start looking elsewhere. And another thing that happened around that time was that I received a fantastic travelling scholarship from the Aussie Ballet. It was a career development scholarship and because of the geographic isolation of Australia, a dancer can use it to go and check out other companies around the world. So I used it to go to San Francisco Ballet, the Royal Ballet, this company here, the Ballet Vlaanderen, the Dutch National Ballet. Then I had some money left over, and I asked my boss if I could use that money to go back to Indonesia to do some Javanese dance training. Because I was beginning to feel this… even though we went to Indonesia every year of my childhood. I really very much consider that I grew up in both countries. I very much consider that. But I hadn't been back for longer than a couple of weeks since I was like 20 or something. And so it was a good few years and I hadn't been back there for a full immersion really. It was just like go in, say hi to the relatives, and then leave. And I was just starting to feel this pull to connect more with my culture there. And to connect also with the origins of why I dance. And it was great that I was approved to be able to go and use the rest of the money to train there. And so I went to Surakarta, Solo, which is the city where my mum was born and happens to be the capital of traditional, classical Javanese dance. And so one of my cousins hooked me up with one of the best teachers there. And I asked to learn the dance that my grandmother was famous for, which I wasn't allowed to learn because you have to be within the palace walls, and it's very sacred and da da da da da, so I wasn't allowed to do that. But she said she could teach me another dance which was similar and I did that and it was a huge awakening. I realised then why I'd spent all these years in classical ballet without even knowing it because there's so many fundamental similarities between the styles. First of all, the origins in the royal court and because of that the sense of regal carriage and grace and elegance, the very slegato lyrical quality of movement, the turned out feet. And the use of storytelling as well and the use of motifs and gestures to tell a story without words. It was really like this ‘OK, I get why I'm doing this ballet thing. This is in my blood, quite literally. Growing up in Sydney means I have that Western connection and I'm fulfilling this Western version of my Javanese culture.’ And it was just really… everything just sort of clicked into place. And it was a super nice moment. And since then it's kept me really in touch with that side of my identity as well. And that was a super important moment for me because I came back to Australia, and I could feel it had transformed my dancing. (18:29)

So I continued at the Aussie Ballet for a few more years, but then I was just starting to feel like the walls were closing in around me or I was outgrowing the walls. I don't know what it was exactly, but I really felt it when I was performing Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake, and it would have been an interesting full circle, because that was the first time I stepped on stage of the Australian Ballet, was as one of the swans. And then there I was, dancing the lead role Odette in Sydney on the Capitol Theatre stage. And I'd been understudying the role for 11 years and I finally got to do the role and I remember stepping on stage and thinking I would be so content if this was the end of my years with the Australian Ballet, but I had some shows coming up in a couple of months from then, in Sydney, as Giselle, which was another classical ballet role that I really aspired to do. And also I was on all the posters, so I was like ‘well, shit. I better stay for that one!’ No, it wasn’t like that.  It was more like I felt like a real… not loyalty but just this real pull to do that and fulfil that. And I'm really glad I did, because it was one of the most beautiful processes I got to do with this wonderful… She was the ex-artistic director of the Australian Ballet, Maina Gielgud, and she's such an extraordinary mind in the classical ballet world. She brings such a humaneness to classical ballet which is so nice, and theatricality as well, which I really connected a lot with, like I could finally really be a human on stage and it was super, super nice. I had such a great process working with her towards Giselle, and I'm really glad I did that. And then I had my final show on the Sydney Opera House stage in April 2015. And I just knew it at the end of act one, actually, after I died, it was gonna be my last. I knew it. I died behind the grave and I just lowered back behind the grave and I just burst into tears. And I just remember the assistant stage manager… I was lying on the ground with my hands over my face. And I just remember the assistant stage manager push a box of tissues towards me. It was just such an overwhelming moment. And I came out the stage door after the show, and my sister just came up and she's like ‘that was your last one, wasn't it?’ and I was like ‘yeah, that was it’. It was just a very emotional moment. And I took a month to think about it, but then a month later, I resigned. and it was in the middle of the season, but I really needed to go. I'd already been sitting on it for basically a few years before that and finding the right moment and it just felt so right in my heart. And I knew that if I stayed a moment longer then I don't know what would have happened but I would have been very unhappy and I knew that I deserved to exit in the way that I would like to. I felt that I'd earned that. So I was really happy with the way that it happened. It wasn't understood by everyone and that I was prepared for, because maybe it feels like a dishonour to end your contract in the middle of the season. And I was very aware of that. But then I'd been such a loyal and good member of the company for such a number of years that I really did feel right in my heart and my conscience felt that it was a justified way to choose to end my loyalty to the company. So that happened, and then I decided to freelance for a couple of years, and I was really grateful that I did that because I could fully explore the Australian—as much as possible… not fully but as much as possible… explore the Australian dance scene outside of the Australian Ballet. It's not that I felt I was caged in there. It's not that. The reality is when you're doing 200 shows a year, you don't have time to go and see a lot of other things and be in other workplaces. And I had a lot of friends who were choreographers or dancers in other companies, and I could finally go and work with them and collaborate and do all those things that I dreamed of doing for so many years. And so that was super cool. (23:28)

Andrew: I remember I think it was during that time I saw you in a piece with Melanie Lane. Was it Remake? And that explored the body and ballet and that kind of stuff, didn't it? It was a while ago now but I remember that vividly.

Juliet Burnett: Yeah, that was probably my favourite collaboration at that time. Mel and I are friends from childhood, actually, because our parents were friends. Her dad translated many of my uncle's texts into English from Indonesian. And so our parents were friends in the 70s. And I just remember going to Mel's house when I was probably like nine years old or something and trying on her pointe shoes. And then we reconnected again when she had a piece in Dance Massive. I can't remember what year it was, but we reconnected many years late, maybe in 2015, actually. And then we promised to stay in touch and one day work together. And  we worked a couple of times together that year. We also created a solo work based on my uncle's texts that I performed in Jakarta in 2016. And then not long after that we worked on Remake. That was a really cool process because really she was interested in getting into my archive, my physical archive. And it brought up a lot of stuff, actually, It was very interesting. Whether it was commentary on certain works that I had beef with, basically, because of the political incorrectness of it being presented in the modern day, or whether it was that it was an awkward movement style that I had to try and inhabit. So we made this really cool moment where it was stitching all of those things together. It was a super fun process. We're talking about working together again, so watch this space. That was a really, really nice project. (26:00)

And that segues nicely into the original question. Sorry, I really rant! After the last show of that at Chunky Move I had my flight to come over here and start work the next day. It was so wild. In those years of freelancing, I sort of dipped back overseas every now and again. I did do a couple of auditions, but it wasn't really consciously auditioning for other companies. It was more just to see what was out there. And I just connected with some directors and wanted to see what was happening and whether I wanted to be back in a ballet company, whether I wanted to be in a contemporary company or company at all. It was really eye-opening because I hadn't ever experienced that before. One company that I really liked was here in Antwerp. And I was really interested because the director, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, I've always been a fan of his work. And I was really interested when he took over the ballet company because it's got a bit of a mixed history here with the repertory. It's always been doing a lot of modern ballet stuff, it's not always the traditional stuff. And there was an Australian director here, Kathy Benetts who brought a lot of Forsythe to the company because she was working at Frankfurt Ballet. She was the assistant director to Bill Forsythe. And that's what really put Ballet Vlaanderen on the world stage. This Australian director really brought Ballet Vlaanderen into the world stage. And I've always been interested in the company since then. It's been on the radar. And then when Larbi came in, I was like, ‘OK, this is really interesting what people might be about to do’. And I just sent an email and basically asked if they were offering contracts, and they were. So I came over into the class and eventually I got a job and I was really, really happy about that because now I've been here just over three years. So this is my fourth season. It's my fourth season now. And I'm really happy that I did because I very much align my own values of what dance can be and what it is or what it is in this state of flux, that's what it is… are very much aligned with Larbi's. I feel anyway. And it's really nice to be part of that vision and the repertoire we have here, the diversity of it is quite astounding. It's really crazy what we get to do and I'm really in love with the group of dancers as well, the diverse background of training. We have some classically trained dancers, but we also have dancers that have contemporary dance training, from all over the world. And I really get inspired by them on a daily basis and I get different cultural backgrounds. It's really, really a nice rich environment to be part of. Like any company there's always difficult moments, but I feel like we're a nice family that is interested creatively in one adventure, and it's a nice place to be. I'm happy.

Andrew: When you talk about your values with regard to dance, what kind of values are they? Or what are they for you? (30:02)

Juliet Burnett: For me, it's always thinking about the greater context. What can dance mean in the world today. Let's face it, the world right now… there's so much horrible stuff going on in the world at the moment. It's heartbreaking. I stopped reading the news on a daily basis a couple of years ago, actually, because it just made me depressed. It's horrible. So I feel like I'm constantly reevaluating what dance means in the world. And what it can mean to me in my life and how I can use dance as my medium in my life to better place myself in the world. My uncle actually has a great quote that I kind of live by, which is that he believes that art is the voice of the people. And so I feel like the value that I have of dance as a medium is how can it be a meaningful voice for humanity, for our human-ness? How can we communicate or heighten our communication between each other through dance as a medium? I would say that that's my primary value is like what is the place of dance? And how it, in many ways, as an art form has a responsibility to be in the world and to speak of human-ness.

Andrew: Dancers are often accused of being quite elite. Particularly the ballet or classical strands can often be seen as quite exclusive and elite and even to participate in those art forms… you talked about it before, as a young child, it's a lot of investment in terms of families, in classes, and that long-term childhood investment to make it in ballet. Contemporary can can be a bit different. And I know you've done a bit of work in Indonesia in terms of dance and making dance accessible. How does dance as an art form reach that greater audience as that voice for the people? Because often, I guess, people don't see it in those ways, necessarily.

Juliet Burnett: Yeah, that's my project at the moment is figuring out how. You tapped on there that, yes, I've been doing some community projects in Indonesia. Mainly, it's been groundwork, just getting to know what is needed to bridge those gaps. Indonesia is a country where there's a huge divide between the socio-economic classes, so to speak, between demographics, much more so than a western country. I would say it's sort of similar to India in that way. Between the poor and the middle class, and then even the divide between the middle class and the rich, it's really crazy, almost unfathomable sometimes.  And growing up in Sydney, really in a very privileged situation, it wasn't until later in my life in adulthood, especially as a dancer in a big wealthy ballet company, where I started thinking about how I can use this position that I have here to reach out to more people. And I was quite inspired by how at the Australian Ballet they've always had a very good community outreach education programme and that's always been a really important facet of the company and I very much admire that and was inspired by it. I think it’s called the “Out There” programme now, I’m not sure. I won’t paraphrase because I don't know what I'm talking about. But they’ve always been very good at that and totally hats off to them. I was always really inspired by that, and even in Australia to start classical ballet, you're right, it's a lot of money if you want to start classical ballet. And the answer to how to bridge that gap is like… I have no clue. In terms of education and access to education, I really don't… I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on that. But I'm hoping to learn more about it. I do know strangely more about it in Indonesia than us in Australia. In Indonesia, it is really only the wealthy kids who are doing classical ballet, who are interested, in fact, in doing western classical forms because it is what we call in Indonesia Budaya Bule which means “white culture”, and it is a western art form. It’s very elite. You think it’s elite in Australia? Baby, in Indonesia, it’s very… for sure it’s out of context. It’s the elephant in the room. It’s very out of context there. And a lot of the classical ballet shows you might get to see they're done by… there's no professional ballet company there where they pay the employees and all the rest of it. They're working towards it. And I'm trying to help them work towards it. And when I say “them” I mean the ballet community there. But yeah, it's something that is a long term vision for sure. It's not that it's a relatively new thing. From the Dutch colonial times, in fact, there have been ballet schools there. And there've been famous dancers who have danced overseas from Indonesia, and there's been a classical ballet culture there I think from the early twentieth century even. (36:48)

But it's very much still… because of such a rich culture of other art forms, and traditional dance and being culturally out of context, it's a very slow road. I know that there's a lot of renewed interest lately because there's some big ballet schools there that have been sending kids over for competitions in America. And there's been a lot of success. So there's some more interest in the talent there. It's still it's all hard work, but it remains something for the wealthier people. And so something I'm more interested in doing is coming in as one of the only… in fact, I can't think off the top of my head, any other Indonesian, even half Indonesian, classical ballet dancers in the world at the moment. There was a full Indonesian dancer in the Australian Ballet, Natasha Kusen, but she’s just retired, just last month. So it's not taken to that level. I'm interested in that aspect and how to get these the Indonesian ballet seen on the world stage but what I'm more interested in is how to bring the communities and lower socio-economic demographics in to be able to access not just classical ballet training but contemporary dance training from Western influences. And not just that: I'm also interested in how we can discover a way to put it into an Indonesian culture context so that it can be something that can be a meaningful medium for them. My uncle very successfully translated Shakespeare to Indonesian and brought western theatre principles and collided them with Javanese philosophies. And that's the basis on which he founded Benkel Theatre which is still alive today. And he did that from going to New York and training in New York and then bringing all of that experience back to Indonesia. And that's something that I would really like to explore how to do that in Indonesia. But it's mainly why Indonesia more than Australia? Why? Because I feel like they need me there. There's plenty of experienced Australian dancers who can do those sorts of things, who've been around the world being professionals and can bring that experience back into the home turf. But there's very few professional dancers who have done the dash who will come back to Indonesia and bring that work there. It's starting to happen more and more. Melanie Lane’s working there a lot now. And they're bringing a lot more of that overseas professional experience in there. But then it's a different thing altogether to also have the blood of that place running through you. And I feel like I have a role to fulfil there. And then a very long winded answer to the question is I'm still learning and I would really like to find more ways to bridge those gaps and find ways to make the western forms of dance accessible, to get some good training happening, and to discover together how to recontextualize it in Indonesia. And I think that's a pretty exciting adventure that I'd like to embark on. I've got a few more years of my dancing to fulfil first but it’s something that’s on the radar.

Part 2

Full episode can be found here.

Andrew: Obviously, what you bring into Indonesian context is quite unique and built on western dance and art forms and things that have been learnt there. I'm wondering what you bring in terms of that Indonesian dance experience and ideas and also the Australia-specific context over to Europe. Do you notice that there are things that you've learnt in Australia that are quite unique? Or that you've picked up from Indonesia?

Juliet Burnett: Aside from calling all my colleagues “mate”? Actually, it’s really nice. That's also what I really like about dancing in this company is that it has certainly been channeled on a few occasions in creation. For example, at the moment, we're recreating an opera with Alain Platel, which is wow… a dream come true. I’m getting to work with Alain Platel with a small cast of dancers and creating at the moment a small solo, where Alan was very interested in some improvisation that I'd done in the workshop process. And whenever I improvise, I always go back into Javanese dance motifs. It’s like my default home base. It's really funny. And obviously, in improvising, you're very lost in the moment and you find yourself just returning to certain things that feel nice to do that you enjoy to do. And the more that I improvise, the more I learn what my home base is and its job and it's Javanese dance. The thing that seemed like ‘what?’ So Alain was really interested in some of those shapes and the textures of the movements that I made and asked if we could create a solo together that was based around those movements. So that was like ‘yippee, this is awesome! I'm getting to do this.’ A choreographer I worked with a couple of seasons ago, Édouard Lock, very famous for his dance films as well, he was really interested in that side of me and created some hand movements in this piece The Heart of August… continued around my culture. I know that Larbi’s always really celebrating that part of my identity. And so it just feels like it's something that I can really celebrate… that point of difference over here and really use it to set myself apart but also use it to deepen my connection with my culture, my second culture, my first culture, I don't know… made my first choreography for the stage. And what I really wanted to explore in that was this idea that how is it that I move to Europe, I move over to the bloody other side of the world, and I feel in many ways more connected to my Australian-ness and my Indonesian-ness? How is that possible? And I had this idea of… first of all it was a writing piece, to write an essay about the notion of identity and its intersection with culture, our stories and histories,  and notions of identity and how the nature of it all is in fact very fluid and non-binary… how it can be very engaged with or rebelling against the space that you happen to be in, whether it's Antwerp, Belgium,  or whether it's Berlin, or whether it's London or Jakarta or Sydney, wherever, and how and how your identity behaves in different spaces. And that was the first idea. And then I wanted to create a solo work around it. I had lots of ideas for how to explore a hybrid, I guess, or a new dialogue between the Javanese dance, between contemporary dance and classical ballet. Maybe more between contemporary dance and Javanese dance. And I wanted to use a dancer that was of this place, of Belgium. I ended up asking an actor-dancer Victor Polster, who was the star of the Belgian film Girl from a couple of years ago. And we created In Situ, which premiered last year, and I was really happy with Victor's—he's only 17 years old—openness to learning, to coming on this crazy adventure with me first of all, but also helping me carve a new dialogue between the form. I was exploring dance theatre as well because that's really my first love in terms of performance. Dance theatre will always be my number one. I just love the confluence of dance and theatre together. That's my two first loves right there. And music, of course. So he was kind of the perfect person to explore that work, as an actor and a dancer, and so incredibly open to the process. And I learned so much about my own identity in that time as well. And I feel like I've also found a new outlet and voice through which I can explore more of that Indonesian culture as well. So I'm already thinking about two other fantastic—I think fantastic—ideas for new pieces, both of them based on traditional Javanese stories. So watch this space. (07:28)

Andrew: In terms of your work, you've danced with so many incredible choreographers in so many different kinds of works and contexts and stuff. Are there things when you look back across your dancing career to date that really stand out or particular roles in particular works? You mentioned that link between theatre and dance, or particular things that you’re just like ‘that works me’ kind of thing?

Juliet Burnett: In my career in Australia with the ballet company, I think Giselle became quite synonymous with me. I do, physically and stylistically, very much suit that romantic ballet intention and aesthetic, the spirit of it, and I really connected with it as well. I really enjoyed Giselle and also Les Sylphides, La Sylphide. I really enjoyed those romantic ballets. The history of them I was quite in love with as well. I much preferred those to the straight up classical ballets, the old pas de deux ballet tutu ballets, because I think I just didn't like being upright, basically. I like to be in more of an incline or a recline and maybe more horizontal in my movement. I don't know. I think also Maine Gielgud put it really well when she said that a lot of what's interesting about the technique of dancing Giselle and romantic ballet is to create the illusion of weightlessness you have to really transfer the weight more like a contemporary dancer, contemporary technique. And it's true, actually. If I would be given the opportunity one day to coach Giselle, I think that I could bring a lot more knowledge to it now that I've done all of this contemporary dance here as well. Actually, I think that's probably where the attraction lay as well. Certainly, Graeme Murphy's choreography, I really grew in his work in my years at the Aussie Ballet, and he was always putting me in his principal roles. So I danced Sophie in The Silver Rose, and, like I mentioned, Odette in Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet I got to dance my namesake, so that was something that, for sure, is very synonymous with me too and I feel very connected with because that's what I was named after. So that's my years at Aussie Ballet. But also I mentioned Wayne McGregor before and I really connected with his work and a lot of audience members really enjoyed my performances in those works. And I feel very much like it was a… not natural, his work’s not natural for the body, it really hurts. But I have to say it was something that I really enjoyed to move in. I really really enjoyed those shows. (10:44)

So that's that chapter of my career. Maybe it's wrong to look at it in chapters but it somehow helps me. My brain likes to categorise things. But once over here I… for sure, that Édouard Lock work I mentioned earlier, The Heart of August… continued, a very cryptic title. And when I asked him ‘what does it mean, Édouard?’ he was like ‘what do you think it means?’ Like “I don’t know. We started creation in August, is that what it means?’ I have no idea. I'm not even going to try and figure it out. But we sort of worked around this abstraction of the Orpheus tale, basically, and I was Euridice. And so that was the basis of the piece, and it was really interesting that that was what it was because one of the big creations that was made on me at the Aus Ballet was semele, And so I was like ‘maybe this is becoming a bit of a thing in my career this sort of Greek herein. So maybe that's also another answer to the question, that I can be a Greek, and often not the goddesses, usually the crazy mortal. Maybe it’s my hair or something, I don’t know! Or the one who’s just a bit nuts somehow. But that was just, all jokes aside, Heart of August… continued, and was my first recognition over here. And there were these critics’ awards in the Dance Europe magazine and I was recognised for that. And so it felt like my first recognition in Europe and I felt very deeply connected to that work and like it was a huge development in my own dancing career. That was an important moment for me like ‘phew! OK, I've made the right choice coming over here’. And then the work of Larbi ,obviously, we do a lot of it here and that's also something that can be seen as something that identifies me as a dancer. And like I said, Pina Bausch is my dance idol, forever and ever, amen! We had the opportunity here to be the first company outside of Tanztheater Wuppertal to be able to perform Café Müller, which was a huge deal. That will be something that sticks in my memory forever, that being on that stage on the premiere night and thinking ‘my God, we've just made history here’.

Andrew: And looping back to your teenage nerd days around Pina Bausch.

Juliet Burnett: Totally! So now I get why I always like that weird kid in ballet school who had pictures of Pina Bausch taped up in my locker. Everyone else had pictures of ballerinas and Darcey Bussell and they were like ‘who’s that?’ and I’m like ‘it’s Pina Bausch, you guys’. It was a big confluence of many things making sense and affirmations and all the rest of it. It was a really beautiful moment. Often here, I find that, having had the classical ballet career I've had, I'm often cast doing the more ballet-based choreography, which is a fairly obvious choice. And I enjoy it in some ways in that I can do something and develop in something that feels not like I’ve mastered it but I feel like I've done a lot of work in it and can develop in a way that builds my self-confidence, I think. But what I really came here for was to do things that really challenged my sense of who I thought I was as a dancer.  And so I think now I really hunger to do more things that are really outside of my preconceived box of what I can do or what kind of dancer I identify as or think of myself as. So maybe if we do this interview again in two years, I'll be able to answer and say ‘well, I did this and this and this. Now that's my new identity.’

Andrew: Outside of dance, I've heard that you dabble a little bit as a DJ. Is that right? (15:25)

Juliet Burnett: Yeah. You know what, I'm so bad. I haven't been practising for a very long time. But I have a bit of fun with it. I write as well. So I would say that that's my second career, I guess. I've been writing a bit on and off since 2009, just on a very now and again, very casual basis. And I am, at the moment, putting words together to hopefully have a book one day. Just starting to do that. But yeah, music has always been a huge passion of mine and we were in the middle of the process of putting together Akram Khan’s Giselle, which again, I have to say, in addition to that previous question is I think it's only six or seven women who have danced Akram Khan’s Giselle,  including the dancers in our company, and so I'd be one of only a few who have danced both the traditional Giselle and Akram Khan’s Giselle. So that was a really nice moment as well to come not in full circle but to come into a contemporary imagining of this story that I knew so well and was so highly trained in and got to perform before. And I feel like that's been a really huge moment for my new identity as a dancer over here, was that actually I could bring that history and that archive into the future into the present and everything else. So that was a really cool moment and… not that I was  actively comparing the two roles, but it was really refreshing to do a Giselle that had a very contemporary context in its world and said something quite political, actually, about this world. And that was a real gift to do that. And also, the Kathak hand movements have many similarities with the Javanese one. So that was really interesting as I could draw comparisons there. It was really  interesting to nerd out on that too.

Sorry to go back to… was what was the question? DJing? Yes. So we were staging that and it was a very intense process and to wind down, as I always do, I was listening to a lot of music and then I thought ‘well, I think I'd really like to learn how to DJ’. So I did and I got some gigs. And it's been a really nice, fun outlet. Like I'm not saying it's like not… it's hard. I find it really hard and also I'm a massive perfectionist, so I sort of uphold that in pretty much all aspects of my life. So it’s just something I really enjoy to do and can just indulge in another creative outlet through that as well. It's nice. I've got some other gigs and things that might be happening once we get into some warmer weather over here. And it's a nice way to network and meet other people outside of the dance world, and for that I’m really enjoying it.

Andrew: And in terms of 2020, what's in store for you this year? What are you looking forward to?

Juliet Burnett: Brilliant question! I have no idea! What does my horoscope say? Well, I've just come out of a really difficult year for me, personally. So I'm really looking forward to finding more lightness and more joy, looking forward to exploring some of my ideas, because if there was one big jolt that I needed was to just, like I said about the choreography, just do it. Stop being scared of it and just do it. And now that I've done that, I feel like it's opened up this whole can of worms or Pandora's Box, however you want to look at it, of other stuff that I want to do like, like writing this book, for example. Really get knuckling down into my ideas for what I would like to do more in Indonesia and working with more Indonesian choreographers and dancers and getting my ass over there sooner or later, because it's been difficult to find the time to do so in my schedule and find time out that I needed to take last year, for sure. That's on the cards is an Indonesia visit at some point. I'd like to stay for a while, not just two weeks, stay a while and immerse myself more in the scene. The piece that I made last year, In Situ, we're going to make a film of it as well. So going to start working on that. Also just completed filming of a dance film with my friend Sam Asaert who’s an award-winning dance filmmaker and my very good friend who's a choreographer Christopher Hill. He was a dancer in Oz Ballet with me and was a dancer in the company here in fact, and WA Ballet as well. And he choreographed for this dance film. So the three of us made this film in the summer and we're just sorting out the music for it at the moment, but that will be released this year. There's a couple of other projects with choreographers and other dancers that are still in their gestation on stage… chatting about possibilities. (21:23)

Andrew: Sounds like a full year.

Juliet Burnett: That’s not within my contract at Ballet Vlaanderen. That’s all my extracurricular stuff. As for the performances here, like I mentioned before the opera of Alain Platel I'm really excited about. We will also be performing Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring, which is like ‘whoa, is this really happening?’ But soon that will be happening in the European spring. And another work of Larbi’s called Noetic. And we'll then be starting to work towards the next season and I can't say anything about that yet because it's open to the public. But yeah, there's some cool stuff coming up. I think just lots more working with more awesome people who inspire me and finding lots more joy in life. Hopefully I'll get back to Australia as well again at Christmas time like I did last Christmas and connect again with a land that hopefully will have healed from the bush fires by then. Because that was very confronting to see when I went back at Christmas. I didn't see it first-hand, but I could smell it and I could say it in the air. The smoke was really, really scary. So 2020…  I really hope it's going to be big and bright here.