Upclose with Robert Curran | South China Morning Post

A principal dancer with the Australian Ballet, Robert Curran arrived in Hong Kong two weeks ago to start preparing for his role as the male lead in Swan Lake, the Hong Kong Ballet’s season opener. (No, he has not seen “Black Swan.”) In the rehearsal studio, with Tchaikovsky’s familiar chords pounding in the background, he talks to Hana R. Alberts about business and back injuries.

HK Magazine: How did you start dancing?
Robert Curran: In Australia, every Sunday they used to have community hall dances. And my grandmother [before they married] would always refuse to dance with my then not-grandfather because she didn’t really like him. She thought he was a little bit of a rascal. Then when she finally accepted a dance with him, he was so good that she fell in love. He died many, many years before I was born, and I was coincidentally born on the same day as my grandfather. She was quite excited about that, and decided from that day that I needed to learn to dance. She had ballroom dancing in mind, I’m sure, but Mom enrolled me in ballet as I was always dancing around the kitchen. So that when I was four, and I never stopped.

HK: What are the best parts, and the challenges, of playing Prince Siegfried?
RC: The biggest challenge for me is, believe it or not, having never done the role before. I have done Siegfried, but it’s a traditional version that I’m doing here. We did a version choreographed by Graeme Murphy. It’s kind of a morphing of the Swan Lake story with the Princess Diana and Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles story. There’re no 80s hairdos or anything like that, but it’s based on that love triangle. It’s a very similar story, but the choreography is very different—three-piece suits and stuff like that, not traditional ballet.

HK: You’re getting a business degree. What’s your intent?
RC: I think that dancers are a resource that can be exploited beyond pliés and tendus. Dancers aren’t given enough credit for their level of intelligence and what they can contribute to the running of an organization like a ballet company. But there is a requisite vocabulary that is needed to communicate across the boundary that sometimes exists between administration and artistic teams.

HK: Who are dancers that you look up to and try to emulate?
RC: I am looking at the dancers who are younger than me and who are in the middle of that very enthusiastic and un-jaded point in their career. They maybe have not had any injuries yet. They haven’t had any major disappointments. I don’t necessarily aspire to be like them—because that’s impossible, unfortunately, at my age. But there is something about watching somebody at the beginning of their career and seeing them innocently going after their dreams.

HK: Have you suffered injuries in your career?
RC: I have. I hate talking about them.

HK: You don’t have to.
RC: We can. I’m just going to hold onto wood. It’s superstitious. I have had some horrible, horrible injuries.

HK: How do you overcome that?
RC: We have two full-time physios, maybe one or two extra part-time physios, two full-time massage therapists and two full-time doctors that look after a company of 70 dancers… they are at the forefront of dance science and dance medicine. They are leading the world in research into the health of dancers, specifically ballet dancers. As a male dancer, I have tended to sustain injuries to my back more than anything else. Certainly, in my career, there’s been a lot of partnering. It is my favorite part of the job, so I don’t resent it at all, but very serious injuries with discs have kept me off my feet for [up to] 12 months—that was the worst [one]. The medical team keeps us on track. Maintaining that kind of health and fitness is an exponential workload. As you get older, you really have to work much harder to maintain the same level of fitness.

HK: Are you wearing special shoes right now? They look like moon boots.
RC: Yeah, dancers wear them all the time. They’re kind of like quilts. They’re padded. It’s also just for warmth. The joints in our feet, they really take a beating. Any kind of cold tends to bring out the pain.

HK: Are you going to grace the dance floor at any of Hong Kong’s clubs while you’re here?
RC: I’m just really bad at it. So I have to confess there is a certain amount of liquid courage that would be required for me to get out on the dance floor, and being that I am here to work, there’s no chance of indulging.

See Curran in Swan Lake from August 19-21 at the Cultural Centre’s Grand Theatre. Get tickets from www.urbtix.hk.

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