Upclose with Robert Curran
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.