Healey’s On View: Icons, a decade-long itself in the making, has distilled, through both camera and edit, the essence of six remarkable dancers, and they are so faithfully, and truly rendered, it is as if they are there before me.[2] As I pad through the darkness of the space and find a cushion on the floor, Kramer recounts her own delight at seeing a performance in the conservatorium which sparked within her the desire to dance. Her mother had taken her to a Gertrud Bodenwieser concert, and “there before my eyes, these beautiful girls, dancing. I said, oh! That’s what I’ve been wanting all my life: that created action!” Kramer went on to become a student under Madame Bodenwieser for three-years before becoming a member of her company, and having stepped in the fairy ring, never stopped dancing. As she silvers on the screens in triplicate, re-enacting the soft opening gesture of the “Waterlilies,” it is as if she too is part of a continuous loop, ever dancing. 

At the ‘actual’ beginning of part 1, I am met by Lucette Aldous AC,[3] former principal artist with Ballet Rambert and the Australian Ballet, who is sadly also no longer with us, and yet, she, also, radiates eternally. Filmed behind projected footage of herself dancing the role of Kitri alongside Rudolph Nureyev’s Basilio in Nureyev’s film version of “Don Quixote” (1973), she raises her finger up to the projected version of herself then, as if by doing so she will lift the extended leg up higher, almost as if playing with a little doll of herself. Part correcting and directing herself, in the spirit of always learning, always practising, always perfecting, always moving, always dancing, her eyes are focused on her recorded self’s arabesque. She moves to the side to use her finger to instruct her recorded self to raise her arm to fourth. Then, as if to signal, ‘yes, enough, lower, done’, she flaps both hands twice, and her recorded self follows suit. It is intimate to witness, and revelatory. 

Every part of Aldous, watching her earlier self dance, is unsurprisingly alert and responsive, but the focus of this moment catches me off guard and makes me consider my own posture, firstly, own purpose, secondly. “Don’t make it too difficult, even though it is,” says Aldous. “Make the audience feel they can get up and dance like you.” As captivating as the footage of Aldous as Kitri is, equally so, the footage of Aldous, as herself, on a deck by the water’s edge. With a blue patterned scarf wrapped around her head, framing her face, as she sinks her standing form to seated with fluidity, dance, like the spirit, has no age, it merely changes form.