DANZ QUARTERLY No 4 June 2006

Published with the courtesy of the Taranaki Daily News

A Hard Act To Follow

The doyenne of Taranaki ballet teachers, Dawn McAlpine, has retired after more than 50 years. She talks to VIRGINIA WINDER of the Taranaki Daily News

A mane of coiffeured red hair, a mini-skirt above knee-high lace-up boots, long lacquered nails, an air of fashionable elegance and a will of steel.

Molten steel that melts into a warm smile and an arm slung around a pupil ’s shoulder.

“You look like you’re wearing your gumboots today,” the ballet teacher says.

These are some early memories of Dawn McAlpine, a name that conjures up a woman with the glamour of a movie star.

Even at the end of her ballet teaching career, Mrs McAlpine, as thousands of girls have known her, is beautifully groomed, no hair out of place, agile and smiling.

But there is sadness in her face, a graciously hidden grief that after 56 years of nurturing young dancers, she is retiring.

“It’s a bit of bad health and bit of old age,” she says. Five surgeries for skin cancer, plus ongoing radiotherapy have taken their toll on this seemingly ageless woman, now in her early 70s.

Her fleet-footed days began at age three with Highland dancing. Her ballet career didn’t begin until after World War II and only came about because of nagging.

“My mum (Victoria Diggle) wanted my younger sisters to learn. I had to take them on the tram from Mt Albert to the inner city.”
While watching her sisters, the young Dawn was captivated.

“I fell in love with it. I drove my mother mad: `Please can I learn?’ `You are too old,’ said she. Eventually she bowed down.”

In 1946, aged 12, Dawn Diggle (“I hated that surname”) began ballet. “Guess what I wore?” Without waiting for an answer, she says: “My grandad’s long johns. Mum dyed them black, cut the calico and buttons out (from the crutch).”
This was topped with a singlet. Younger dancers just wore singlets and pants.

Two years later, the then Avondale College student was asked to step in and take over teaching all the classes while the studio owner cared for her dying husband. “I was only 14.”

The teenager taught ballet, tap and Highland dancing. Once again this passionate girl-woman was swept off her feet. “I just fell in love with it.”

Her plans to become an interior designer were peeled away like old wallpaper and, aged 15 and a half, she left school to set up her own little ballet studio in Mt Albert.

Six months later, she fell in love again. This time it was with a young Taranaki man called Alex.

“McAlpine Brothers had the sawmill out at Oakura and Alex chopped his finger on a saw.”
Because he couldn’t work, he made a trip to Auckland to stay with his great-aunt Tilly, who lived next door to the Diggle family.

“Aunt Tilly was a bit of a matchmaker,” Mrs McAlpine says. She arranged for her young, beautiful neighbour to join Alex on what was to be a Friday night out with the boys.

After two years of courting, the Taranaki sawmiller and the Auckland ballet teacher were engaged. However, her parents thought that at 18 she was too young to be married, so the couple waited until she turned 21.

“We used to write to each other all the time. I’ve still got a lot of the letters - especially the first one.”
In February 1955, they were married and the young bride moved to New Plymouth. “I had no intention of teaching - I came here to be the little housewife.”

That was never to be. Alex learned of a woman called Joan Gadd, who was leaving for the Hawke’s Bay and had an upstairs ballet studio in an arcade opposite The Chalet coffee shop (now Ultra Lounge) and needed a replacement tutor.

Mrs McAlpine met the dancers’ parents, but one woman was not convinced she had the credentials to teach her daughters.

“I’m not sure about you - I’ve looked you up in the gazette. You’ve only just passed Intermediate.”
She couldn’t have been more wrong. But that comes later.

In December 1955, Mrs McAlpine’s 15-year-old sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis. That loss almost killed her mother, who couldn’t see any point in living.

The McAlpines came to a decision: “The only thing that will get that woman thinking about something else is if we have a baby.”

Grant’s birth did help bring Victoria Diggle back from the brink. “They had such a special relationship,” Mrs McAlpine says of her eldest son and mother.

“Aren’t we lucky with our lives, the way all the threads entwine? Isn’t it incredible?”

Two more sons, Craig and Scott, came soon after and the young mother gave up the arcade studio and taught just a few students from the garage off the family’s Ngamotu Rd home.

“That’s when I started crying all the time.”

Alex took his wife to see her mum in Auckland. Mrs Diggle told her son-in-law: “Alex, she hasn’t got enough to do.”
When he pointed out she had plenty of housework to do and three boys to look after, she stopped him. “Not the right kind of things - she needs to be back into her teaching.”

So, in the early 1960s, Mrs McAlpine became a working woman who had people caring for her children. With her husband’s blessing, she started up her royal academy at 180 Devon St East, opposite the State Theatre (now Clegg’s). Later she moved to rooms on Rangi St (now the Richmond shopping centre) and in 1987 bought an old church on Mangorei Rd, which she has just sold.

“Alex was so supportive and that was the big thing that made it possible,” she says, talking of her late husband, who died of cancer in 1988.

“He made scenery for our shows and ferried me backwards and forwards and many times he had to come and collect me from the (New Plymouth) Operatic parties at 5am. Those were great times- all those wonderful shows at the Bowl (of Brooklands).”

These included Once Upon A Time, which brought storybook characters alive and an evening with Rogers and Hammerstein, directed by Cydie Strang and choreographed by Mrs McAlpine, which featured parts of Oklahoma, King and I, South Pacific and The Sound of Music.

One of the stars of the latter show was Pam Revell (now Sole), who found her feet teaching ballet for the dancing doyenne. Instead of doing School Certificate, “Miss Revell” left school to do “an informal apprenticeship” with Mrs McAlpine.

“She became a serious role model in my life. I wanted to be like her - and I was,” Sole says. “In the early 60s, there weren’t many role models around like her. She had her children in care (with my grandmother), she was a businesswoman, she was gorgeous, she had a sexy sports car. She was an individual with purpose and clarity.
“She had a vision and knew how to get there, and I liked that. She was fascinating to me. I loved her.

“But with that whole gorgeous side was smoking B&H and drinking black coffee, which I quickly took up. She went to the hairdresser every week and had it dyed and bought these amazing clothes.”

The two women, bonded by ballet, fun and the belief in strong discipline, had a great working relationship, says Sole (now 55). Today, Sole is teaching Body Balance classes at a local gym.

Kim Maharey (nee Te Ruki) was another ballet dancer who turned to teaching under Mrs McAlpine’s guidance. She spent 14 years learning from the woman, who she still has a close bond with.

“I thought she was tough, but had a way of getting the best out of you. When she was being tough with me, she had her arm around me. I know a number of times Mum said to me, `you don’t have to go back’. Even as young as I was, I knew deep down she was getting the best out of me. She knew I could do it, so she had to push me. I thought she was wonderful.

“I remember her teaching in white, knee-high lace-up boots with a teal skirt and waistcoat - just fabulous.”
Another memory is of Mrs McAlpine’s anxiousness to know how her pupils were doing in their exams. “She would get on the floor and look underneath the crack in the door to see how the girls were going. And she’d see their feet and say, ‘oh yes, they’re en pointe’.”

At age 14, Kim was asked to help with teaching. “I guess I learnt some really good skills on how to teach and love teaching, which I still do now with my job.”

Maharey now teaches group fitness at a local gym, and has been doing that since the 1980s when aerobics was all the rage.

Felicity Lealand (nee Winder - yes, the writer’s sister) learned from Mrs McAlpine for 10 years. “She was a very disciplined sort of person. Ballet for me was a love-hate relationship because of the hard work involved, but you’d get such a buzz out of it as well.”

She remembers the picture-story ballets, like The Toyshop, Eastern Fantasy and The Wizard of Oz, in which she played the Scarecrow.

Once, the young dancer turned up for class with a stubbed toe and asked to be exempt from point work. Mrs McAlpine’s answer was swift: “Do you think that would ever stop a dancer from going on stage?”

Lealand can laugh now. “She was a tyrant at times. I suppose it provokes respect. When she was focused on you as her chosen project for the day, then you knew you were in for a really hard lesson. It was always such a relief when it was someone else.

“She got me to do a solo. ‘Felicity, now I would like you to do it again without your tongue poking out’. That’s what I always did when I was concentrating.”

Lealand also remembers how her father, Howard, thought Mrs McAlpine was “a dishy dame”, who reminded him of Barbra Streisand.

This glamorous woman, who often had her poodles in class (these days she has two west highland whites), also became one of the world’s top teachers and examiners for the Royal Academy of Dance.

When she was aged 40, she passed her Advanced Teacher’s Diploma. “I was one of four people in the world who passed that exam with honours at that time,” Mrs McAlpine says. “I was absolutely blown away.”

Then the request came for her to be a Grade Examiner, which she did. Five years later, she was asked to audition in London to become a Major Examiner. Of the three woman who auditioned, only she passed.

“They (the other two women) were so unkind to me at the beginning of my training. I’m positive they thought I wouldn’t get there, this little colonial girl. That made me more determined.”

From there, Mrs McAlpine became an international examiner, marking students throughout Asia, South Africa, Australia, Europe and the United Kingdom. She retired from examining just before turning 70.

“I had the most wonderful, wonderful days,” she says.

While she can pick out the late Mark Stevens as one of her greatest ballet stars, Mrs McAlpine says her job wasn’t just to promote those with talent.

“The thing I wanted to do more than anything else was to teach children to love dance, not necessarily to become professional.

“Though I taught dancing, I always wanted to feel that I was helping in other ways to develop the children, develop them for success in whatever. I have got dentists, doctors - you name it. No matter what they went on to, they were successful.”

When Mrs McAlpine announced her retirement, she returned home to an answer phone crammed with messages from tearful mothers urging her not to stop.

“That’s a good time to retire, when they feel like that.”

And a card she received from former pupil Frances Moral (nee Hall), whose daughter has been learning ballet with her, sums it all up.

“I enrolled Bridget with your ballet studio because I have always believed that you are and always will be ‘simply the best’.”

Return to Contents page of DANZ QUARTERLY N0 4 June 2006