This was published 9 years ago
Mao's Last Dancer urges North Melbourne to soar ... and to land safely
By Tony Wright
There are other-wordly moments when a player soars, arms stretched to pluck a ball from the sky, when Australian football becomes less a game, more ballet, and Li Cunxin, Mao's Last Dancer, recognises it instantly, his heart rising with the spectacle of it.
His heart, too, is in his mouth, for he worries that the unleashed strength and grace of a player flying is not often matched by the ability drilled into the body and soul of the ballet dancer to balance coming back to earth without the risk of injury.
Li Cunxin displays his footy allegiance.Credit: Glenn Hunt
Li knows about soaring, and injury too.
He has struggled most of his life with compromised hamstrings, the footballers' - and dancers' - burden. At age 10, Chinese dance instructors forced him to stretch his legs so wide he ripped both hamstrings, and he has had to learn special techniques to preserve his strength.
Li Cunxin in full flight.
Li Cunxin, born impoverished in Mao's China, his childhood swallowed by16-hour days of gruelling training within the closed world of the Beijing Dance Academy before he defected to the US, is one of the more unlikely devotees of Australian football.
Yet ever since 1995, when he moved to Melbourne with his Australian wife, Mary McKendry, to become principal dancer with the Australian Ballet and later to write his world-acclaimed autobiography, Mao's Last Dancer, he has loved both the game and his chosen team, North Melbourne, with great passion.
"I was told I couldn't live in Melbourne without following a team and I thought at first, of course I can," he says. "But it was true. I wanted to be part of Australian culture. Friends took me to a North Melbourne match - the team was so strong then - and from that moment on, I was a North Melbourne man."
Li laments that he won't be in Sydney on Friday night to urge on North against the Swans. As artistic director these days for the Queensland Ballet, he must attend a performance of the company's latest production, Cinderella, on the Gold Coast. He has given strict instructions to one of his daughters to record the game, hoping that North might perform its own Cinderella story, emerging to the light from the its long period of drudgery at the league's hearth.
Football and ballet, Li believes, have much to teach each other. Only last year the Queensland Ballet performed a newly-choreographed version of the classical Coppelia, this time set in an Australian country town, complete with an allegro by male corps dancers in AFL outfits. Li brought in players from the Brisbane Lions to instruct the dancers in correct usage of the ball, including handballing techniques.
In turn, Australian football players could learn from dancers, he contends.
"We train our dancers to be super athletes," he says. "They must have great strength, just as football players have, but they must also have amazing grace and balance.
"I have great respect for the players who are able to take high marks, but they don't really know how to land.
"I think if only they had ballet training, to learn and understand the fine balance, they would be even better athletes.
"If I was directing [a ballet company] in Melbourne, I would offer the players the opportunity to spend time learning how we train; our techniques."
He has advice for players like Hawthorn's Cyril Rioli, battling hamstring injury.
"Stretching is the key," he says. "You must spend an absolute minimum of half an hour to warm up the hamstrings, and you must carefully strengthen all the surrounding and supporting muscles."
Meanwhile, he has a message for North Melbourne, which he says is facing an enormous test on Friday.
"There will be a family up north watching with great interest and goodwill and hope," says Mao's Last Dancer.