Cover image: Floeur Alder. Supplied

When I spoke to Dawn Jackson in 2021 about the documentary she was making on fellow WAAPA dance graduate Floeur Alder, who two decades before had been horrifically injured in a random attack, I was expecting the finished film to be a straightforward tale of trauma and recovery.

Jackson would recreate the horrific incident in which a stranger walked across Mary Street in Highgate and plunged a knife into the face of the 22-year Alder, she would trace her years overcoming the physical and psychic wounds and she would lean into the highly publicised resumption of her career with the assistance of her parents, dance legends Lucette Aldous and Alan Alder.

Which is what we get in the finished film, Pointe: Dancing on a Knife’s Edge, a wrenching and ultimately uplifting story of a future star whose life and career was derailed by a random act of violence and a life-affirming renaissance that gives hope to anyone battling trauma. 

What is completely unexpected is that the story of Alder’s recovery took her out of the hospital and the rehearsal room and into her past — into the dark woods of her relationship with her famous parents. 

Specifically, Floeur plunges into her relationship with her mother Lucette, one of the most celebrated dancers of her generation and with whom she has been repeatedly compared from the moment she put on her first pair of ballet shoes.

In other words, the violence done to Floeur and her physical and artistic renaissance opened up an even more painful wound — not an evil done to her by her famous parents, but the journey traced by both Jung and Freud in which a child must emerge from the giant shadow cast by parents and flourish in their own identities.

“I know children of famous dancers. It is both a joy and a curse. You have these people saying, “Are you going to be as good as your parents? It is a hard road,” says David McAllister, former artist director of the Australian Ballet, one of several ballet world luminaries interviewed in the documentary.

Astutely, Jackson opens up the way for a psychoanalytic reading of Alder’s story when she repeatedly uses clips of Sleeping Beauty, which she Lucette did at the Royal Ballet with Margot Fonteyn at the same age — 21 — that Floeur was in Royal Perth Hospital recovering from the inexplicable knife attack.

Later those performances become more tortured as Floeur dances her way into her past, with every fibre of her being expressing the pain and anger over her predicament. She is a dancer and her body is her mode of expression.

“I didn’t realise the amount of rage that I had. All the cells of my body remembered everything and I was angry. It wasn’t only about the incident. I was about my childhood, my parents. As I was growing up things were quite dramatic at home. I had repressed all those memories,” narrates Floeur, revealing that her father too felt intimidated by the success of his more celebrated wife.

While the first half of the documentary deals with Floeur as victim, the innocent who was cut down in her prime by a stronger who has never been caught, the second half she takes charge of her own narrative, channelling all that pain into a work called Rare Earth that she choreographed and performed in with her parents.

In the final moment of the piece, which was performed at His Majesty’s Theatre in 2004, Lucette and Alan recede into the shadows while Floeur moves forward into her new career as not just a vehicle for other people’s ideas but a creative force in her own right.

“I believe that is the moment she became a creative choreographic artist above and beyond the fact that she was a dancer,” says Western Australian dance legend Chrissi Parrott. 

Pointe: Dancing on a Knife’s Edge took many years to get made, which meant that Jackson was at her friend’s side for much of her physical recovery and artistic renaissance. Indeed, the film is not just a record of Alder’s rebirth. It played a major role in that journey, two creative acts intertwining and giving it greater force.

It also has a wider cultural resonance. For much of her life Alder was in the thrall of Europe, which is where her mother forged her reputation and in whose footsteps Floeur hoped to dance. Then came that fateful night.

By the end of the documentary Alder is making work in the Australian bush, where she is now comfortably at home. Gone is the European high culture and the dark fairytales. Flour Alder has woken and is alive and well in her own skin.

Pointe: Dancing on a Knife’s Edge is on at the Windsor Cinema on November 2 at 1.45pm ahead of a national tour.