In 1973 a dance film changed the cultural temperature of Australian ballet. Rudolf Nureyev and Sir Robert Helpmann’s Don Quixote, filmed in a converted hangar at Essendon Airport, was exuberant, sunlit and unmistakably Australian, with Nureyev dancing Basilio opposite Lucette Aldous as Kitri. Premiering at the new Sydney Opera House before its official opening, the film became an international calling card for The Australian Ballet and cemented Aldous as one of the great dancers of the century. It remains one of the most significant dance films ever made, a time capsule of a company in ascendance and a generation of artists whose influence still reverberates.
More than half a century later another film is entering the national conversation, one equally rooted in dance yet entirely different in form and intention. Pointe: Dancing on a Knife’s Edge follows Aldous’s daughter, dancer and choreographer Floeur Alder, through an eight year period of upheaval, creativity and recovery. Directed by Dawn Jackson in her debut feature, the film traces Alder’s attempt to reclaim her life and artistic voice after a violent attack that nearly ended her career. If Don Quixote was a celebration of virtuosity and theatrical imagination, Pointe moves inward, examining the porous boundary between trauma and art, inheritance and selfhood.
Jackson’s relationship with Alder reaches back decades. A former student of Lucette Aldous and Alan Alder, Jackson remembers young Floeur sitting in the studio after school, absorbing the atmosphere of work, discipline and imagination. That long history created the foundation of trust needed for a documentary of such emotional clarity. Jackson reflects that their connection was never a typical director and subject pairing but something more layered. “This really grew out of our relationship,” she says. “I used to babysit her. I knew the family intimately. I understood the world she came from. So when this horrific thing happened early in her career and we reconnected, it felt natural to support her as she tried to return to dance.”
The idea of a film emerged slowly. Jackson initially imagined a short dance piece, but as Alder began creating work such as Rare Earth with her parents, the scope widened. “I was watching her with Lucette and Alan and thought, this is a big story. Her parents were enormous figures. Their archive alone held so much. The story of what happened to her could not be separated from the story of where she came from. People told me to focus solely on the attack, but that made no sense to me. These lives were entwined.”
The challenge was not only structural but ethical. Alder was still recovering from trauma when the project began. Jackson understood the risk of retraumatisation and resisted pressures to accelerate production. The film became a long, careful process shaped by respect, listening and timing. “Filmmaking is stressful,” Jackson says. “I did not want to push her. She needed agency. She needed to feel safe. We worked slowly because that was the only way this could be done responsibly.”
Alder recognises that the trust between them could also be volatile. “I was a difficult subject at times,” she says with candour. “Because Dawn knew me so well, I could push back. I was protective about what I wanted to say about my family. We would argue or I would shut down, but I felt safe enough to do that. She never gave up on the true story.” She pauses and adds, “Her patience is remarkable. There is nothing in the film that I am unhappy with or that feels untrue. That is because of Dawn.”
The process was profoundly personal for both women. Jackson, who has worked across dance and theatre, found echoes of her own life in Alder’s story. “We were both on a kind of healing journey,” she says. “The documentary became a raft for both of us.” The film’s emotional architecture reflects this intimacy. Raw footage of Alder making solos, grieving her parents, or confronting long-held silence is woven with theatre material originally devised for a separate project called The Sleeping Beauty Project. Jackson drew inspiration from archival footage of Lucette Aldous dancing Aurora with Margot Fonteyn in 1959, televised by the BBC. “If there was a ballet that held a parallel to Floeur’s life, it was Sleeping Beauty,” Jackson says. “Born into exceptional artistry, struck down at the moment of coming of age, enduring a long inner slumber, and gradually finding her way back.”
Aesthetic beauty and emotional truth had to coexist. Jackson worked with editor Nick Dunlop to build a rhythm that allowed the audience to understand Alder’s world without romanticising it. “Nick is not a dancer. He broke my assumptions. He pushed for clarity because he wanted the audience to truly grasp what was at stake. We agonised over choices. We fought, we wrestled with material, but that is what shaped the film.”
Alder’s movement is a central narrative force. Her body registers rage, fracture, grief, and release in a vocabulary almost impossible to articulate in words. Jackson notes that this was essential. “Her ability to physicalise her story is extraordinary. She draws us in. Some scenes still make me cry because of how deeply she allowed herself to be seen.”
For Alder, the film became a crucible for identity. For decades she had been introduced as Lucette and Alan’s daughter, an epithet that both honoured and overshadowed her. “I talk about pretending a lot in the film,” she says. “This process helped me understand who I am. It let me find authenticity in what I want to say.” She stops to consider the weight of legacy. “I want to find my own path, but I could not be who I am without where I come from. Their philosophy, their humanity, their artistry, it is all in my cells. I honour that. I am protective of it.”
Her choreographic trajectory has increasingly moved outdoors, shaped by her connection to land and by encounters with Indigenous artists during her years with Ochre Contemporary Dance Company. Healing, for Alder, is inseparable from nature. “Everyone has nature,” she says. “I learned to ground myself by feeling the earth, by listening. Being on Country with elders taught me a different way of seeing. I would not have gone in that direction if the incident had not happened.”
The aftermath of grief also shifted her centre of gravity. “I lost my parents and so many people in one year. Nature became where I found signs, comfort, connection. I look to birds. I talk to them. It is very real for me.” She laughs gently at her own words, yet they reveal a profound cosmology shaped by movement, spirit and land.
Alder’s growth across the eight years of filming is unmistakable. When asked whether her past self would recognise the woman at the end of the film, she answers simply, “No.” Then, more firmly: “I see the things I put myself through, how hard it was at times, and I think, did you really do that? I am proud of who I am, and I do not say that often.”
The focus of Pointe is not the attack but the slow, difficult work of rebuilding. Jackson insists that this was essential. “This film was never going to centre the perpetrator. It is about how she fought back, how she reclaimed herself through art. It speaks to violence against women, but it also speaks to empathy, to what we cannot see inside someone.”
Audiences across the country have responded with emotion and gratitude. Alder recalls a woman in Darwin who embraced her and said, “Thank you for reminding people that they have a choice.” It is this message, Alder says, that she hopes endures. “The film is about not giving up. About knowing there is always a way through.”
If Don Quixote captured the radiance of performance, Pointe reveals the interior landscape of an artist forged in lineage, fractured by violence and remade through courage, nature and movement. Together they bookend a remarkable passage of Australian dance history: mother and daughter, two films, two eras, two completely different ways of being seen. One dazzled the world with virtuosity. The other asks it to listen.
-Olivia Weeks
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