Sir Jon Trimmer, a dancer who was long a guiding light in the Royal New Zealand Ballet, has died at the age of 84. In 1990, as a then 50-year-old Trimmer finally stepped back from leading roles, he talked to Hugh Coley about his time as a star of the company, character actor, and a man happy to make the tea and shift the scenery.
He said on his 50th birthday in September that he wasn’t dancing the way he used to,” remarks Beatrice Ashton. Jon Trimmer could be forgiven the odd intimation of mortality.
He has been dancing professionally for 31 years – since 1958, when, at the age of 18, he threw in his job at a commercial art studio and joined the New Zealand Ballet. On the eve of the company’s 1989 European tour, Trimmer looks relaxed, youthful and horribly fit. “You realise of course,” I say, “that you’re classed as the grand old man of New Zealand ballet?” “I know,” he chortles. “Isn’t it. hysterical?”
Not altogether. While the suggestion that this lithe, ageless individual should be the grand old man of anything is patently ludicrous, it should not obscure the fact that Jon Trimmer MBE is a figure of central importance to the development of New Zealand dance, heir in authority and influence to Poul Gnatt, the Danish dancer who founded. the New Zealand Ballet in 1953.
Gnatt was not a humble person. “It will take two men to replace me,” he was in the habit of saying. It took one.
Beatrice Ashton was manager of the New Zealand Ballet from 1960 to 1971. In 1962, she recalls, a youngish woman met with the directors to ask if the company could bring her brother home, because he was so miserable in London. Ashton had never heard of Jon Trimmer, but his reputation was known to others. After the meeting Gnatt took her aside and said, “He is the one to replace me.”
Jon Trimmer, or Jonty, as he is widely known, began dancing at the age of 13, under the tutelage of an older sister. At 19, after a year with the New Zealand Ballet, he won a bursary to the Royal Ballet School in London, returning home to rejoin the New Zealand Ballet in 1962.
In 1963 he married Jacqui Oswald, a member of the corps de ballet, and in 1965 they both took leave from the company to work, first with the Australian Ballet and then with the Royal Danish Ballet. They came back to New Zealand in 1970, with no regrets. “I had done what I wanted to do overseas,” says Trimmer. “I had danced all the roles I wanted to dance. I had always said that when I turned 36 I would retire. I came home when I was 31 and decided that I liked living at home, I wanted to live at home, so let’s see what happens.”
A lot happened. After a disastrous fire in 1967, the New Zealand Ballet was weathering another of the periodic crises that bedevilled it during its formative years, this time to do with funding. The company was, in fact, very close to extinction. “Three months after our return, the powers that be stripped everything and were going to close it down for six months,” Trimmer recalls.
“A group of us fought that and we managed to go on tour with about eight dancers.” It’s hard to imagine Trimmer at the barricades, but it’s probably thanks to him and to a handful of others that the company survived, at least in its present form. Wasn’t it difficult – the politics, the talking, etc? “I’m very bad at it,” he laughs, “but at certain times you’ve got to push.”
Although Trimmer has worn many hats throughout his career, he is first and foremost a performer, and it is as a performer that he will be remembered, in ballets such as Napoli (1962), Petrouchka (1967), Les Sylphides (1979), The Rake’s Progress (1985), and No Exit (1986). “Technically he’s splendid,” says Ashton. “There’s a lot of talk these days about body language. Jonty has so far transcended his technique that it’s really body language you’re seeing from him. You don’t look at him and think, ‘My word, he does that pirouette well, he does that leap well – you just see someone expressing joy or sorrow or anguish. He has an extraordinary mastery over technique because he has an extraordinary mastery over a wonderful body.”
While thankful for the body, Trimmer is philosophical about its inevitable erosion. He still does warm-up exercises before every performance and rehearses every day, but heavy dancing is out.
Nowadays he does mime and character work — “old men and old women”. He himself made the decision to stop dancing heavy classical roles such as those in Swan Lake and Giselle. “I gave away the strained ankles and torn ligaments when I was about 44. I was very lucky to be able to continue until then; most dancers retire well before that age. I was lucky in having a body that was flexible from the word go, and also good training.”
The word luck is heard frequently from Trimmer, as though it were the primary factor in his success. “He would say that his gift is only physical,” says Ashton, “but it’s more than that. He is an artist, and dependent not just on his body but on his spirit and drive and special force.” And on the Gypsy blood he inherited from his mother. “For Jonty it’s always been just a matter of picking up and going to the next town or the next performance. He brings a particular quality to the company through his personality. He has a very equable temperament but no ‘temperament’, and his inheritance has stood him in good stead because dancers are driven from pillar to post.”
There is no doubt that Trimmer could have made it internationally, had he chosen to stay overseas. In choosing instead to stay with a company in which, after 31 years, he is still making tea and shifting scenery, he brought a new dimension to the meaning of loyalty. When Beatrice Ashton first had anything to do with the New Zealand Ballet (the Royal came later) it was just like a family. “Its lines went out horizontally – the worries of one were the worries of another; the successes of one were the successes of another. The company has always had a family feel, and Jon and Jacqui have helped perpetuate it. They are committed to the company, and the company has been sustained because of them and through them.”
Trimmer is the antithesis of the prima donna. Expecting carpet-chewing egomania, I found only sweetness and light.
Clearly the kind of person in whose presence others improve, he radiates a palpable aura of tranquillity that may owe its origins to an unusually happy marriage. Because he has an easy-going nature Trimmer could perhaps be taken advantage of, thinks Ashton, “but he has a good wife in Jacqui. She makes sure that he is treated well. He deserves good treatment, and he gets it, of course, but she would be very fierce on his account if he didn’t. She and Jonty have somehow brought out the best in each other, both in their professional and private lives.” Jacqui Trimmer MBE is the company’s ballet mistress. They have no children.
In 1967 Trimmer broke a tendon and was sidelined for three months. It was the practice when the company toured schools for someone to talk to the children between demonstrations. There being no one else available, Trimmer hobbled forward with some reluctance and found, quite unexpectedly, that he had a voice.
And with the voice came the revelation that he could act. Television Performer of the Year in 1972 for his work in Facade, nominated for a Gofta Award in 1987 for his role in The Fire-raiser, the Head of Company for the Royal New Zealand Ballet has managed seamlessly the transition from brilliant, airborne bird of paradise to comic and character actor/ dancer. It can’t have been easy for Trimmer seeing younger dancers come forward to take the roles he once took, but he has made the change with characteristic grace.
Although he has been a guiding force in New Zealand ballet, Trimmer would be the first to admit that he has never taken artistic control of the company. The artistic director pulls it all together.
Trimmer’s talents are interpretive.
“Choreography is not my cup of tea. I would rather perform than create.”
Whether the piece is classical or modern doesn’t matter. “I’ve done both. To me it’s all dance. But if you want to be a good modern dancer you must have a thorough training in classical ballet because of the strength and control it gives you.”
This is the closest Trimmer comes to a point of view. To a profound degree, he is the least doctrinaire of artists. And after a lifetime in dance, he has developed remarkably few preferences. Although he remembers ballets that have engaged the full range of his capabilities, such as Les Rendezvous, which is demanding technically, and Petrouchka, which involves character work, he can recall no favourite production. Nowadays he just likes a part with drama, as long as it’s not too turgid. Ballets such as No Exit, which combines heavy drama and heavy dancing, are getting to be a bit much.
As to the audience: “We’ve always had an excellent following – even during the lean times there was always that core support. Local audiences are not as demonstrative as audiences overseas. You don’t get the same riotous applause, but there’s great warmth there. You know when they like you and when they don’t.” And the Royal New Zealand Ballet, though smallish by international standards, compares favourably with the better companies overseas.
“Whether because of our isolation or because of our programming, which ranges from the strict classics through to contemporary work, we have a freshness and vitality that other companies don’t have.”
Ashton would agree. “There’s a great upswelling of talent in New Zealand. If there’s a unique New Zealand characteristic, it’s physical prowess. We make very good footballers, cricketers, netballers, and it happens that we make very good dancers.
It’s taken a long time, but after a difficult gestation, ballet in New Zealand has now reached the point where it is regarded as “establishment”. That is not to say that today’s audiences are stuffy or hidebound, but they are altogether different from the sullen little groups that had to be hauled in by hook or by crook during the early days, when the company toured the backblocks under the auspices of the Community Arts Service. While the importance of that initial grassroots support will never be gainsaid, audiences now are no longer small-town but urbane, a mixture of all kinds of people of all ages – New Zealand audiences.
Beatrice Ashton thinks it’s remarkable that the company should still be going after 36 years. “It’s nearly as old as the National Orchestra, and in a way, it has penetrated the same layers of New Zealand consciousness. I get a marvellous feeling when I go to the theatre. People don’t come overdressed as if for a social occasion. They come, relaxed and informally, to see the Royal New Zealand Ballet. The company has devoted a great deal to children’s programmes over the years, right from the time of Poul Gnatt, and in a way, we used to say that we were going to get the audience of the future from those children. Whether we did or not is not known, but the company has grown to its present stature and the audience has grown with it.”
At home in Paekākāriki, Trimmer practises yoga and tends a luxuriant garden. He also does handcrafted clay work, in preparation for his retirement.
“It’s just that I don’t get around to retiring. A sister who has been a potter in Melbourne for 20 years is coming back home to live, and even while I’m still performing with the company, I plan to work with her, with a view eventually to doing it fulltime.”
If Trimmer has one regret, in a life singularly devoid of regrets, it is that he was never a chorus boy. “If I hadn’t been a ballet dancer, I would have loved to be a singer and dancer in Broadway musicals – an all-round performer. It would have been great fun.”
In the event, it’s been fun anyway. To a rare degree, Trimmer conveys the entirely satisfactory impression of someone who has spent his life doing exactly what nature meant him to do. Which is not to say, after 31 years of terpsichorean endeavour, that he’s ready just yet to hang up his dancing shoes.
Goodness gracious, he’s only 50.