Peter Faux

I'm thrilled to be sharing with you a very special interview with dancer, teacher, mentor and choreographer Peter Faux. Peter's teaching and mentorship has both ignited and profoundly shaped my own ongoing relationship with dance. Whilst Peter wouldn't consider himself a dance movement therapist, I treasure the influence his wisdom and passion has had on my life. So, it is my hope this interview will gather some of this magic to offer & share with you.

Here, Peter shares the story of how tap dancing healed his lungs as a child and introduced him to the world of dance; the humour he found in responding to others fear of the dancing disease on the football pitches of Port Melbourne in the 60s, the magic of dance and his commitment to fostering inquisitive minds.

Peter is a trained teacher in Cecchetti method classical ballet, MDES Jazz, past President of the Australian Pilates Method Association, and runs a dance school and pilates studio in Melton, West of Melbourne.

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I wonder if you might share with us a little about your childhood and what lead into your career as a dancer?

It really was a medical situation that led me into dance. I was quite ill as a young child and they thought I might have my mother's lung condition. They tried all sorts of things, but nothing worked in strengthening my lungs until the doctor suggested Tap Dancing.

My mother asked, "Will that really help" and the doctor responded, "Can't hurt!" And so I was dragged off to start to tap dance. The vibration of the tapping cleared the lung condition and I’ve not had any lung problems since. I understand they refer to it now as energy medicine or vibrational medicine.

After dancing for a while I was considered quite skilled, but didn't think much of it. I found my way to Cecchetti classical ballet.  When I say I really loved the ballet – it really engaged me.  Particularly, I’ve always had an interest in the history of dance and one of my teachers (Coral Brown) was a student of Madam Serenova who was taught by Maestro Enrico Cecchetti himself.

I ended up dancing professionally for a number of years and I found that I met a lot of different dance teachers. This led me to opening up my own school. 

When I came to Melton, I was teaching in the East of Melbourne and then my father took sick - had a brain tumor, and they didn’t expect him to live. I came out to Melton to help mum look after dad when someone said “would you teach our kids, just one night a week” and the end of the first year I was teaching every night of the week and that was 40 years ago!

So it’s just been an amazing journey and none of it was planned!

I think probably the big kick off in my career was when I was thirteen - I was the first boy to win the Cecchetti Medal it and it was covered in the press, on the radio – as it was then in those days.  A lot of people noticed and it certainly helped my confidence to pursue a career in dance.

Why was that confidence important then?

Dancing, it was very difficult to do dancing back then. I actually lived in Port Melbourne which is where the wharfs are. Running around in a pair of tights in the Port Melbourne district, wasn’t seen as a good career choice. I put up with difficulties, which people these days will call harassment or whatever.

I remember once I pulled my ballet tights on and pulled my footy shorts over the top and played half a game of footy in my ballet tights. I found that a good a sense of humour would often balance out the bullying I copped. At quarter time the coach said, “I think you’ve made your point”, but I didn’t think I had!

I used to play full back and because male dancers were considered unusual creatures at that time. I remember once telling the full forward he had cute legs and next thing he was standing 30 yards away from me - so there was a very vacant goal!

So, anytime the coach had a problem, he would place me strategically as no one wanted to catch the dancers disease.  I found it quite amusing, but I don’t think I was destined to have a footy career after that. 

Did you think at the time dance would be such a life-long dedication? What have some of the joys been in choosing this pathway?

Once, someone from the audience actually said “you’re not just a dancer, I just loved the dancing in the show and it was brilliant because there was so much atmosphere to it!”. That was a real turning point for me psychologically, I transitioned from thinking of myself as “just a dancer.”

I’ve been struck by people’s exuberance, their energy and enthusiasm – their involvement in watching the show – and how they get caught up in everything that is happening onstage.

Initially I really respected and loved dancing because as our brains develop very young everyone knows that if you study a language, you study music, you study dance – if you have those three things going on the brain does develop quite exceptionally.

As a dancer, if you study dance, if you go beyond just going along to a studio to build ego’s, show off or want to compete. Rather, when you become involved in it, and you want to understand it more – it develops the brain absolutely superbly.

Dance is just extraordinary because it gives you so much wealth in developing you as a person.

And the joys of teaching the children that you have worked with over the years?

I think one of the greatest rewards of a dance teacher is you just see the lights switch on in children’s eyes – and the joy that they have.

And then you see the impact of social media and television - and I remember quite dramatically that shift.

The impact that things have on the children, when you are trying to teach them something more and get their imagination working. 

The war has started – all this danger and fear and people talk about - what happened to the magic? To me, it’s all about the magic.

I wish more people had magic, I really do – because they would enjoy life more. It wouldn’t be so boring and dull at times and how serious life is. We all need a piece of magic in our lives.

In learning from you, I remember so clearly the feeling that you were genuinely interested in everyone in your dance school as humans, rather than dancers. There was a distinct difference in the way you approached teaching to what was coming out of the ballet school at the time. I wondered if you could share a little on that?

In every class I teach I ask the question, "What is the greatest asset?” People pause and they think and they look. Some of these are adults. They often say, “I don’t know.” I say “an inquisitive mind.”

You have a look at the people as you walk along the streets sitting in restaurants and they are all on their phones. There is no inquisitive mind.  There is no excitement. That is the important thing – to be intrigued.

I have said to you and all the students I have taught “don’t believe what you’re told”. They want you to agree and believe what they want to tell you. Be inquisitive. Analyse. Think about it. Read. Look into the history. Just don’t accept what you are told, because you don’t know what the agenda is of the person that is telling you that.

Why do you think it’s important that the students you teach have an inquisitive mind?

I think it’s important because the brain develops at an early age.  But it does have another burst of neurons as the brain grows. So, if you can encourage people to be inquisitive at a young age, they will be more active mentally, more alert and have better insight than if you just weigh them down with facts and memory things. Get the brain active to develop the best it can. I don’t understand this flatness in teaching now.

I’ve always tried to teach my students that there is a big picture. I think that is a human responsibility - the individual responsibility to find out more and seek to understand.

I am critical of the teacher's union quote “knowledge is power." Knowledge can give you the chance to speak because you have a bigger band of understanding, but it’s not power.

“Stop trying to control things!” is something that you would say quite often to us as students. When we learnt to pirouette (turn), you would encourage that we persist in experimentation.  You wanted us to throw ourselves into a turn and fall over, to learn where the boundaries are by feeling into them, rather than pre-empting and stopping short of that understanding.

Why do you feel that embodied learning is so important?

Everyone has a deep fear. When you turn that over and look at that fear, it frees you up.

We have to get ourselves outside the boundaries that we are locked in. We need to find out if can we do something or not do it.

Little kids do it. They throw themselves around and when they fall they get back up.

I truly believe the body feels that freedom in dance, it’s not held back by constrained fear. We need to understand ourselves more – the impact of emotion. Movement helps overcome the fear, uncertainty.

You have always had a strong interest in the wisdom of our First Nations Peoples and particularly the teachings of Native American Hopi tribes.  We had posters of teachings, poetry and predictions all over the dance studio and you talked very openly to us about what you were experiencing through your own friendships and explorations. Why did you feel this was important to teach?

I can only say to you that the more experiences that you have, that you are involved in, the more we understand ourselves.

I’ve always been interested in our history and Indigenous cultures because they have a concept about living with nature and I was always fascinated by people saying, “Indigenous cultures own land” and the response being, “No…we don’t own the land – we are custodians of the land and we are looking after it for our ancestors.”

Life is very shallow if you just look at the surface and so we’ve got to go in deeper if you really want to do justice to yourself – in my option.  

I’ve tried as best I can without telling students what they should believe, to show them that that there are other experiences out there.

How has it been teaching in Melton during this time?

It’s hugely different particularly after COVID. We have lost a lot of students, but strangely enough, the students who have left are all inquisitive. They want to know how and they want to know why. I don’t know that I have taught them that – I look at their parents and they have that too.

 Just before the holidays we had parents in to watch classes and I was staggered at how good those kids danced. I was just amazed. We don’t have enough to hire a theatre anymore, but we do our own little thing and the kids look forward to that.

To me they are doing something of substance. They aren’t here for the shallow – "we want to be in a theatre and we want a $200 tutu." To me they are doing substance.

I have to say that final week of term I was grateful to have those kids because it reassured me that there are people there that still want to learn.

On that tangent, you always said to us “the costume doesn’t matter, the tutu doesn’t matter, you are all going out in your leotards!”

Exactly… and a lot of professional companies now will just do dances in leotards because in reality the body is the art. That is your art. That makes your style as a dancer. Whatever it is, that’s their shape, their magic.

Someone will always watch one dancer on stage even in a professional company. And someone else may not have noticed them. But that’s the magic, that the person captures you.

That comes from people within. That comes from your spirit - and you should dance from your spirit. Not from the heart, not from the mind, but from your spirit – the true inner being.