Letting go.
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No easy thing after so many years of meticulous guardianship.
"It's very, very hard," affirms Marie Walton-Mahon. "Obviously, I'm a perfectionist but you can't do everything to 150 per cent. And, after 36 years, the school is in a really, really good space."
This month the former ballerina announced that this will be her final year as artistic director of the Marie Walton-Mahon Dance Academy and National College of Dance at Lambton.
It has taken three painstaking years to organise the transition to her exacting satisfaction, but now the dance teacher is comfortable enough to entrust her baby to the care of others.
Her expanding roles with the London-headquartered Royal Academy of Dance have drawn her far from her base. One assignment alone took her to Italy for weeks.
Something had to give.
Weekender has made the journey to Walton-Mahon's Lambton base. It's not easy for the outsider to venture here. As willowy shapes beautiful as blossoms and light as sprites skip to class, the intruder is painfully conscious of his crumpled clothes and clumsy step.
What do we know of this world? For generations now, parents, many from blue-collar backgrounds, have scraped up the cash to give their kids a glimpse of something finer and, in human endeavour, ballet is as fine as it gets.
The juxtaposition is perfect when you imagine a dad, in dirty overalls and work boots, arriving in the work ute to collect an exquisitely tutu-ed child.
Newcastle's extraordinary reputation as a dance nursery has escaped nobody's attention. Nor has the edge to the rivalries that exist between individual schools. In that regard, the Marie Walton-Mahon act is the Manchester United of local dance. No outfit wins more accolades than the Lambton star factory. And now the head coach is moving on.
The perfectionist has plotted her succession extremely well. Brett Morgan, formerly of the Australian Ballet Company and Sydney Dance Company, will work alongside Walton-Mahon for the latter part of 2010 before taking over as full-time artistic director next year.
As assistant artistic director Elise Frawley, 33, relates, the ground has been laid.
"We know Marie has had this change in mind for some years. We set our sights on Brett Morgan as our number one choice and we got him."
Jenna Mulholland, 25, came from Coonamble to find a career in ballet. Now, the highly qualified teacher is in charge of a number of grades with a focus on the entry point of 3-6 years.
"Of course, we're going to miss her but there's no time for tears. The parents have been inquisitive but we've let them know that it's going to be great."
Marie and husband Ian Mahon have sold the family home in Cooks Hill, and bought a place in Sydney handy enough to the airport for the dance mentor to pop on and off flights to such places as Rome, New York and London. As for ownership of both the Marie Walton-Mahon Dance Academy and National College of Dance, that passed into the hands of owner-directors Tony and Michelle Bayliss in 2007.
Discussing this extraordinary juncture in her professional and personal life, Walton-Mahon sits at her desk, kneading her hands in an unconscious mime reflecting the thought she has invested in this process.
At 56, she retains the diminutive frame and alert bearing that carried her across ballet stages in her youth.
Within metres of her office, an entire corridor is lined with awards depicting the national and international achievements of an academy sited in a regional Australian city far removed from the northern hemisphere's cultural pulse.
Despite the tyranny of distance, its reach is truly extraordinary. Graduates have found positions with companies right around the world. Currently, there are no less than seven of her former students with the Australian Ballet Company.
Of the Hunter's centres of excellence - from winemaking to medical research - all would be proud to make such a sizeable contribution in their particular fields.
Marie Walton-Mahon knew early on that dance would be her life. As a third birthday present Rose and Laurie Walton enrolled their daughter in a tiny backyard dance school in Maitland. When the Waltons realised dancing was more than a passing fad, they transferred Marie and her sister Kim to a Newcastle school run by one of Australia's most venerated ballet teachers. In time, the Maitland-Newcastle shuttle became too much. Rose and Laurie sold the family home and moved closer to the dance studio.
In explaining just why the Hunter punches so far above its weight in the education of elite dancers, Walton-Mahon says: "You've got to give credit to my teacher Tessa Maunder."
Like generations of Newcastle-reared dancers, the Walton girls shone under Maunder's classic tutelage. The venerable Miss Maunder remains a national legend in dance education.
Marie: "I started teaching for Tessa to pay my fees. It was a real struggle. It was either that or give up, and I really wanted to be a ballerina more than anything."
In 1970 Marie Walton passed the Royal Academy of Dance advanced exam. Her certificate was signed by Dame Margot Fonteyn. In 1971 she accepted a scholarship to study for a year at the Rosella Hightower School in Cannes, France. One year later she was dancing with Les Ballet de Marseilles under the direction of Roland Petit.
At 18, she had achieved her heart's desire: touring with a professional company and dancing on the stages of the world. It was short-lived. In 1974, while touring Europe she received news that her father was gravely ill having suffered a heart attack. The dancer came home.
It was an end but also a beginning. On June 17, 1974, Marie and her younger sister Kim started M & K Ballet.
"It was in a tiny scout hall at Kotara. We had just six little beginners and the boys used to come and peek through the windows," Marie recalls.
Eventually, the sisters would go their separate ways: Marie to Lambton and Kim to start a Central Coast dance school. Now, Walton-Mahon can look back on those formative years and wonder at her own lack of confidence.
"I was quite insecure, really," she says. "I didn't realise that you had to watch them grow right through to the professional stage before you could sit back and say, 'Hey, I did that'.
Those modest beginnings seemed a long way from such international benchmarks as the Gen?e International, one of the world's most prestigious classical ballet competitions. Organised and promoted by the Royal Academy of Dance, it is held annually and honours Dame Adeline Gen?e, one of the founders of the Academy. That's where Walton-Mahon's ambitions lay.
"The first person I took from primary through to the Gen?e was Kellie Comerford," the teacher relates. "She now has her own school in Melbourne and has just sent a student here to the college."
The moment that announced Marie Walton-Mahon's arrival as a mentor of high merit occurred in 1989 when Jane Finnie, 17, of Whitebridge won the Gen?e gold medal in London. Two years later, Finnie was back in London, dancing as a fully fledged member of the Australian Ballet and invited as one of just nine from the company's complement of 64 to dine with Princess Di at St James's Palace.
"Jane became a leading soloist with the Australian Ballet Company. After ballet, she became a scientist. She is living here in Newcastle and has a little girl of her own, so I expect we'll see her at ballet school soon."
Walton-Mahon can reel off a list of ex-students with high-achieving lives beyond dance. Brains and ballet - the connection is something more than casual, you suspect.
"These are very bright young people," the teacher says.
Dance is fertile ground for academic rigour.
"In training for dance, you learn a lot of skills that can be useful at university. To pick up choreography you have to be quick. In understanding safe dance technique, a student needs to know where every sinew is at any time. Next week, our students are booked in for lectures in psychology, health and nutrition, and injury prevention. They are exposed to so much knowledge."
Dance has opened a portal to the world for many, not the least of them her own daughter Veronica. Teaching her own, Marie concedes, presented different challenges.
"You can't correct your own by calling out her name, so we had a bit of a code system going. For instance, if I touched my ear that meant a certain thing she had to fix."
The code system worked. Veronica went on to win Gen?e gold in London, dance with the Australian Ballet, the South Atlantic Ballet Company in the United States and the Sydney Dance Company.
Today, at 29, she is teaching at the school her mother founded.
Veronica's personal experience in dance prompts the thought: how in this era of allegedly under-motivated gen X and Y-ers, when society seems obsessed with rewarding mediocrity over high achievement, can anything as disciplined, exacting and downright tough as ballet still exist, let alone thrive? As one student tells us, the full-time course entails hours of daily physical activity.
"We're going home tired every night," she relates. "It requires a lot of discipline and dedication."
It's an anachronism, that's what it is.
When, amid all that learning and discipline, did Veronica find time for a healthy teenage rebellion? Laughing she says, "I think I had a delayed rebellion. I took about a year away from dance, did other things. But right now, I'm loving it as much as ever."
Listening to this exchange, her mother says nothing, but her eyes twinkle with knowing. Somewhere in her busy life Marie Walton-Mahon found time to raise two children of her own. Her son Laurie has been working in Dublin and is due home in June.
The Walton-Mahons are used to receiving postcards from distant lands. The academy is one of the region's most successful exporters. Opportunity for the most talented lies abroad and placement is one of Walton-Mahon's strong suits.
"When the diploma students come through, we try to get them positions," she explains. "Part of the course involves career guidance, we help them with their professional CVs and compile an audition tape for them."
In a world in which dance companies compete aggressively for talent, the recruitment process is not dissimilar to the football transfer market.
Take Simon Jones, 15, of Elermore Vale, a talent in demand.
Walton-Mahon: "He was a finalist in the Youth America Grand Prix in New York. That's where he was spotted. Now, he's been offered scholarships with Miami City, the Bolshoi and Munich. So, I'll do up a DVD of him, send it to the Royal Ballet and say, 'He's had these offers - what can you offer him?' It's my way of getting the best for my students."
Similarly, Danielle Muir was offered a Royal Ballet School scholarship for 2010 after being spotted dancing in an overseas competition. Walton-Mahon reports that this year's graduate year, all 14 of them, have placements.
Her commitment to continuing education took on a new guise in 2007 when she opened the National College of Dance (NCD), offering accredited training to young students seeking to pursue careers in the dance industry.
It identified a need for students to have access to high quality, nationally recognised training in dance-related studies. The NCD attracts students from all around Australia with a number of them housed at the college's own boarding complex. The courses on offer are Certificate III, Certificate IV and a Diploma in Dance Performance.
Rhys Kosakowski, having outgrown his award-winning lead in the Australian stage production of Billy Elliot, is back at Lambton tackling the Certificate IV. Walton-Mahon is convinced even greater things are in store for the actor-dancer who is headed for the Australian Ballet School next year.
Canberra is home to Emily Dibden, 17, but she hasn't lived there since she was 13. Dance took her to Sydney and more recently to Newcastle.
"When I heard about the full-time course with uni entry after I finished, I was pretty keen to come here," she says.
Courses include individually developed subjects such as performance in classical, contemporary and jazz, body conditioning, musicality, choreography and sustainable career planning.
Nobody can just start up a college and hang out their shingle. Firstly, you need the approval of the NSW Vocational Education and Training Accreditation Board (VETAB), the authority responsible for regulating registered training organisations (RTOs).
It was a high hurdle for Walton-Mahon.
"I did a whole year of getting up at 4am to write the formal course and get it accredited with VETAB. I couldn't take time off work, so I had to do early mornings or late at night. It's probably the hardest thing I've done."
The teacher, who had left school in year 10 to pursue a dance career, had to go back to school and upgrade her own qualifications in training and assessment.
"Then, to go and unveil the anatomy side of a course as it related to body conditioning and prove to a round table of academics that this was really worthwhile . . .," she pauses, reflecting perhaps on how much it took out of her.
It seems more than mere coincidence that such an impost coincided with the onset of her thinking to hand over the artistic running of the academy.
But, if the process has wearied her, the impression is gone in a blink as she claps eyes on Elizabeth Masters, 17, of New Lambton.
"I've got big plans for Elizabeth," Walton-Mahon beams. "When she dances on stage, everybody stops."
Walton-Mahon assures concerned parents and kids that the school's succession plan is in perfect shape.
"Some of them have been coming to me and asking me if it will still be OK if I can give them a reference," the teacher smiles. "I tell them I won't be letting go altogether, I'll still be around to help them with their careers."
Will she miss the day-to-day routine, the painstaking process of moulding unco-ordinated littlies into prima ballerinas?
"I'm going to visit regularly. It's still a big part of me - watching the kids who are six at the moment going on to graduate.
She stops, lost in thought for a moment, and begins again:
"I love it when the students get that look on their face that shows they've really got it. It can take a long time but when you see somebody at the end of their training spin off seven pirouettes and they've got a grin from ear to ear, it's the best feeling."
