Time for some Newman Nostalgia!
Today we have loved turning our attention to the extraordinary talents of one of our Newman Siena girls: Miranda Coney Barker (Coney 1983)!
While in Year 10 at Newman Siena in 1981, aged just 15, Miranda auditioned for, and was accepted into the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School and, in 1982, entered The Australian Ballet School. David McAllister AC (1980), who we featured earlier this year, knew Miranda from growing up in Perth, and from Newman, and had entered The Australian Ballet School a year ahead of Miranda after finishing Year 12 here.
In 1991 Miranda became a much-loved Principal Dancer with The Australian Ballet. (David had become a Principal Dancer in 1989.) She was said to light up the stage, to take flight upon it, and to bring a breadth and depth to each role she danced.
She caught the eye of then Music Director Charles Barker, who trained at the Manhattan School of Music and was with The Australian Ballet from 1997 to 2001.
Charles takes over the rest of the story with his blog post from 25 October 2000:
"...Let me set the scene.
The Australian Ballet opened in Perth last night [at His Majesty’s] with a performance of the Merry Widow with Miranda in the title role. I had planned to propose to Miranda after the opening night performances in Perth, for about 6 weeks. She has family in Perth, she was the Widow, it all seemed to fit. I had told my plans to no one except Ross Stretton, Artistic Director of Australian Ballet, who incidentally slyly engineered some of the technical parts. Extreme secrecy had to be maintained because there are no secrets in this company!
Just before the performance Ross and I spoke to the stage manager to alert her that she needed to make an announcement over the PA just before the final curtain to get the audience's attention and that she had to fit me with a body microphone because I was going to 'make a presentation'. Then we swore her to secrecy for the next 2-1/2 hours.
After the performance finished (which, by the way, was quite good) the bows followed as usual - corps, soloists, principals, all forward and back, the Widow (Miranda) gets the conductor [Charles], all bow, curtain down, bows for principals in front of the curtain, ... curtain up, all (except conductor) down and back. This is usually when the curtain falls for the last time for the evening. However, tonight, with the curtain still up and the audience still applauding, the stage manager spoke over the PA and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, may we have your attention”.
The audience became quiet immediately and I walked out onto the stage, faced the audience, and spoke to them ... saying, 'Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Charles Barker, Music Director of the Australian Ballet. I have a question to ask tonight's Widow.' At which point I turned and walked a few steps toward Miranda, went down onto one knee, held out an engagement ring to her and said, 'Miranda Coney, will you be my wife?'
Miranda had no idea that this was about to happen and the look on her face was priceless. She was quite overcome and came to me, nodded yes, took the ring and gave me a hug and kiss. At the same moment the stage and audience erupted with a deafening ovation, a type of which I had never heard before. Men were yelling their bravos and women were shouting through their tears - especially the ballerinas on stage. An usher brought Miranda some red long stem roses I had gotten for her, more applause, then the curtain came down. It was quite a scene. I couldn't have hoped for a better scenario. Everything went my way.
The next morning the press began to phone at 9:30am. We gave interviews and had photos taken until about 2pm. We are both still pretty high from the evening. It was fun and perhaps most important, it was successful! The amount of media coverage after the fact was surprising. We did dozens of newspaper and radio interviews including the BBC from London. I guess people like happy endings."
How gorgeous is that?
Miranda and Charles left The Australian Ballet in 2001, after which they married and moved to New York, where they still live, and raised their sons Max and Riley. Both are prodigiously talented; Max has followed Miranda into dance, and Riley has followed Charles into music.
Yes! People really do love happy endings!
Miranda Coney and Steven Heathcote in André Prokovsky's Anna Karenina, 1995. Photograph courtesy Earl Carter.
