A quarter of a century after a senseless attack in Highgate left a knife lodged in her neck and a promising ballet career in tatters, Floeur Alder still struggles to walk the streets alone.
Her recovery is chronicled in the new documentary, Pointe: Dancing On A Knife’s Edge, which is set to have its world premiere at CinefestOZ later this month.
Though the trajectory of Alder’s life was irrevocably altered by “the incident”, as she refers to it, the film proves she isn’t defined by it.
Instead, it delivers an examination of the burden of expectation, which Alder has lived with all her life as the daughter of Australian ballet royalty.
Her mother was Lucette Aldous, a prima ballerina who danced with Rudolf Nureyev and worked as a dance instructor into her 80s, and her father was Alan Alder, who at one time was principal artist with The Australian Ballet and, later, became head of the dance school at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
Pointe tells their story, too.
With her parents passing in recent years, Alder’s voice cracks as she describes the experience of watching the film.
“The scenes where my parents are watching me dance for the last time, it is really hard to watch, so that’s been my initial reaction to hearing their voices and seeing them on camera,” she says.
In June 2000, Alder was 22 and about to embark on the biggest opportunity of her young life — following in the pointe shoes of her mother and dancing in Europe.
Then, one night, as Alder was walking to her Mary Street home, an unknown assailant sprung from behind a tree and wildly stabbed at her in a frenzied attack before fleeing, leaving the knife in her neck.
In a state of shock, Alder ran inside the house and promptly pulled out the blade and dialled triple-0, but quickly realised she’d bleed out before the ambulance arrived.
With blood spurting from the wound, she made her way to the Beaufort Street cafe strip for assistance and collapsed on the floor of a restaurant.
Doctors were able to save her life, but it was a long, painful road to recovery, with the physical scars fading quicker than the emotional ones.
A five-year period of her life after the attack doesn’t exist in her memory, and she described seeing it covered in the documentary as like an out-of-body experience.
“I feel like I’m watching another person’s life unfold onscreen,” she says. “It feels really surreal, I feel numb . . . and that’s quite confronting.”
Pointe is the debut feature from WA filmmaker Dawn Jackson, who trained as a dancer under Lucette and Alan at WAAPA, and first met Alder when she was an eight-year-old running around the studio.
“I got to know Floeur through that time, and then I saw what happened when the attack happened, and then her trying to make her way back to the dance world, and that was really hard for her,” Jackson tells STM.
One particularly tough scene in the doco depicts a piece Alder performed in France, which was an interpretation of the incident itself.
A rehearsal sequence culminates in Alder screaming in anguish.
“It wasn’t like every rehearsal I ended up on the floor, with that sort of cathartic experience,” Alder explains.
“But I think sometimes you just don’t know when it’s going to hit you, or when you’re going to be taken back.”
In this instance, the physical demands of a 20-minute solo had her out of breath, and that triggered a long-buried memory of the incident.
“I remember being in the (Beaufort Street) restaurant and them saying to me, ‘If you don’t stop hyperventilating, you’ll pass out’, and that’s when I thought, ‘If I pass out, I’ll die’,” she recalls.
Alder says “a hell of a lot of therapy” over the past 25 years has helped, but the trauma will never leave her and manifests in unexpected ways.
Walking back to her car after a recent night at the opera, Alder saw a man in the distance and the fear kicked in, causing her to hide behind a building until he passed.
“I wouldn’t have done that if the attack hadn’t happened, I’m hyper vigilant around things like that,” she says. “But it’s few and far between.”
Making things harder is the fact the police never caught Alder’s attacker.
“We had that policeman (in the film) saying that it was just the most bizarre thing that no one saw anything, no one knew anything,” Jackson explains.
“The attacker just literally came out of the darkness, as Floeur says, and then disappeared.”
Alder hopes the film inspires others in their recovery from trauma, while also shining a spotlight on the wonder of dance.
Pointe: Dancing On A Knife’s Edge will have its world premiere at CinefestOZ in Busselton on August 31, before opening in cinemas on September 11.