An outpouring of love and grief

'Get Up, Dress Up, Show Up: Lessons in Love and Surmounting Grief
A memoir by former ballerina, Petal Miller Winstanley.

“My journey has been a kaleidoscope of ecstatic love and despair, tumbling me through highs, lows and everything in between,” writes Petal Miller Winstanley in this memoir. Never was a truer word written.

The author is an Australian dancer who has spent a successful and creatively fulfilling career between Australia and England. She danced with the Royal Winnipeg and the Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet, touring and sharing the stage with luminaries such as Lynn Seymour and Rudolf Nureyev and performing in treasures of the British repertoire. She married three times. She adored each of her husbands, and each of them died after suffering a prolonged illness.

Get Up, Dress Up, Show Up was written at the suggestion of Petal’s therapist, in the months following her third bereavement, where she was able to “let go of my pent up hurt”. The result is a searingly honest and sometimes gruelling outpouring of a life of great joys and loves but also of great despair – and more sadness and unfairness than should be borne by one person.

Petal was born in Perth, trained with Kira Bousloff and then moved to London, where she enjoyed the life that so many Aussie expats experienced during the swinging 60s and 70s. Petite and talented, her performing career eventually progressed to teaching and other roles: for a time she was assistant to Maina Gielgud when she was Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet, and she choreographed the charming ballets Snuggle Pot and Cuddle Pie for the company and The Snow Queen for the Australian Ballet School.

 But this memoir is less about her own career than her relationship with her three husbands, each of whom she loved intensely and mourned deeply.  Her first husband, dancer Michael Brown, died of HIV; her second, David Ashmole, a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet and the Australian Ballet, died of cancer. The third, Simon Winstanley, an architect, died of Parkinsons. In addition, Petal lost her own unborn baby.

Many would be crushed by so much loss and suffering. Petal writes honestly of her despair and this book is often difficult to read. Yet it is also an admirable example of fortitude and survival. She admits that while the deaths did break her spirit at the time, she has endured, still able to cherish the richness of life, and still grateful: for the ”abundance of love I’ve had”, for her good memories, for her friendships and “ballet family” and even for the intimate privilege of helping another human being through their final days. She also counts herself lucky for having a “lifelong love of art in all forms, especially ballet. “Each time my world fell apart – which as you know it had a habit of doing – my salvation was music and dance,” she writes.

Her repeated experience with hospices has turned her into advocate for Dignity and Dying and early cancer and AIDS detection. Today, now 77 years old and back in Australia, “having had a lifetime of love”, she writes, “I shall not complain.” She looks forward with optimism. Petal, I salute you.

- KAREN VAN ULZEN

'Get Up Dress Up Show Up: Lessons in Love and Surmounting Grief', is published by Grosvenor House and is available through Amazon.