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sylvie guillemdancing to her own tune
It was Sylvie Guillem who decided when and where we should meet, and she chose 4pm in the café at the back of Clarke's fashionable delicatessen in Kensington Church Street in west London. Although the place is conveniently situated for her, since she lives somewhere just around the corner, it was in other respects a curious choice. For one thing, the café is so small that it has only three tables, and predictably they are all full when I arrive there a few minutes before her. For another thing, it doesn't allow smoking and Sylvie Guillem, like many ballet dancers, is a smoker, albeit a very moderate one. I have always been intrigued to know why ballet dancers smoke. Their work requires huge stamina and athletic prowess, so why do they penalise themselves in this way? This is one of the first questions I ask her when a table finally becomes free and we are able to sit down. "It is a reaction against the discipline you must have," she says. But athletes don't smoke, I say. "We are not considered athletes," is her reply. Guillem is very pretty and has a remarkable body which has been described as having the physical calibration of a snake. She can do things with it that no other dancer can, such as effortlessly adopting a six o'clock position with her extraordinarily long legs. She is slim and fragile-looking, but made entirely of muscle. Across the café table I can see her arm muscles restlessly rippling through the tight sleeves of her long black dress, but the legs that are a wonder of the world are concealed from view.
Those who have sought to dismiss her as a mere athlete have probably been influenced by the fact that her mother, the wife of a Paris garage mechanic, had a job as a gym teacher and that Sylvie herself originally appeared destined for an athletic career. "I was born with a different physical capacity to other people," she says in her charming French accent. This "physical capacity" was noticed very early on, and at the age of 11 she was picked for special training at France's National Institute of Sport. She was short-listed for the French Olympic gymnastics team, but her training included ballet classes three times a week, and it was the ballet that eventually won her when she was persuaded to join the ballet school at the Paris Opéra. She became a member of its corps de ballet at 16, and at 19 one of its stars. It was Rudolf Nureyev, then running the company, who promoted her, and he danced with her on many occasions. They had a stormy relationship, but a very close one. It is not surprising that she still speaks wistfully of her love-hate relationship with Nureyev, whose every step resonated with dangerous passion. "In that respect we were equals," she says. "We shocked each other. Meeting someone with such character and charisma was not easy when I was wanting to make my own mark, but since then I have never met another dancer with those eyes, that look, that instinct. I was lucky to have shared in part of his life." Nureyev once said that Sylvie Guillem was the only woman he could ever think of marrying. And she tells me over her cup of herbal tea that she had had "a very personal thing" with him, which she still wanted to keep to herself. "My only regret is that I started to talk to him too late," she says. (Nureyev died of Aids in 1994, and Guillem took part in an international tribute to him the following year.) Her final row with Nureyev happened ten years ago, when she presumptuously demanded the same privileges that he had, such as the freedom to work abroad independently of the Paris Opéra, and he refused. To everyone's astonishment (she was only 23) she walked out and went to London, where the Royal Ballet, also to everyone's astonishment, agreed to provide her with the kind of contract she wanted. "I fought with Nureyev because he said he didn't think I was ready to leave the company," she says. "But, really, he knew I was right. I fought with him because he didn't actually believe what he was saying." It was at this time that Sylvie Guillem began to acquire her reputation for arrogance and contrariness. She became known as the girl who couldn't say yes. She would argue with choreographers and conductors and be extremely fussy about the clothes she was asked to wear on stage. In one legendary incident, she is reported to have shouted at the late Sir Kenneth MacMillan, the Royal Ballet's great choreographer: "I am the star, not you!" And though she has subsequently denied using those words, she says it was true that they had had "an ego fight".
The antipathy between Guillem and MacMillan is grounded, I would guess, in their rather similar insecurities. Both were seen as upstarts in their companies: she with her gymnastic background and her rapid advancement by Nureyev, causing considerable jealousy at Paris Opéra Ballet, and MacMillan as the perpetually aggrieved Scottish rebel against English snobbery. Guillem upset him by refusing the first ballet he offered her, My Brother, My Sisters; she says she tried to make amends by agreeing to be second cast (behind Darcey Bussell) in the odd fairy-tale The Prince of the Pagodas, even though she could not make head or tail of the character she was portraying. "Some people just see you as the dancer, to do what you are told. And they don't like to have someone there who they have to explain to, or convince, or fight. It's also a question of ego. His ego and my ego. I don't deny it. But my ego comes from very strong instinct and a kind of... honesty." Guillem and MacMillan yelled so loudly, everyone in the Opera House heard them, but he could not stop her tucking Manon and Juliet triumphantly into her belt, before she tackled the next pillar of English style - Frederick Ashton. Guillem has decided views about Britain's grand duo of choreography: both of them, she says, "have talent". "But if you look carefully, there are very few masterpieces by MacMillan and Ashton. There are very few that are really valuable." Alarmingly, she describes Ashton's La Fille mal gardée, one of the gems of 20th-century ballet, as "too difficult, too long and too stupid. Voilà". She then unblots her copybook with her genuine, tender respect for Ashton's A Month in the Country, a Chekhovian mini-tragedy in which she was surprisingly successful as the unhappy wife, Natalia Petrovna. Reproduced from ballet.magazine. © ballet.co.uk |
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Her
critics in the ballet world have accused her of too much athleticism,
of being "only a gymnast"; but that can only be envy. She
is an immensely expressive ballerina with an ability to move an audience
as no other can. The director of the Kirov Ballet, Oleg Vinogradov,
has called her "the best ballerina in the world". "It
is impossible," he has said, "to overestimate the influence
she has had on future ballerinas."
Given
that MacMillan (who died in 1992) depended on extraordinary performers
to create his pieces, it was widely hoped that he and Guillem would
hit it off, in a dream partnership. Her green eyes flash. "He
never said anything nice to me. He said to me after a rehearsal of
Manon, 'You are just a French boring star'." She laughs. "I
just said, I'm sorry, but what you have said is completely stupid.
If you want to talk about the rehearsal, the work we did, please try
to find something else to say, because this is completely stupid."
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