Article by:
Sarah Crompton
This year will mark the end of Sylvie Guillem's astonishing 30-plus years as one of the world’s foremost ballet dancers. Sarah Crompton meets her as she prepares to bring her farewell tour to Britain
Sylvie Guillem is standing on the stage of the Royal Opera House, the scene of some of her greatest performances. It was here that she traced Juliet’s headlong flight from young innocent to tragic heroine; here that her Manon moved from sensual pleasure to dark, despairing death; here that her dazzling technique and profound dramatic engagement brought the stories of classical ballet, of Aurora, of Odette, of Giselle, to vivid new life.
But tonight she is wearing high heels, not pointe shoes, a shimmering bronze dress not a tutu. And tonight she is speaking, not dancing – accepting an Olivier award for lifetime achievement, a huge smile on her face. ‘This represents 39 years of pleasure,’ she says, in English made exotic by her French intonation. ‘I was lucky because dance came to me, and I loved everything about it.’
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Her grin broadens. ‘I never had this opportunity to say out loud an enormous thank you to the audience. I needed the audience, and you were always there, warm and passionate. It was a pleasure to dance for you, and when I stop at the end of the year I will really miss you.’
This brief speech and an award presented to her by the Royal Ballet’s former artistic director Anthony Dowell marked Guillem’s first return to the Royal Opera House stage since she left the company in 2007, disenchanted with its artistic direction. ‘I was too nervous about having to make a speech in front of some of England’s greatest actors to think about that,’ she says afterwards.
Her entire career has been like that. Once a thing is over, it is done with. She first came to the world’s admiring notice in 1984, aged 19, as the youngest ever étoile at the Paris Opera Ballet, but in 1989 – despite protests in the French National Assembly – she left to come to the Royal Ballet.
As soon as that chapter was over, she moved resolutely on to Sadler’s Wells, in an astonishing late flowering as a contemporary dancer. This, too, is reaching a conclusion. Guillem has decided, ‘quite suddenly’, that the year of her 50th birthday is the time for her to stop dancing. Once again her exit will be decisive.
Having outpaced time for so long, she wants to stop before there is any decline. ‘I knew for a long time that I had to stop,’ she says, over fruit juice in a noisy hotel bar, at the end of a long day’s rehearsing at Sadler’s Wells. She looks tired but animated, happy to look back on what is by any measure an extraordinary career. ‘Better that it is a clean cut. I don’t know if I will be able to cope with the decision I have made. But still it has to end.’
There is, however, quite a lot of performing to be done before the final curtain falls, in Japan in December. In 10 days’ time, Guillem brings her farewell tour – significantly called Life in Progress – to Sadler’s Wells. These performances are sold out, but three more British appearances at the London Coliseum, the Edinburgh Festival and at the Birmingham Hippodrome are not. People still have a chance to catch the last glimpse of the most significant dancer of her generation.
Sylvie Guillem was different from the very beginning. Born in the suburbs of Paris, to a father who was a car mechanic and a mother who taught gymnastics, she arrived at the Paris Opera Ballet School at the age of 11, not as an aspiring ballerina but as a gymnast on a year’s exchange. That status allowed her and the two other girls on the programme the freedom to leave the confines of the school three times a week for training. But the mental freedom was even more important; she never felt constrained by the need to confirm.
We didn’t have the same mentality as the others,’ she says. ‘The notion of pleasure was not there at all for them. It was work, work, work. The first thing we did was go on the roof and take some pictures – I have them still. It was forbidden, of course.’
She laughs. In life, Guillem laughs freely and often, mainly at herself. She is unstarry and approachable, although, strangely for someone who so much knows her own mind, she is also quite shy, which can make her seem distant. That reserve vanishes when she is on stage – and that was true from the start. The moment Claude Bessy, the renowned principal of the school, asked her if she wanted to dance in the end-of-term show, she was hooked. ‘I knew something there was for me,’ she says.
Her progress from that point was helped by the fact that what others found difficult, she found easy, coming top in every exam. She was, quite simply, built to dance, in perfect proportion, with strong, arched feet, long legs, flexible ligaments, and great strength. But she also began to see dance differently, to feel that she was capable of expressing steps in new ways by extending the technique she was being taught.
When Rudolf Nureyev arrived as artistic director in 1983, Guillem was at the forefront of a great generation of dancers waiting in the corps de ballet. They were to be his instruments as he sent a blast of fresh air through an august institution.
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In her Olivier speech, she joked that she ‘really needed to thank someone in the Royal Opera House who told him to get lost when he wanted to take over the Royal Ballet. This is how we got him, and how he got us, a group of young and hungry dancers. And because he knew that time is the only thing we do not have, he gave us our chance very early on. Without his generosity, his intelligence and vision, I would not have done what I did.’
She tells me, ‘It was as if he opened a window on the real world, the world of today. He brought in choreographers such as William Forsythe and Robert Wilson. I could feel already at that moment that these were the ones I was looking for.’
But Nureyev’s promotion of her career did not stop her from fighting him. ‘When I thought it was fair, it was OK,’ she says. ‘But when it was unfair there was no way I was going to swallow that. So I would argue about some decisions made. Or I would argue about the type of partner he was chosen for me, then I would argue about the fact that he forced me to do in front of everybody something I didn’t want to do. But afterwards, I laughed about it all because he was so witty.’
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Their mutual respect and affection lasted long after she had left Paris. Indeed, when she found the going tough at the Royal Ballet, she would speak to him on the telephone. ‘He used to say, “So you understand me now,”’ she remembers, laughing again. ‘He was fantastic – a sacred monster.’
When Guillem talks about her time with the Royal Ballet, she reveals a mixture of joy and frustration. She loved the company’s repertory, but she clashed repeatedly with the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, then treated almost like a god by his colleagues. She loved dancing in some of his ballets, such as Romeo and Juliet and Manon. But she expressed her dislike of other works, such as The Prince of the Pagodas, which he choreographed in 1989.
‘I didn’t like it,’ she says bluntly. ‘I did it, I changed a few things, I thought it was stupidly made. He must have thought that I had a big ego because he said I was a boring French star or something like that. I think he didn’t realise who I was as a person, as a girl.’
Guillem came to the Royal Ballet because she had been guaranteed the right to make her own choices. ‘Why should I leave Paris Opera and do the same thing at the Royal Ballet, be dependent, be told you do this, you do that? I said, “Mais non.” That is what they didn’t like.’ What drove her then, what drives her still, is a desire to explore every corner of dance, and to share her discoveries with an audience.
Nowhere is this truer than in her famous ability to raise her leg into a perfect six o’clock position – a move that scandalised some critics in its breach of traditional leg heights, but which transformed ballet. ‘Before me, there was a dancer in the Paris Opera who was even more supple than I was,’ she says. ‘But she used that facility with no sense and no taste. I was trying to use my leg not in a vulgar way, not as a trademark, but when it was good to do it.’
All her passion has been devoted to this idea of making dance communicative, involving art, not a set of historical steps. ‘Maybe my vision of ballet was not a real one. I was living it, I was enjoying it, I was doing what I wanted. I had pleasure in the relationship I had with the audience and I was trying to be intelligent at the technical level I wanted, and to convey the emotions I wanted. Romeo and Juliet, Manon, Giselle – they are not stupid stories. They have fantastic characters. They have a big package of emotion. Dance should touch people.’
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She sometimes felt isolated, but it didn’t matter. She had friends outside the company and a partner in the shape of the photographer Gilles Tapie, now her husband. ‘I was going, coming, living, rehearsing, dancing, living again. It was too tiring to think of pleasing everybody. I didn’t really care. I don’t regret it. I learnt a lot.’
In a rehearsal room at the headquarters of English National Ballet, in a mews behind the Royal Albert Hall, Sylvie Guillem is creating a new work to take on her final tour. Young dancers on their way to their own rehearsals peer through the windows of the raised walkway above, watching as she repeats a complex sequence of steps over and over again until she masters them.
She sets an inspiring example of dedication: she is always the first in the room, and she is usually the last to leave, mapping the movement in her mind. Today she is creating a new piece with Akram Khan about the relationship between nature and technology. It is a complex theme, and the choreography is intricate, ambitious – and fast.
‘It’s the speed that kills me,’ she says, collapsing, legs apart, folding her body forward from the waist to catch her breath. But you can see the pleasure she takes in the process of making a new piece. ‘I like creation even if it is a bit difficult. It is always very exciting.’ Since 2007, when she became an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells, she has commissioned choreographers she admires to make work for her.
It was inevitable that when it came to a final tour, it would be these choreographers she turned to. ‘I thought, “Let’s do the last show with people I really enjoy working with.”’ So in addition to Khan’s contribution, Russell Maliphant has fashioned a new duet for Guillem and Emanuela Montanari; Forsythe provides Duo, a duet for two male dancers, and the programme ends with Bye, Mats Ek’s poignant solo to Beethoven’s final piano sonata.
Although in performance Guillem looks as effortless as ever, the discipline and effort required are immense. She ends most days in rehearsal limping and clutching ice packs to her bruised knees and hips. ‘I have to build up stamina, doing it again and again. It is painful, but each time you go a little bit further, you feel it is a little bit easier. It is like banging yourself on the head until you don’t feel the pain anymore,’ she says, laughing. ‘It’s the only way.’
Sylvie Guillem on her career-defining performances
She is trying to treat this tour like any other, to concentrate on making it the best she can. But every night will be saying goodbye. When she premiered the bill in Modena in April, the high tiers of the Luciano Pavarotti Teatro Comunale were packed. At the end Guillem stood centre stage, taking the applause, smiles, and sadness passing across her face. ‘The curtain calls are very emotional,’ she says.
It will be a strange year – and she doesn’t yet know what will happen afterward. Perhaps she will campaign for the environmental causes – such as the marine conservation organisation Sea Shepherd and the seed foundation Association Kokopelli – that have increasingly involved her in recent years; perhaps she will have some engagement with the creative world. ‘If an idea comes and I am attracted to it, I will do it. I will not grab on to things because I am afraid to be with nothing. This again, I will have to learn. To see life differently.’
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