Clinging to the barre in a rehearsal room at the Royal Opera House, Martha
Wainwright looks down at her feet in astonishment. The Canadian-born singer-
songwriter, performing in the Royal Ballet’s production of Bertolt Brecht
and Kurt Weill’s 1933 ballet chanté The Seven Deadly Sins,
seized the black shoes of her co-star Zenaida Yanowsky at the end of the
rehearsal and is now teetering perilously en pointe. “And you can actually
stand in these?” she asks the beautifully leggy principal dancer with
amazement.
This looks like the very embodiment of a culture clash: before her involvement
in this production, Wainwright had never seen a ballet, nor had Yanowsky
heard Wainwright’s folk-inspired, emotionally raw music. The choreographer
Will Tuckett had admired the singer’s self-titled 2005 debut, however, and
approached her to perform in the ballet. She plays Anna I, the pragmatic
storytelling sister from Louisiana who pimps out her silent sibling Anna II
(Yanowsky) as they move through seven American cities, unearthing a seedy
netherworld of motel sex and exploitation. It is a bleak commentary on
modern consumerism.
The new version had its debut in the spring of 2007 and Wainwright is now
returning to the Royal Opera House for a second run. “Because it’s Kurt
Weill, it doesn’t have to be sung by an opera singer,” she explains. “And
when Will spoke to me about singing it I said: ‘Oh my God, that would be
great — can I do some movement?’ Because obviously it would be a trip. When
it was sung by Lotte Lenya or other people, often the singer just sat on the
side of the stage, perhaps holding a microphone. But although I move through
the dancers it’s very important for me to stay out of the way, otherwise
I’ll get killed.”
Just as the ballet shoes sit oddly with Wainwright’s jeans, so the worlds of
modern rock music and ballet seem like a strange mismatch, the formality and
rigour of one clashing with the laissez-faire hedonism of the other.
Wainwright smiles. “Going on stage you do think, ‘What do I have to offer?
Why do I deserve to be here?’ because all these people here have been
working day and night, 20 years plus. And I’ve been at the pub a lot of the
time! These are athletes of a really high standard and quality. I depend on
costume.”
There are, however, more similarities between their different art forms than
the stereotypes might allow. Yanowsky, who gave birth only three and a half
months ago, talks gravely about how many dancers go off the rails once
encroaching age forces them to retire. “At 38, we are pretty much cooked and
done and that’s quite a young age to finish a whole career,” she says. “Most
of the ballerinas I have met, very few come out with their head on top of
their shoulders. Most of them are slightly odd because they need that buzz —
that drug — that the stage gives you. And there’s nothing you can do about
it because you are done, you are old, full stop.”
Wainwright has also discovered that the intense physicality of the dancer’s
life is at odds with the ethereal cliché. “It’s all about sex, isn’t it?”
she observes gleefully to Yanowsky, who grins wryly. “Rock musicians go out
a lot, go on the road, meet a lot of people. Dancers are in here all day
long and they’re very youthful and kind of beautifully naive in some ways.
It’s like high school with a bunch of gorgeous gazelles. You see a lot of
big jockstraps and bums and you’re touched everywhere and the body is
completely a machine.”
Yanowsky laughs. “We have no boundaries, basically!”
The singer admits that the first run of The Seven Deadly Sins had been
“a really steep learning curve for me”. First time out, some critics
wondered if her voice, even amplified, was suited to filling the Royal Opera
House or fleshing out Brecht’s sharp-edged satire; this time, however, Debra
Craine, the Times dance critic, was among those who thought that her
performance had “grown in stature”.
Certainly, watching the singer stalk through the dancers’ flying limbs on
stage, a tough, physically confident presence in a beehive and a black
dress, there is no sense that she is finding her feet. “I did what I could
and sang as best as I could,” she says, “but when I came back a second time
I wanted to try and add some subtlety to the singing and become a bit more
comfortable, a bit more of a character.”
“Second times are always much more comfortable,” Yanowsky agrees. “You can add
more colours to the choreography; emotionally, it just grows; you dare to do
new things.”
Martha is not the only Wainwright to jeté across art’s high-low boundaries.
Her brother Rufus, best known for his baroque pop, is about to start
rehearsing his long-awaited opera in Manchester, where it will open at the
city’s International Festival in July. He’s coming to see his little sister
perform on this night. “My brother Rufus has been an opera fan since he was
12 years old. That’s all the music he listens to essentially and you can
hear that a little bit in his pop music,” Wainwright says. “But what I’ve
heard of the opera is the real deal, it’s very serious and very exciting.
It’s so great that both of us have been able to break into the classical
world — and also not be able to escape each other.” She laughs. “I’m
following him wherever he goes whether he likes it or not! He’s going to
have to buy some ballet shoes now.”
“I’ll give him my pointe shoes,” Yanowsky offers. “Oh,” Wainwright eye-rolls,
“he’ll be in them in two seconds.”
As the two women talk, it becomes clear that there is a happy synthesis here,
fittingly, as they’re playing sisters who are “essentially supposed to be
the same person”. Wainwright is not only the sister of Rufus but the
daughter of folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III;
Yanowsky, brought up in France and Spain, comes from a family of dancers and
trained with her parents.
They agree that The Seven Deadly Sins retains its impact because, as
Wainwright asserts: “We are all prostitutes to a degree. Working for the
dollar. It’s kind of obvious — but that’s OK, it’s ballet!” They both laugh.
“In the end you get paid to show your body and give yourself — in a
nonsexual way,” Yanowsky agrees.
Do you ever resent the audience as a result? “I resent a bad audience who are
dead and don’t clap,” Wainwright shrugs. “Especially at the opera house;
they are very proper people,” adds Yanowsky, who spends much of the ballet
in some fairly risqué underwear. “The moment you get into your knickers they
are: ‘Oh my God . . .’ ”
“The great thing about Martha Wainwright,” Yanowsky confides, “is that there
is a new crowd coming to the Royal Opera House. Which is brilliant, it makes
the whole audience way buzzier. It’s a gamble and it’s paid off well.”
The Seven Deadly Sins continues at the ROH (020-7304 4000, www.roh.org.uk),
Feb 19-21
