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video of Sylvie Guillem performing
Sylvie Guillem has a way of talking – direct, drily witty, French-accented –
that is immensely likeable. She sits, an elongated woman warrior, her
famously limber legs crossed like precision weapons and an amused gleam in
her eyes. The long stick with which she practises her newest martial-arts
discipline, aiki-jo, lies nearby, propped across her Brompton folding
bicycle. “Oh, I had to insist,” she is saying, sending up her image as She
Who Must Be Obeyed, the ballerina formerly known as Mademoiselle Non, whose
every demand would send the Royal Ballet obediently scurrying.
What did she have to insist? That the choreographer Russell Maliphant should
banish all thoughts of stopping as a dancer. He had already created a piece,
Broken Fall, for Guillem and the Ballet Boyz, Michael Nunn and William
Trevitt. Now she wanted him not only to choreograph, but to dance with her –
so he did. Maybe that is why their programme is called Push. Created in
2005, it comes to the Coliseum for its fourth London run this spring.
It’s a rare occurrence when contemporary dance performed by just two people
sells out houses. But the seamless, mesmerising quality of Maliphant’s
choreography, combined with the world’s most exciting ballerina, is an
astonishing experience. Guillem becomes a lanky boy-girl, enclosed in
sculpted light and punctuating her liquid moves with sudden sharpness, like
exclamation marks. Or she is half woman, half dragonfly, arms windmilling in
a strobo-scopic crescendo. This is dance of unique achievement, fusing bold
radicalism with total accessibility and leaving you wanting more.
Push, like Sacred Monsters, Guillem’s collaboration with the Kathak dancer
Akram Khan, has toured widely here and abroad. Is it the glittery ballerina
name that brings the crowds? Maybe. But they are not disappointed, staying
to offer an ovation at the end. Only once during Sacred Monsters, in a
4,000-seat theatre in Greece, did a spectator interrupt. “It was at a point
when I do some talking,” Guillem recalls. “He said, ‘Why don’t you dance?’
And I said, ‘Well, I thought that’s what I’d been doing for 20 minutes
already.’ Maybe he was waiting for the Sylvie Guillem with the diadem and
tutu, and he was disappointed. And I said, ‘If you don’t like it, I’m sorry.
I could sing if you want.’ So the audience started to laugh and applaud.”
She could have carried on with the diadem-and-tutu roles she does so well. But
she has always broken away for fresh challenges. Contemporary dance might
not be entirely new to her – she has been performing various forms of it for
years – but it does require a determined commitment to rethinking the body’s
mechanics. “Russell links together simple gestures to make beautiful poetic
phrases,” she says. “We are not used to simplicity in the ballet world. But
here, suddenly, a simple gesture takes on an importance, so that it’s not
just a nice picture, but something that talks.” The focus in ballet is the
other way round: more on external shape, less on inner impulse. “Someone
will teach you a movement, and you, as a classical dancer, will imitate,
perfectly, but it will be an empty image. And, for me, imitation – whether
in ballet or in contemporary dance – has never been enough. A movement has
to have life, a personality.”
Guillem is notorious for her strong-willed, maverick independence of mind.
Right from her early days at the Paris Opéra Ballet, she felt a certain
distance from received ideas. She was the most talented pupil ever to emerge
from the company’s school, a freak, a preternaturally gifted phenomenon who
in 1984, aged just 19, was promoted to the highest company rank, étoile.
But she would question certain assumptions. “Teachers don’t want to change.
They would say, ‘It was set like this, you should do it like this.’
Classical ballet depends too much on people without vision, who just copy.
It was only a few people who would say to me, ‘Yes, that’s not a bad idea. I
didn’t do it like this myself, but maybe you should try.’” It wasn’t about
being a rebel, but about resisting mindless conformity. When, in 1998, she
coached the Finnish National Ballet in her new version of Giselle, she
introduced a freer approach, allowing dancers to make adjustments for their
own bodies. “They were a bit surprised. And I was surprised that they were
surprised.”
She laughs. The practical, combative manner is all of a piece with her
functional, casual clothes, trainers and spectacles, hung around her neck
for convenience. No fuss, no pretentiousness, no glamour, no vanity. For
her, celebrity is just a means to power, allowing her to work the way she
wants. She and the Royal Ballet divorced last year, ending an 18-year
relationship. “I know they said I left the company because I didn’t want to
do the big classical roles any more, but that’s not true.” After all, there
were plenty of other possible roles. Instead, it was her dislike of the
present directorate, she says, that spelt the end. “I did cope with it for a
while, but what was the point? I don’t want to ruin my life by feeling
angry, so I left.”
In 1989, at 24, Guillem had made an even more dramatic break, leaving, amid
great furore, the Paris Opéra Ballet and her boss, Rudolf Nureyev. She
arrived at the Royal Ballet as a renegade guest star. Her extraordinary
technique thrilled and angered British audiences in equal measure. Some
thought her extreme flexibility a sensational vision of the ballet of the
future; others, the traditionalists, accused her of unclassical distortion.
Now even her detractors have been won over, eulogising her expressiveness
and range.
Her schedule is full until the end of next year. As well as touring Push and
Sacred Monsters, she has been in Japan performing a programme that includes
a Swan Lake extract. (The classical roles have not been completely
discarded.) She is also preparing another documentary film and a second book
of photographs, as well as working on a new piece with Maliphant and the
Canadian actor-director Robert Lepage. “I saw one of Robert’s shows in
Sydney and went backstage and said, ‘If, one day, you need a dancer, I’m
here.’” Sadler’s Wells is the co-producer, and the piece is pencilled in for
next year.
It is appropriate that Guillem should be an associate artist of Sadler’s
Wells: London has been her base since she first arrived. “I have friends
here, and I like this town,” she says, “apart from too much traffic and not
enough cycle lanes.” If she doesn’t get stopped for speeding through a red
traffic light, it takes her 25 minutes to cycle to Sadler’s Wells from
Notting Hill, where she shares her flat and garden with her long-term
boyfriend, the photographer Gilles Tapie.
Guillem stands up and prepares to leave. Her long, rangy body has the look of
a Masai. “People say I’m too skinny, and I try to gain weight, but I can’t.
I love to eat – it is my great passion – but I think it’s my metabolism. My
grandfather was like that, tall and very thin.” She is pulling a cap down
over her head, twisting a scarf round her neck. On her bike, she also wears
a pollution mask and sunglasses. No wonder the police stopped her in St
James’s Park during President Bush’s visit to Buckingham Palace: “I had to
half undress so they could see I was not a terrorist.”
Far from it: she is festooned with honours from the French state, among them
the Légion d’Honneur, which she received from President Mitterrand at the
Elysée Palace. “Already, at that time, he was ill. He arrived a bit late,
and we were all in line, 10 men and women, from different fields.” It was
rather impressive, the way she tells it. “He stopped at each person to pin
the medal and made a small speech, from memory, for each of us, a resumé of
what each had done.”
Her honorary CBE was more low-key, delivered by the then culture secretary
Tessa Jowell. Guillem didn’t know she had been awarded it until the Royal
Ballet’s assistant director congratulated her. “I said, ‘For what?’ And she
said, ‘You’ve got the CBE. Didn’t you know?’ She explained that usually they
write to people, but I received nothing.” I tell her it’s exceptional for a
foreigner to be awarded a British honour. “Well, I am very pleased. It’s
just that it looked like a mistake, as if they got the wrong person.” She
laughs. “Maybe it really was a mistake.”
Booking for Push, at the Coliseum, WC2, is now open; call 0871 911 0200 or
visit www.eno.org
