Ballet’s most unlikely star takes her final bow

PARIS: Everything was against Marie-Agnes Gillot becoming a ballerina — never mind a great one.

She was too tall, broadshouldered and most of all, she had a double scoliosis, which sometimes gives her a hump when her back is swollen.

Yet the hump disappears as if by magic when Gillot takes to the stage.

“I have a limited time to stay standing, carried by my muscles and myself,” said the star, who accepts “that with time passing I’ll be going back into my corset, unless I accept the operation, the metal rod in my back”.

On Saturday night Gillot was to close an extraordinary chapter in modern French ballet when she took her final bow at the Paris Opera Ballet in “Orpheus and Eurydice”.

The last great French ballerina of her generation, she hid her problem from her teachers after leaving home at nine to go to ballet’s elite school in the French capital.

“When I arrived I thought who are these nasty skinny ladies?”

People before me who fell (during their final test) and people after too went on to be principal dancers while I could not make the smallest error. — Marie-Agnes Gillot, ballerina

“I see myself as a good soldier with a lot of discipline who has embraced all types of dance and never given classical or contemporary priority.”

Gillot, 42, has been branching out into film, fashion — working with Chanel, Hermes and Repetto — and art in recent years, even saving her sweat in little jars for one project.

She also has a collection of poems in the pipeline.

But as the only female French choreographer to have her work staged at the Paris Opera, dance still fires her.

She is passionate about righting wrongs in dance education, telling AFP that some elite schools “stifle” young dancers creativity.

“I would develop children’s curiosity by bringing them to the theatre to see great actors... or even to fashion shows where they’ve made clothes out of bin bags so that they have creativity in them instead of just commands and orders all the time,” she said.

“We cannot break 10,000 children for one little prodigy. We have to cherish their imagination and not rein it in,” she told Paris Match magazine earlier.

With her warm, throaty laugh, personality is not something Gillot lacks.

Having spent the last three months tearfully “grieving” her exit from an institution where she has spent most of her life, “now I just want to get on with it”, she laughed.

Still there are memories that will remain with her forever, the greatest of which was “dancing with my son in my tummy at seven months. I would lift up my leg and he would get in the way. But it is amazing what the body can do.” — AFP