Darcey Bussell: What makes a great dancer
Darcey Bussell explores the chequered life of her mentor, the legendary ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn
There is a tradition at the Royal Ballet Lower School: every morning, as young ballet students go through the foyer of White Lodge and pass the lifesize bronze statue of Dame Margot Fonteyn, they touch her middle finger for luck, making it shine much brighter than the rest of the statue. Decades after she last performed, Dame Margot remains the touchstone for British ballet.
She was our founding ballerina – a term that is accurate and appropriate. The founding of the Royal Ballet was based on a trio of extraordinarily talented and determined people coming together at exactly the right time: director Ninette de Valois, choreographer Frederick Ashton and ballerina Fonteyn. As if this was not enough, she then matched this accomplishment 20 years later by being one half of the most famous ballet partnership of all time, with Rudolf Nureyev.
When I was training, I was keen to understand what made Margot such a great dancer: how she managed to touch people, how she could reduce an audience to tears with one subtle move. I knew that no one, not even Margot, would make the claim that she was a great technical dancer; and though her figure and proportions were perfect, her feet definitely weren’t. How did Margot capture the imagination of the public and the hearts of the audience?
Very early in my career at the Royal Ballet, I had a unique opportunity to find out. In 1990, as I was rehearsing the role of Odette/Odile in Swan
Lake, my world of dance and Margot’s overlapped. This was my first three-act classic as principal, and the Royal Ballet arranged for Dame Margot to coach me.
I assumed that she was going to drill me hard on the finer points of technique – tips and tricks on head or hand positions. Instead, Margot gave me advice that stayed with me throughout my career. She impressed upon me that my job as a ballerina was, above all, story-telling; that every step I executed shouldn’t be focused on technique, but on telling the story. That’s how Margot made her audiences care – by drawing them into her story with every single movement.
Now that I’ve retired from ballet, I’ve found a different outlet for my own story-telling. I’ve been making documentaries about the real lives of people famous to us as stars of stage and screen; what I discover is that running parallel to their talented performing lives are personal lives of real humanity and of great interest, stories of human frailty, sacrifice, deep love, heartbreak, intrigue and even being involved in world events – and this is all applicable to Margot.
For all the iconic status she enjoyed in the world of ballet, when I met Margot in 1990 her real life could not have been further from the glamour of her stage career. Because, as well as coaching me, Margot was in London to attend a royal fundraising gala to raise much-needed money for her retirement in Panama. After a dazzling and unbelievably long career, Dame Margot had been living in poverty, alone and abroad. How had Britain’s greatest ballerina come to this?
That’s just one of the questions I set out to answer in my BBC One film about Margot Fonteyn. Making this film reminded me that Margot was a huge star decades before she met Nureyev. She was a famous ballerina before there was even a Royal Ballet; postcards of her were collectors’ items during the Second World War; her image appeared on the cover of
Time magazine in 1949; and she was appointed a Dame in 1956.
But even with regards to her partnership with Nureyev, we tend to forget how courageous a decision it was for Margot to dance with a man 20 years her junior. She was 42, already well past the age at which most ballerinas retire. In an interview later in her life, Margot describes having to take her courage in her hands to dance with him at all, even then suspecting that all eyes would be on him, that no one would be watching her at all. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
With Nureyev, Margot danced till she was 60 – more than 20 years beyond the age at which I chose to retire. And she didn’t always make herself popular with fellow dancers by doing so. Brilliant young dancers felt their careers were being sidelined in the glare of Margot and Rudy’s star appeal. It is still a sore point in the ballet world that when, in 1965, Kenneth MacMillan created
Romeo and Juliet for Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, the first-night cast in America had to be Fonteyn and Nureyev.
But why did Margot dance for so long? To find the answer to that question meant looking not at Margot the dancer, but at Margot the woman.
I discovered a personal life marked by tragedy and disappointment. Margot barely knew her father, and was dominated by her ambitious mother, Hilda. And though she yearned for romance and a family, she was unlucky in love. In her early career, she had a long affair with the married composer Constant Lambert, only for him to marry someone else after his divorce.
Margot was just 18 when she met and fell in love with the Panamanian Roberto “Tito” Arias, but he also let her down. And though they eventually married in 1955, when Margot was 37, that marriage brought both scandal and heartbreak. I went to Panama to explore the extraordinary story of how Margot came to be arrested in 1959 after taking part in a failed coup with her husband. And I also discovered that after that failure, Tito’s interest in other women became serial philandering.
And then there was the matter of money. Once married, Margot funded Tito’s political ambitions, and that meant she had to carry on dancing, putting incredible strain on her body. As her biographer Meredith Daneman says, Margot “didn’t mean to be an old ballerina”. But when Tito was shot by a rival in 1964 and paralysed from the neck down, it was Margot who paid for his expensive medical bills. All of which meant that by the end of her long career, all the money she had earned was gone.
When she eventually did retire, Margot cut almost all links with ballet. She lived out her last years with Tito in Panama, in a former cow barn with no telephone, in the middle of nowhere, acting as his nurse. Visiting her farm, I got to read the little accounts book in which Margot recorded their living expenses – counting every dollar they spent.
But what might seem like a tragic end, as far as Margot was concerned, was anything but. She wrote that this was the happiest time of her life. Marguerite Porter, who knew both Margot and her husband well, says that Margot always needed to be needed, and in this situation Tito needed her.
When we think about Margot, we assume that her most significant partnership was with Rudolf Nureyev. It wasn’t. For Margot, the partnership that mattered most in her life was with her husband. And that’s why, when I placed a rose on her tombstone, it wasn’t in Westminster Abbey or a lovely churchyard in rural England, but in a crypt in Panama. That’s where she wanted to be buried, next to Tito.
‘Though she yearned for romance and a family, she was unlucky in love’
Darcey Bussell: Looking for Margot is on BBC One on Tuesday at 10.45pm