‘I totally believed I would die at the end’
Sixty years on, Dame Monica Mason tells Mark Monahan what it was like to star in ‘The Rite of Spring’
Monica Mason was just 20 years old when, early in 1962, she found herself plucked from the Royal Ballet’s corps to star as the ill-fated Chosen Maiden in Kenneth Macmillan’s The Rite of Spring. “At that age, I had phenomenal energy,” she says, in an attempt to explain why the great choreographer “chose” her. “I mean, there was no stopping me. I was like a truck at full speed.”
She describes working with Macmillan on his Rite – a complete reimagining of the famous 1913 Stravinsky/nijinsky creation, which premiered 60 years ago tomorrow – as “this incredible collaborative thing” where it was impossible to tell whether it was choreographer or dancer who had come up with any given step. But what on earth was it like to perform it? Exhilarating, draining, terrifying?
“Everything,” she says. “So, so, so exciting, so challenging always. When I first did it, I just started at the beginning and went through the ballet believing – totally believing – that I was going to die at the end. That I had to dance so full-out that I would die. Some nights, I would have more energy than others, but always there was this compulsion to drain every single drop out of yourself. And there were nights when I actually thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I died tonight? That would make the front page!’ ”
Mason, now 80, is terrific company: effortlessly regal, but also very warm and resolutely un-grand. She was born in Johannesburg in 1941 into a “very outdoorsy” family (her father was an accountant, while her mother brought up her and her younger sister, Brenda), and her childhood was, for some while, a happy one. Her interest in ballet was first pricked by an older cousin who took lessons, and also by a cultured family friend from England called Roy Fabian, who tantalisingly told her all about the world-class troupes he went to see in London.
At the same time, however, Mason had long been aware of the fundamental injustice that permeated her homeland in those days. She remembers the young black man, Daniel, who worked for them in the house, as “heaven”, and it bothering her as a child when she learnt that he saw his family, back in the countryside, only once a year. “I remember thinking, ‘Daddy’s here most of the time. And what is it like if your father’s never there?’”
By a cruel irony, Mason soon learnt exactly that for herself. Her own father died when she was 13, leaving her mother, still only in her mid-thirties, “very unsettled”. By now, though, the teenage “Mon” was showing a very considerable aptitude for ballet, and Fabian eventually told her mother, “‘If the teachers think Monica’s got talent, why don’t you think of coming to London? I’ll help you find a school for her, and for Brenda too.’ So we set sail, and we arrived in England in 1956.”
In 1957, Mason won a place at the Royal Ballet Upper School. One year later, at 16, she became the company’s youngest member, and was then promoted to soloist in 1963 and principal in 1968, excelling not only in the works of Macmillan but in the more dramatically charged roles in works as disparate as Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty and De Valois’s Checkmate. In 1980, she switched to administrative duties, and in 2002, took over from the ill-suited Ross Stretton (who showed little grasp of the company’s history or purpose) to become director of the Royal Ballet, where she proved a safe pair of hands right up to her retirement in 2012.
Throughout, Mason continued to coach (she still does, in fact, when her successor Kevin O’hare calls upon her, such as for The Firebird in 2012 and 2019). And back in 1987, Macmillan suddenly decided that he wanted two male dancers (Wayne Eagling and Simon Rice) to perform the Chosen Maiden, and asked if Mason would teach them. The Royal Ballet had long flipped between the sexes in the casting of certain prominent supporting “character” roles (such as the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella). But now, decades before such things were making headlines, British ballet suddenly had its first gender-fluid starring role. “Kenneth said, ‘Are you shocked?’ And I said, ‘I’m not shocked. I am surprised. What an amazing idea!’ ”
Since then, dance-theatre maestro Matthew Bourne has often reinvented the sexual politics of the 19th-century classics. Still, I put it to Mason that in choreography, casting and increasingly androgynous costumes, a lot of actual ballet – traditionally, the most chivalrous art form imaginable – now seems to be trying more and more to blur sexual distinctions.
“You can’t divorce the arts from life,” she says. “And I’m not in stiletto heels today! At one time, women wore skirts, and dainty shoes, and men wanted them to look pretty, and beautiful. Women dressed probably to please themselves, but it was the extension of a man’s fantasy. So, I think that it was a very straightforward fact at one point, a hundred years ago, that the ballet looked how it looked.”
Then, however, the Ballets Russes arrived, and everything started to get more interesting. “A hundred years ago,” says Mason, “people were already starting to pose those possibilities, at the same time as women were cutting their hair short and losing the bras and the corsets and so on – that 1920s look. So, I think it’s that life and art are very closely aligned. I think there’s a place for everything, as long as you’re aiming for excellence. If it becomes tawdry, or naff, then we all squirm and hate it.”
I put it to Mason that, these days, some do squirm at what they see as the Royal Ballet’s increasing neglect of the ultra-refined Ashtonian, or “English”, style at both the Royal Ballet and its feed school – especially among the girls – in favour of a more blandly anonymous, athletic and internationalist approach.
“Things inevitably change,” she says. “You know, it was once relatively easy to keep the Royal Ballet looking like the Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet looking like New York City Ballet, and so on. We didn’t exchange dancers. You didn’t see other dancers. There were no videos or films. We were incredibly different from one another. But once that changes, there’s no stopping it. So just as we now live our lives globally, so dancers inevitably will change.”
She seems not at all sentimental about this. “No,” she agrees, “I’m not. Because I think that anything that you try to ‘keep’, you’ll kill. You cannot stop something changing. Everything evolves.”
Talking of evolution, Mason acknowledges the literal leaps and bounds with which male dancing has developed in recent decades: “When we first saw Nureyev and Baryshnikov, we thought, ‘It’s not possible!’ They’re doing that at 16 in the School now.” And yet, she ends on a note of caution.
“One of my favourite tennis players growing up was Rod Laver,” she says. “He’d be wiped off the court now. I mean, Nadal would just eat him for breakfast. In those days, they played with an incredible skill. Style, wit, humour” – as it happens, decidedly Ashtonian hallmarks all – “But power? And I think one of the things one does want to protect with dancers is that it’s not acrobatics. It’s not gymnastics. It’s an art form. It’s dance. And it’s music. And it’s artistry. So, those are the things to protect. But we must not be afraid of pushing!”
‘We need to protect the idea that dance is an art form. It is not acrobatics’
The Royal Ballet’s ‘Swan Lake’ returns on Wednesday, and its new ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ opens on June 2. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk