On first meeting, in her sleek navy tracksuit and immaculate trainers, Sylvie Guillem, the superstar ballerina, looks like the pro gymnast she used to be as a girl. A star is always a star, but her relationship to the firmament in which she shines is mutable. Balletomanes who have marvelled at the way Guillem’s astounding physical presence can dominate a stage would be surprised to find that, in person, she is slight, almost vulnerable. Until you shake her hand. Guillem’s steely clasp, combined with a risque smile and the shy but penetrating look that quizzes you from behind a mane of wild red hair, hints at the dance diva of her reputation.
Today, perhaps because she has just announced her retirement (she will be 50 this week), the woman once known as “Mademoiselle Non” is in an affirmative mood: chatty, reflective, candid and fun, striking a séduisant note of collaboration throughout the rigmarole of a press interview.
There is, however, no point in asking Sylvie Guillem about her childhood dream of becoming a ballerina, because she didn’t have one. When the young Sylvie was growing up in the working-class suburbs of Paris where her father was a car mechanic, her teenage future had only Olympic dimensions. There was, she says, “no music at home. I was a blank duck.”
Her mother was a gymnastics teacher. Aged 11, Guillem was a junior member of the French national team, training for Olympic glory. Dance, she says, “was on another planet. I had never a thought of training to be a ballerina. I was a normal child. I never dreamed of the tutu. In fact, I landed at the Paris Opera Ballet school by… by hazard.” Guillem’s English is good, with a strong French accent, but occasionally she supplements the conversation with her mother tongue.
Guillem’s gym coach had friends at the Paris Opera Ballet school, and he arranged for his pupil to swap the parallel bars for the barre. Both sides hoped an exchange programme between young dancers and gymnasts would achieve a mutually enhanced performance on stage and in the arena. Guillem, who was shy and rebellious, hardly saw it like this. “I did one year, and I really didn’t like it.”
In the gym, she was free and happy; ballet school was too much like boot camp. “When I was doing gymnastics, I was playing. It was fun. The ballet was not fun at all. Yes, I agree you must have discipline, but you don’t need to be a witch. You can’t teach a child like that. Three times a week, I went back to train as a gymnast. Then I was happy.”
However, by the end of her first year, her teachers had spotted her potential – and she had discovered her vocation. “They asked me if I wanted to be in the end-of-term show,” she says. “I thought: I’m not finding this ballet school exciting. Let’s try the show.” Here her expression takes on a passionate intensity. “One foot on stage. Curtain up. That was it… The relation I had with the audience, it was fantastic. It is always so strange. You dance, and there is an answer – that is always true. You put me in a room with people and I hide in the corner; put me on stage and I’m different. It’s difficult to explain.”
Is that still true?
“Yes.” Another shy smile. “Still.”
Guillem is so composed and easy-going today that it’s hard to imagine her at odds with the demands of performance. But the more she talks, the more you see a woman, and an artist, who has never had it too easy. She has always been a loner, with a fierce sense of her integrity, and an awkward relationship with the world.
“Wilful”, “demanding” and “egocentric” are the words that surface recurrently in the reports of her career as “the most exciting dancer in the world”. Her strong sense of herself may also come from her father’s Catalan origins. “My grandmother,” she exclaims at one moment. “Now she was something; she was terrible. I am a bit nicer than she, but I didn’t have the hard life she had.”
As a child, Guillem was awkward, shy, and deeply attached to her parents. Ballet school meant weekly boarding. Every Sunday evening, returning to the discipline of the ballet class, she would cry her eyes out. “It was a nightmare,” she recalls.
It was her mother who inspired a crucial career turning-point for Guillem. “She said: ‘Listen, this can’t go on. If you are really sad, we stop, and we don’t speak of the ballet again. If you want to do it, you have to change.’ So that day I said to myself, ‘That’s it. I am not crying any more.’ After that, I decided to separate, and all my life I have drifted away from my home, and done all these different things, like living in England, dancing with Rudolf…”
Looking back now, across 39 years of dancing, in roles such as Giselle and Odette/Odile, Guillem can point to some extraordinary high points. She can even look back on her younger self with nostalgia. “There’s a period in your life when you have no brain,” she says. “You think you are immortal, and everything is energy. As you get older, you want to slow down, and use your brain to analyse your performance.”
But in ballet, unlike theatre, the music always sets the tempo. There can be no slowing down. As she says, “All I can do is stop.” And yet a dancer’s biological clock is always ticking. At the Paris Opera Ballet, retirement is mandatory at 42. By 2006, having moved to Sadler’s Wells in London to pursue contemporary ballet, Guillem was into injury time. She has continued to defy the odds for a further decade, and at several points in this conversation she expresses a keen awareness of time.
In retrospect, the moment when the ageing Rudolf Nureyev joined the Paris Opera Ballet as dance-director, in 1983, is crucial. His best years were behind him, and his health was failing, but he and Guillem, who became his protegee, forged a powerful artistic alliance. She remains one of the few dancers still at work today who has actually performed with “Rudi” on stage.
Guillem becomes animated with memories of her days (aged just 19) as Nureyev’s precocious “Etoile”, the youngest-ever dancer to occupy this coveted role at the Paris Opera Ballet.
“When Rudolf arrived, he had this huge reputation. He was no longer dancing so well, but I could see the difference between the dancer and the man. He had vision. He was passionate, intelligent and generous. He helped all the young people in the Paris Opera Ballet.”
In Nureyev, Guillem found a kindred soul. “He taught me that you must stick to what you believe, even if it’s hard. That was a good lesson – to learn that you have to fight.” She smiles, modestly. “I won’t compare myself to Rudolf,” she adds. “We clashed because I respected him. He was really quite shy, and I am too. I had trouble to communicate, and so did he. With us, it always goes to the wall: we had no diplomatic language. That was the problem. Things that make me angry and sad, I cannot hide. It’s not because I want to be a rebel, it’s my instinct. When something touches me deeply, I really have to react. So we had clashes. But I loved him, yes. He had shiny eyes. He was very clever, and he knew what he was doing.”
Guillem, under Nureyev, now performed all the leading roles in the classical repertoire, but she has never been at ease with classical formality. “Technique?” she queries, dismissively. “I don’t care. Classical technique… for me, it’s not interesting.” Increasingly, she preferred to explore modern dance. In 1987 she performed the lead role in William Forsythe’s contemporary ballet In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. For Guillem, there is only dance. To her, “modern” and “classical” are largely labels.
By 1989, Guillem had had enough of a restrictive ballet regime. “I said to myself, so long as I am happy I will go on. If something is wrong, I stop. I can always leave.”
She was in the middle of contract negotiations in Paris when the Royal Ballet made a dramatic counter-bid. “I wanted a contract where I could choose the productions and my [dance] partner. I wanted my own say. Perhaps I was a little bit Latin in my approach to things.”
Her move rocked Paris culture, and her defection was debated in the National Assembly. The arts minister went before the TV cameras to declare “a national catastrophe”. Guillem was unmoved. For her, following in the footsteps of Nureyev, the Royal Ballet was “a new start”. Her new contract gave her the right to choose her repertoire. This freedom, and her willingness to refuse certain roles, won her, from artistic director Anthony Dowell, the soubriquet “Mademoiselle Non”. Once, this relationship had tensions; now, she has only praise for Dowell, whom she describes as “one of the finest dancers ever”.
At the Royal Ballet, Guillem became a ballet superstar, and a game-changer. She used her celebrity power to promote the choreography of Akram Khan, Mats Ek, and Russell Maliphant, and still talks of “doing what I do with pride and passion”.
There have been some diva moments. In 2001, Guillem astounded French Vogue when, responding to a modelling commission, she submitted a set of portraits (taken by her photographer husband, Gilles Tapie) in which she appeared without makeup, stark naked. Perhaps the only safe prediction about Guillem is that she will be always unpredictable – contrarian, her enemies would say. In the course of this interview, she occasionally seemed almost Anglo-Saxon in her determination to speak her mind. She has lived in London for nine years, mostly in Notting Hill, and has made many English friends.
“I love England,” she exclaims. “It is so civilised.” She favours London, as a great city with many parks in which she can ride her bike, and be free. When she retires she will live in Switzerland (where she has a house), and Italy, whose culture she adores. And how will she cope with retirement? Guillem makes a wry face. “Who knows? I just want to let it come to me. I need time to look and see. I am very interested in nature.” Guillem has already added her voice to the campaigns of the environmental lobby Sea Shepherd. She pauses again to contemplate her future. “I think it’s exciting, but it’s going to be hard. I’m going to miss the pleasure of the stage a lot.”
Her last dance – and when she says there will be no comebacks, you believe her – will be a performance of Mats Ek’s poignant valedictory solo, Bye, in Japan on 30 December as part of her final programme. “When I think of it,” she concludes, “I am already crying.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion