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On a recent
train journey, I overheard a family doing a crossword. "Famous
ballerina" was the clue. "Darcey Bussell," they chorused.
It took them much longer to think of Margot Fonteyn. Bussell is
the outstanding British ballerina of her generation. When she was
just 19, the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan chose her to star in
The Prince of the Pagodas, his last full length ballet. She
guested at the Kirov in 1998 and, from 1993, with New York City
Ballet - where a notoriously demanding public welcomed her as one
of their own. Beyond ballet, she's appeared in fashion shoots for
Vogue, in advertising campaigns for American Express and
Mulberry. Onstage, she has extraordinary radiance; her long limbs
unfurl into effortlessly beautiful shapes, expansive and free. At
37, after two children, she still has a look of youth, of innocence.
When MacMillan chose her, she was a mould-breaking
ballerina for the Royal Ballet. British ballerinas had tended to
be small, with quick feet and a sense of drama. Bussell went against
the grain: tall and athletic, with a bounding jump, more at home
with movement than with acting. MacMillan's interest was surprising,
too - since, after a series of moodily neurotic
works, he turned to such an open, sunny dancer. Until his death
in 1992, he kept an eye on Bussell.
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"He'd ignore what the director
wanted," says Bussell, cheerfully, "saying, 'I want
her to do this.' I don't think I would have done things as
early as I did, without Kenneth. My fan! Even though he could
be a torturing fan. He'd always quiz me on things - he was
trying to see how much
someone had lived, how much they'd experienced." Throughout
her career, Bussell has always been held in the highest regard
by choreographers. Twyla Tharp exclaimed over her, while Christopher
Wheeldon has put her at the centre of several ballets. In
DGV (Danse à Grande Vitesse), his latest
work for the Royal Ballet, he has her carried in on high,
in a duet that celebrates her beauty of line. Bussell had
told him she wished she could do more new work.
"He said, 'Don't worry, Darce,
I'll put you in mine,'" she remembers. That sounds casual,
but his ballet clears a worshipful space around her.
Despite all this encouragement and attention, Bussell has
sometimes seemed immature. Her dancing can be glorious - or
unfocused,
particularly in dramatic ballets. Given a mime scene, she
can look like a
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good girl who has worked really hard on
this. There are dance fans who will tell you, categorically, that
Bussell cannot act. In fact, it seems to be a question of the right
role.
In Giselle, the most dramatic of the
19th century ballets, she shows an extraordinary freshness of response,
a close identification with her character. In Manon, she
looks too straightforward, altogether too nice, for the girl who
chooses diamonds over true love. Yet her death scene is terrific;
this Manon fights against death, feverish and desperate.
Still, Bussell's exceptional quality is the
sheer scale of her dancing. It's not just that her jump is high,
that her body is flexible. There's a sumptuous warmth to the way
she moves. At her best, she has the ease of a bird in flight; this
most stylized art form looks effortlessly natural. In person, Bussell
is friendly and conscientious, thinking over the questions or exclaiming
as she answers them. "I was, like, 'woah,'" she will say,
sounding like a teenager. But she's frank and serious in analyzing
her motives, ready to discuss the changes in her life. She married
Angus Forbes, an Australian banker, in 1997. They have two daughters,
Phoebe, born 2001, and Zoe, born in 2004. Last year, Bussell stepped
down as a full-time member of the Royal Ballet. Though she still
makes regular appearances with the company, she's planning her own
shows. In November she danced at Sadler's Wells, partnered by the
Kirov star Igor Zelensky.
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She became a guest artist, she
says, "to free up my life, so I have some more control.
It's my 20th year with the Royal Ballet. I wonder if I should
have done this earlier - because I have children, this lets
me direct things better. I still, often — it's my English
upbringing — say,
'Of course I'll do it.' I'd never say, 'I don't want to' or
'No, I should be doing that role.' I'm not, sadly, strong
enough in that way. And I felt honoured - it was my position
to help the company. But suddenly you become a guest artist,
and your position is to help yourself. But what gets tough
is having my kids. They grow up so fast. It pulls at the heartstrings
if you can't be there, because you've got a rehearsal at 6.30
pm. And you had a show the night before, so they haven't seen
you."
Guest status often comes at the
end of a dancer's career. At this point, you expect dancers
to focus on dramatic ballets, on roles that use charisma,
but don't expose fading technique. Yet Bussell is at a physical
peak, dancing with unshadowed splendour. This season, her
Royal Ballet repertory is hugely demanding. It's dominated
by Balanchine ballets - plotless works that need speed, clean
lines and strong feet. "Well, I still want to be challenged,"
she says. "It's not as if I just want easy work."
In The Four Temperaments, her dancing is
gloriously bold. Fast steps have a glinting precision. In
one series of jumps, the ballerina kicks up her legs as she
leaves the ground, arches
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her back as she lands. Bussell flies through
it. She moves with complete abandon, but every step is given full
weight, every pose fully stretched.
"It's one of the best scores out there, the music is fabulous,"
she says. "The steps are very challenging. And I've never done
it before. Even though I guested for three years at New York City
Ballet [Balanchine's own company], I didn't do some of those signature
pieces. For me, that style is very natural, very comfortable. "She
once said she'd stop at 35. At 37, she's
still here, having found dancing addictive. When I ask about retirement,
she shows the same to and fro, pulled in both directions. "I
can sort of see an end. You either do this full-on, or you don't do
it at all. That's the unfortunate thing about dancing — you have
this bug, but you can't maintain the stamina, the strength, the fitness,
if you're only doing shows occasionally. People will say, 'You don't
need to come in today, you haven't got a rehearsal.' But I do. I'm
not happy
unless I look right. I've become slightly more fanatical, more conscious
of that fact. I'm doing less than half the shows I normally do with
the Royal Ballet, and that's a shock. I'm doing the odd thing outside,
but I don't know how to keep it together. So, in theory, I'd like
to finish, this season, with the Royal Ballet." She's really
thinking about stopping? "Yes.
Monica [Mason, the Royal Ballet's director] was saying, 'No, don't
put a date on it.' A lot of dancers make comebacks, staying a little
bit longer."
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Several of her closest colleagues
have retired, including her regular partner Jonathan Cope.
"It's odd how you come to the end of an era. I
did so much with Johnny, and now he's coaching me! And my
coach, Donald MacLeary, is past retirement age. He's been
saying, 'I'm hanging in for you, Darce. I won't go until you
go.' The nice thing is that I don't have a chip on my shoulder.
I feel that I've done as much as I could do. I don't feel
that I've gone downhill at the end of my career. I couldn't
be luckier. If I can still be dancing after my second child,
that's amazing. So to finish in my 20th year is the icing
on the cake.
If this is her final season, she
adds, she'll give her last performance June 8 this year, in
MacMillan's Song of the Earth. "That's my dream.
It's a ballet that means so much to me. And my husband has
never seen me dance it. He was saying, 'Darcey, you should
be doing Manon, Romeo
for your last show, a full-length ballet' — but they're
not in the rep this year. And that would be another year under
the same strain."
Before then, though, she wants
new choreography. "If I can create a couple more pieces,
I'll be as happy as Larry." She'll get her wish. At the
Royal Ballet, she has DGV, while her Sadler's Wells
show will include a new work by rising choreographer Alastair
Marriott. The Sadler's Wells programme is dominated by Le
jeune homme et la mort, a
highly coloured dramatic work by Roland Petit. "It's
a unique piece," says Bussell, who has danced it in Italy
with Roberto Bolle.
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"When Igor heard about it, he said, 'I had no idea you'd done
that. Let's do it.' It's not done here - it's a role I would never
do with the Royal Ballet."
Made in 1946, it has a young man, a Bohemian figure in a Parisian
garret, confronting a female death. "It's so theatrical,"
says Bussell, happily. "It's incredibly rewarding for the dancer.
There's only two of you on that stage. I haven't done it with Igor
before, but we've both worked with Roland, and of course you learn
so much from the choreographer. It was fab. He
always wants a very tall girl for this — he wants her to be domineering."
A friend, she adds, came to see the show in Italy. "She came
up afterward and said, 'Darcey, I'm worried now. I think you're not
as nice as I thought you were.' And that's the idea I was trying to
get across."
In her 50s, still dancing, Fonteyn remembered saying that she didn't
want to be "an old ballerina." "Oh, isn't that great,"
says Bussell. "I'm glad she said that, because that's it. When
I was young, there was a principal who was about 35, and I just looked
at her, and thought, 'Such a shame, to be an old ballerina.' When
you're young, you're sort of invincible, you're not
conscious of your age, that doesn't come into it. So when you see
an old dancer, you notice their face under their stage makeup. And
then I realize, my God, people look at me like that now. But I don't
feel like that. I can't imagine being
the old ballerina."
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It's strange to hear Bussell, with
her perfect, unlined skin, talk about feeling old. But she
isn't kidding. "When I did A Month in the Country,
with Rupert [Pennefather] in 2005, I hadn't worked with such
a young guy in such an
intimate role for a while. He was only 24, which is perfect
for the ballet" — which shows an older woman's love
for her son's tutor — "but it was incredibly uncomfortable.
Your body doesn't seem to age, but your mind, how you feel
about yourself, does change — these insecurities come
in as you get older. And here was this beautiful young boy,
saying, 'Anything you want, Darce, I'll do it. I'll do it.'
Well, okay ... He'd take my hand, and I'd think, what lovely
hands he has - oh, my hands really aren't very nice, are they?
All those things. I was noticing everything about being the
older ballerina, which I just didn't feel before."
Yet she has some qualms about stopping.
"I felt slightly guilty to stop. If you still have the
ability, that is. People say, 'If I were you, Darcey, I would
be doing it until I was 80,' and you think, 'Well, I don't
think you would.' You can't mentally keep that standard, of
what you expect of yourself. It becomes something within
your life, it turns everything ... If I were more relaxed
about how I was — but I can't. You never want to be comfortable,
because then you're doing something wrong.
"I've done an art work that
is very physical, and it would be very weird for me not to
keep my body moving. It's like a clock you have inside you,
it's never going to stop until you die. When I had children,
I thought I could slow down. But I couldn't sit still. You
know, breastfeeding, having that discipline — you're
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supposed to keep still, to be calm for the
baby, but I would be saying, 'Let's go for a walk.' Poor thing, I
was dragging it to the playground before it was meant to be on a swing.
Having children is like going into a new book, a new page in your
life. But stopping what I've only ever known ... I wasn't ever any
good at anything else, I had to dance. It's strange to think of that
finishing, because that means something inside you has finished. You're
on to the new book." She laughs. "It had better have a good
title."
<end>
Reprinted from the Independent newspaper, London, England,
November 24, 2006.
[top]
"'...the
elegance,
the finesse,
the sensitivity
and sensibility.'"
Zdenek
Konvalina
Zdenek
Konvalina is a true danseur noble in a ballet world where
the very concept has almost been forgotten.
By Michael
Crabb
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It
was the Helsinki International Ballet Competition, the spring
of 2001. The stage of the modernistic opera house was almost
ablaze with technique — all anti-Newtonian jumps and
dizzying turns. Knowing the Finns, I'm sure they'd stored
extra fire extinguishers in the wings, just in case.
Overexposure to mindless pyrotechnics can be desensitizing.
I could feel it happening and stopped counting the pirouettes.
Then some real artistry emerged — technique given expressive
purpose. In the senior category, there was a lean, serious-looking
22-year-old Czech with a mop of dirty-blond hair, perfect
proportions and the most beautiful feet.
In classical work it was clear that Zdenek Konvalina had the
poise and breeding of a danseur noble. Everything was there
in perfect harmony, every move invested with meaning and significance.
Nothing was showy. More surprising was Konvalina's contemporary
work — loose-hipped, daring, witty and incandescent.
The choreography looked somehow familiar. I checked the programme:
Eddy Toussaint.
Seventeen years earlier, Toussaint had been at the first Helsinki
competition with Anik Bissonette and Louis Robitaille, stars
of his then popular Montreal company. Their performance of
Un Simple Moment won Toussaint the special
prize for choreography. Now here he was again in Finland with
an Eastern European protégé. The Helsinki competition
claims to reward artistry over technical virtuosity. Would
the jury hold true to the event's precept? They did. Konvalina
took the top prize, and after five sometimes problematic years
with Houston Ballet, became a welcome and needed addition
to the National Ballet of Canada's principal male ranks. Konvalina's
Toronto debut was in Artistic Director Karen Kain's restaging
of a company heirloom, The Sleeping Beauty. He'd danced
the role in Houston but not this 1972 Nureyev version. The
Great Defector typically expanded Beauty's prince into
a technical minefield. "It's quite a mountain to climb,"
observes Kain. "It's just one hard thing, then another
hard thing," agrees Konvalina.
His first performance, partnering Chan
Hon Goh, was a mixed success, a slightly tentative beginning
that built impressively. "I wish you'd seen his later
performances," Kain told me in December. "He gave
it more and more; the sheer life force he brought to it."
On November 22, Konvalina
was back in familiar territory, exploding with joyous buoyancy
into the third movement of Balanchine's Symphony in C,
a work he had danced before in Houston and Amsterdam.
The next day, Konvalina was tackling a role new to him, the
Messenger of Death in MacMillan's Song of the Earth.
Its technical challenges are considerable. More crucially,
would Konvalina grasp its emotional core? He nailed it —
and in
an extraordinarily personal, individual way. It looked like
no other Messenger I've seen. The next challenge came in December
when Konvalina embraced the evolving, central male role in
James Kudelka's The Nutcracker, one that
moves from the demi-caractère stable boy Peter of the
first scene to the last act's noble cavalier, this time partnering
Sonia Rodriguez. Later I discovered he'd been nursing an injury.
You'd never have guessed.
Zdenek Konvalina was born in the then Czechoslovakia, in its
second largest city, Brno, February 23, 1979. He arrived 10
minutes after his twin brother, Miroslav.
They had an aged father. He'd already, decades earlier, raised
three sons. It's a family joke that when his father was courting
his mother, now 60, he was older than his prospective father-in-law.
He died last summer at age 100. Konvalina was dancing in Tokyo
and unable to return for the funeral, but his restaurant manager
father, who liked to play the violin and trumpet, had long
been reconciled to his youngest son's decision to eschew a
business career in favour of ballet.
Of that art form, Konvalina, keen on soccer and athletics,
knew virtually nothing when at age nine he was recruited into
the Brno Conservatory. His culture-loving mother encouraged
him, but the clincher for Konvalina was the proffered chance
to become more independent of his twin brother and wear a
different uniform. "We got along, but even then I had
this independent streak and a strong, individual fashion sense,"
he says.
The Russian-dominated state ballet school was a gruelling
experience. "Pure hell," is how Konvalina describes
the early years. His teachers were more drillmasters than
nurturers of emerging artistic talent, and even when the Velvet
Revolution of November 1989 put an end to Communist rule the
training approach changed only slowly. He couldn't see the
purpose of it all. Konvalina always had questions. He was
accused of being lazy, told he wouldn't make it and almost
got kicked out. "I had to plead to be allowed to stay."
It was only in the later part of
the eight-year programme, when he began appearing in the corps
of the Brno State Ballet, that Konvalina became convinced
he wanted to be a professional dancer. He knew even then that
it probably would not be
in his homeland. By his mid-teens he'd been absorbing important
lessons from videotapes of famous foreign stars: Bruhn, Nureyev,
Baryshnikov, Dowell. Konvalina knew he wanted to discover
what made them so exciting to watch. Meanwhile, he was a diligent
academic student, learning German and French in addition to
rudimentary Russian. Under the Czech Republic's baccalaureate
system, he graduated at age 18 and, weighing his options,
decided to join the state company of Moravia-Silesia in Ostrava,
where he correctly assessed he would have a better chance
for rapid advancement.
By the time Toussaint arrived in 1997 to stage his Requiem
for the Czech troupe, Konvalina was a leading dancer with
several full-length roles to his credit. Toussaint was stunned
by the maturity of the young man's dancing, "the elegance,
the
finesse, the sensitivity and sensibility." It was the
start of a friendship that has kept them together ever since.
Toussaint returned early the following year for a lengthy
residency during which he restaged several more works. Konvalina
was already anxious to move on and was looking toward Germany,
but Toussaint convinced him to try his fortune in North America.
With Konvalina as the star, Toussaint engineered a tour in
the summer of 1999 for about 20 of the Ostrava company dancers
to the Festival des Arts des Saint-Sauveur to the north of
Montreal. By then, Konvalina had moved to Toussaint's home
in Florida, which became his base for two "crazy years"
of galas and guesting.
It was the ambitious Konvalina's decision to enter the Helsinki
competition. He planned to win and to use the prize to leverage
a place in a large American ballet company with the kind of
classical repertoire he favours. Shortly before,
American Ballet Theatre offered him a soloist contract, but
following his triumph in Finland Konvalina opted to become
a principal in Houston.
By
2001, Ben Stevenson, Houston Ballet's artistic director for
25 years, was already being eased out. Although Konvalina
appreciated his subtle coaching, Stevenson's heart was no
longer in the job and he was often absent. In 2003, Konvalina
had to prove himself to a new artistic director, Australian
choreographer Stanton Welch.
Konvalina's Houston years, however, were not wasted, even
if some observers believed Welch undervalued his talent. He
taught himself to paint — abstract oils on canvas —
while sidelined by injury. He learned many new roles and danced
Balanchine for the first time. He was acclaimed as Des Grieux
in MacMillan's Manon and with help from Welch's artistic
associate, Maina Gielgud, secured Maurice Béjart's
permission to dance Songs of a Wayfarer for a Houston
gala. Béjart was so impressed by the tape Gielgud sent
him that he then allowed Konvalina to add Seven Greek Dances
to his personal repertoire, even coaching him personally in
Lausanne.
Gielgud's presence was Konvalina's lifeline in Houston. Says
Konvalina, "We just clicked." Gielgud, once Welch's
mentor as Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet, recognized
Konvalina's rare talent immediately.
"Zdenek is a true danseur noble in a ballet world where
the very concept has almost been forgotten. He knows the history,
the culture, the tradition. He has intellectual depth. Yet
he is also exceptional in neoclassical and contemporary work.
That combination of abilities, I find, is really quite unusual."
Gielgud left after the 2004-2005 season, by which time Konvalina
was actively searching for a new job. He almost signed with
the Dutch National Ballet until hearing that Karen Kain had
assumed the directorship in Toronto. He knew her by
repute and, reading of her determination to reconnect the
National Ballet to its classical roots, Konvalina, encouraged
by Toussaint, decided it was Kain he wanted to work for. He
flew to Toronto in November 2005.
Kain watched Konvalina in class. "I was so impressed
by the incredible articulation of his feet and legs, by his
line, attack and co-ordination, by the beauty of his training.
I was delighted that he wanted to come here." They talked.
Each was favourably impressed. The negotiations began.
Gielgud believes Konvalina's best years are yet to come. "Zdenek
is only at the beginning of a voyage of discovery in terms
of how far his talent can take him, not only in terms of 'stardom'
but, more importantly, in artistic freedom within the classical
framework."
How long will Zdenek Konvalina's voyage keep him in Canada?
Audiences here have reason to hope it will be a long time.
"It is not my goal," says Konvalina, "to be
a huge star, but I hope I have the humility to become a true
artist." <end>
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