Save the Last Dance for Covent Garden

<First published online in the New York Times, June 12, 2007>

LONDON, June 11 — On Friday night Darcey Bussell, the most internationally renowned and locally adored British ballerina since Margot Fonteyn, bade farewell to ballet and to the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, her home for almost all of her 20-year career. Flowers showered from high boxes beside the proscenium arch until they lined the apron of the stage; scores of bouquets were brought on by current and former dancers; cameras were held aloft to record the occasion; and the whole event was televised.

And how did Ms. Bussell react to all this? When Monica Mason, the company’s artistic director, joined the throng onstage, Ms. Bussell started to cry, clinging to Ms. Mason. She had just danced Kenneth MacMillan’s “Song of the Earth” (one of the first lead roles in her repertory). During the last half-hour-long song, the ballerina doesn’t leave the stage and implicitly pays farewell to love and life itself.

“That ballet says it all,” said Ms. Mason, who coached Ms. Bussell in the role and was its leading Covent Garden interpreter from 1966 to 1978.

Early in the 2006-7 season, Ms. Bussell let it be known that it would be her last. And yet the interval of her farewell never looked for a moment like a farewell until its ending. She tackled for the first time two of the most exacting of all Balanchine ballets, “The Four Temperaments” (dancing Sanguinic), and “Theme and Variations.” And Christopher Wheeldon choreographed a true ballerina role for her in “DGV (Danse à Grande Vitesse).”

None of her bloom has left her. Despite her long career and two children, Ms. Bussell looks girlish, innocent and as prodigiously endowed with ballet gifts as when New York first took her to its heart in 1991. When she danced in Mr. Wheeldon’s “DGV” in November, it seemed impossible that she was thinking of retirement. She made her entrance borne overhead by Gary Avis in a “Giselle” lift, arching up in a calm crescent; when she made her exit, it was in the same spectacular lift, but now with her arms fluttering in a soft ecstasy. You don’t expect so tall a dancer to stay aglow up there. Ms. Bussell made it look natural.

I thought I wanted her to say goodbye in a role more radiantly classical than that in “The Song of the Earth.” I had forgotten, however, her ability to reveal choreography anew. This ballet is an object lesson in Mr. MacMillan’s choreographic virtues and problems: he turns Mahler’s orchestral song cycle into his own series of expressionistic death-comes-to-each-of-us anecdotes, and sometimes he does this by overruling the music’s structure and sense.

Yet he repeatedly makes his “Song” real in terms of choreographic landscapes, patterning his dancers with a deeper use of stage perspectives than is found anywhere else in his work, and he sets his ballerina poignantly roaming, alone, through these paths and distances.

Ms. Bussell, simply doing the movements, drew your eye to each side-tilt of the torso, each yearning finger-to-toe arabesque, and became more vulnerable than any of the role’s most celebrated previous interpreters. More than once Mr. MacMillan has his ballerina standing still in profile, isolated, leaning right forward with her weight over the front of the foot — stillness as a gesture of ardent longing — but nobody has ever made this as clear as Ms. Bussell.

The last time she stands this way, she transforms what occurs: The music builds, she waits alone and then, still leaning ahead in profile, she rises, slowly, slowly, onto point, as if welling emotion were lifting her.

What follows, while the singer (“Die liebe Erde ...”) pours out long vocal phrases about the earth’s beauty, is the famous climax of the role: the ballerina travels rapidly across the stage, forward and back, gesturing right and left (until a final headlong collapse). Ms. Bussell made it seem newly minted, with those beautifully sensitive feet rippling more fully than any of her predecessors’.

No ballet company is more heritage-conscious than the Royal Ballet, and “The Song of the Earth” closed a “heritage” triple bill of ballets by the three choreographers who did most to shape the company’s style: Ninette de Valois (1898-2001), its founder (in 1931) and first director; and Frederick Ashton (1904-88) and Kenneth MacMillan (1929-92), its first two resident choreographers.

True to company character, the program also was the occasion of a 70th anniversary, an 80th birthday and a second farewell. (This was the company’s final performance at Covent Garden this season.)

Ms. De Valois’s ballet “Checkmate” is 70 this year. An overextended and repetitious piece of expressionism, it has theatrically appealing moments, especially in Arthur Bliss’s score and E. McKnight Kauffer’s designs.

These were dedicated to Beryl Grey, a celebrated long-term interpreter of its anti-heroine ballerina, the Black Queen. New York remembers her in other roles, above all as a definitive Lilac Fairy in “The Sleeping Beauty.” The Black Queen is a tall woman’s role: on Friday it was given an impressively severe performance by Zenaida Yanowsky, the tallest ballerina in company history.

The second farewell, that of the dancer Belinda Hatley, came in Ashton’s “Symphonic Variations.” Exemplary in her brio, her piquant feet and her clean style, Ms. Hatley is a more typically British dancer than Ms. Bussell, not least in her lively eyes and acting vivacity, and she has done first-rate service in a wide range of Ashton ballets. Though “Symphonic Variations” (1946) is an ensemble work for six dancers, and though no previous announcement was made of Ms. Hatley’s departure, she was given more than one solo bow.

“Symphonic Variations,” a dance masterpiece of English lyric poetry, was rightly revered until 1977 as the company’s signature ballet. After a period when the mothballs seemed to cling to its every revival, it has reached a new audience this millennium, with applause at Covent Garden often continuing after the house lights have come up.

Unforgettable in the ways it juxtaposes stillness with motion, motion with stillness — this is a ballet that many have drawn on as philosophy — “Symphonic Variations” shapes the physical lines of its individual dancers into stage geometries both distinctive and classic. I love the way it makes its dancers look ahead and then behind them in series, sometimes in midjump (future, past).

There are New Yorkers today who, like me, consider this one of their most beloved ballets. May the Royal Ballet bring it across the Atlantic soon.

@New York Times, 2007