Anthony Dowell at 78: February 16, 2021
1; 2; 3; 4. Many happy returns to Anthony Dowell (b.1943). Probably no dancer has meant more to me than he: I saw him in two ballets one evening in my first view of ballet at Covent Garden when I was eighteen; I went on to see him in world premieres of roles made for him by Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, and others; I saw him as partner to Antoinette Sibley, Lynn Seymour, Merle Park, Natalia Makarova, Gelsey Kirkland, Jennifer Penney, Lesley Collier, Maria Almeida, and many more; I saw him as kings, princes, poets, spirits, lovers; I saw him change the nature of masculinity in dance. Ashton told me how fascinating it was to work with Dowell; MacMillan said on television that “All the superlatives” applied to him.
I used to wonder quite what my intense and intimate emotion about Dowell was - and only after I was no longer young did I realise that Dowell had embodied onstage everything that I myself had wanted to be: grace, lyricism, poetry, wit, androgynous allure, refinement, courtesy, beauty.... No, I never succeeded, of course, and yet watching him was in some way like watching some essence of myself.
There are steps that forever belong to Dowell: piqué steps on demi-point; the arabesque penchée; the flowing arabesque in sustained fondu. In “A Month in the Country”, he would begin his role by stepping out of a seemingly casual triple pirouette into développé into piquée arabesque penchée; in “The Dream” he did a slow and seamless string of double pirouettes into penchée en fondu on alternate legs. Beyond that, he was the epitome of line: not line as something merely correct but as a quality of spirit and imagination that expressed itself in physical form. The same quality of three-dimensional line characterised his phrasing: he remains the only man I have ever seen who could present an entire heroic variation (say, in the ballroom scene of “Swan Lake” or the wedding scene of “The Sleeping Beauty”) in a single unbroken phrase, while in Hans van Manen’s “Four Schumann Pieces” he could - inexplicably, magically - dance, stop, sit, and then resume dancing as if resuming the same unbroken phrase; and all those phrases had texture, suspense, dynamic contrast, expansiveness, thought in action, and action in thought.
Is that praise enough? No. His partnering was superlative: one classic example is the “dead” lift in “A Month in the Country”, when he would pick up Vera (originally and unforgettably Denise Nunn) as she held an attitude on point, slowly raise her to chest height as he revolved in one circle, and then raise her above his head while he revolves again, all to a single musical line, with such naturalness that it was years before I ever realised that was a notoriously hard feat.
His least praised virtue was his stamina. Today, the lead male role in Ashton‘s “Symphonic Variations” is often known as the most killing role in the repertory, never leaving the stage and with a pas de deux of lifting the ballerina around the stage in a manège of chest-high floating lifts halfway through; Dowell, a left turner, would always do sequences of double air turns to the right in synch with the other men. Yet Dowell sometimes would dance that as the centrepiece or a triple bill in which he began as Troyte (in Ashton’s “Enigma Variations”), the only role that so impacted his muscles that he needed to give himself a barre afterwards, and in which he ended as the Bridegroom in “Les Noces”, a role in which Nijinska had rehearsed him in 1966 and in which deadpan peasant energy poured forth with a vast amount of bending of the torso and quickly ebullient jumps.
Mikhail Baryshnikov has spoken of the kindness shown him in 1970 by Dowell and Antoinette Sibley when he, Baryshnikov, was still with the Kirov. I remember how they both, Dowell in particular, would attend Baryshnikov’s later London performances, and how, later still, Dowell as director of the Royal Ballet made Covent Garden a haven for star dancers male and female, including Carlos Acosta, Julio Bocca, Fernando Bujones, Laurent Hilaire, Johan Kobborg, Irek Mukhamedov, Zoltan Solymosi, and more.
It is right to speak of Baryshnikov as the most miraculous male dancer of our day - and yet Baryshnikov has, rightly, spoken of Dowell (David Wall, too) as a male dancer from whom he knew he had much to learn. (He was referring to Dowell’s mastery of legwork and footwork. When it came to partnering, Baryshnikov mastered only minor fractions of Dowell’s mastery.) There remain in the repertory roles made for Dowell by Ashton, MacMillan, van Manen, and Antony Tudor, that tax any new incumbents ; they have permanently extended our sense of what male dancing is.
Tuesday 16 February
Anthony Dowell as des Grieux in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” (1974). Photo: Leslie E. Spatt.
Anthony Dowell as Siegfried in the Royal Ballet production of “Swan Lake”, dancing Rudolf Nureyev’s solo in Act One. Photo: Leslie E. Spatt.
Anthony Dowell as Siegfried in the Royal Ballet production of “Swan Lake”, dancing Rudolf Nureyev’s solo in Act One. Photo: Leslie E. Spatt.
Anthony Dowell as Oberon in “The Dream” (Frederick Ashton, 1964).