By Peter Ross
IF you haven’t yet seen Darcey Bussell dance, you are running out of time. On June 8, Britain’s best-loved ballerina will give her farewell performance, in Song Of The Earth. “I’ve been building up to this, ” she says, “but I know it’s going to be a wrench.” Bussell is 37, still a young woman, and yet ballet dancers are the mayflies of high culture – their working lives are short and there is little to show for even the most celebrated careers; they are often left with nothing more than fading photographs, the faint echo of applause, and a muffled memory of heart-thumping joy once felt at the apex of a leap.
I meet Bussell in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where The Royal Ballet is based. She sits on a couch with all the languorous ease of a burns victim on a bed of nails. Repose does not come naturally. She has always had a surfeit of energy. As a child in Notting Hill she was “wildly hyperactive” – a running, jumping, dancing dervish forever striking poses. Her self-obsession grew to such monstrous proportions that her father threatened to cover every mirror with a sheet, as if at a wake.
Bussell is five foot seven, tall for a ballerina. She has a cold, feels “knackered”, sips Diet Coke, and is mostly wearing black – shorts, tights and weird quilted moon boots zipped over her ballet shoes.
Velcroed around her waist is a blue back-warmer with her surname written on it in black marker.
Everything about her, from her name (“Darcey is Irish. It means dark angel”) to her coltish figure, neat brown bob and wholesome good looks, makes her appear to have lindy-hopped from the pages of PG Wodehouse.
She is the sort of whip-smart filly over whom Bertie Wooster could easily make a fool of himself. He probably wouldn’t notice her wedding ring, though it’s as big as the Ritz.
We flick through a magazine with her photograph on the cover. She points to a picture of Rudolf Nureyev (“I met him in Monte Carlo. He was like a cripple then, poor guy. I think it was his ideal to die on stage”) and rolls her chocolate coin eyes at a photograph of her rival, the great French ballerina Sylvie Guillem. “My good friend, Sylvie.
She avoids me like the plague.”
This is a rare moment of negativity from Bussell. There’s something of the ambassador’s wife about her – strategically pleasant. “I’m very diplomatic in the way I meet people and speak to them, ” she admits. Yet she also says: “To do an art like ballet there are going to be other sides to you, and what makes you tick, but whether you give all that away is up to you.” The implication of course is that she chooses not to give herself away, and I certainly get a strong impression of churning emotions not far beneath the placid surface. Occasionally there’s a ripple, but not often. At one point she tells me, “I desperately want to be understood”, but it’s like trying to understand the Pacific Ocean while standing in Partick – she holds herself at too great a distance.
Nevertheless, one must take the plunge.
We start talking about her imminent retiral.
I mention that when I interviewed the dancer Michael Clark he described his withdrawal from the stage as a kind of bereavement; he had lost the person he was. Can Bussell relate to that? “Very much, ” she says. “Well, it’s your identity really. I’ve only ever known this – I’ve been dancing professionally for 20 years, and I trained for eight years before that, so it’s horrible really to think about stopping – It’s the people you work with, the atmosphere you get when you are on stage, the adrenalin rush. I know I am going to have to replace that with other things. I feel so fortunate because I have two kids. A lot of dancers at the end of their career don’t have children to keep themselves occupied and focused. So I feel the luckiest person in the world that I can leave a career and have so much still.”
She and her husband Angus Forbes, an Australian banker, have two daughters, Phoebe, five, and Zoe, two. Bussell has had to ask herself: if I am not a dancer, who am I? The answer is: “I’m a mum.”
Having children is one of the reasons she is retiring. Not because pregnancy and childbirth have lessened her physical prowess – “My body actually feels quite good” – but because she wants to spend more time with her children, and is finding it difficult to focus on both parenting and performing.
“That’s the hardest thing – trying to be two different people.”
It’s a shame because she is certain her dancing has improved as a result of having children. She now has access to stronger emotions – “those passions that you feel deeply for your kids” – and is able to express these in her performances. Of course, that’s the tragic irony of being a professional dancer; with age and experience you have more to express, yet less ability to do so.
She’s going out at the top though. For many years Bussell has been one of the few dancers known by name to the average Brit, and is famous internationally too. She has achieved this by being the outstanding talent of her generation – an exceptionally strong dancer, known for the height of her jump – and by her willingness to play the media game. She has modelled for M&S, been photographed by Annie Liebowitz and appeared on Richard And Judy. In the National Portrait Gallery, 10 minutes from where we are today, they sell fridge magnets bearing her image.
Her success is the offspring of ability married to accessibility. None of this was accidental.
She likes showing off, but has always known that with the public on her side she would have the power to shape her own career.
CONTROL is important to her. She was uneasy during her pregnancies because she felt she had lost control of her body. She has always placed great emphasis on discipline and charting her own course. When she was 13 – “the odd girl at school” – she wrote down all the things she wanted to achieve in life. “I was always quite driven, ” she recalls. “It wasn’t for fame really.
I was just desperate to achieve well in one thing. I had a really bad schooling. I was always at the bottom of the class, and desperate to find that thing I could do really well.
So when I found that dance was one of my better things, I definitely focused on that.”
She later discovered she was dyslexic.
Given that she had problems expressing herself in words, it was a relief to discover she was so articulate with her body. That she uses dance to express her emotions is another reason she is going to find it so difficult to give up. “Any sort of feeling comes out physically for me, ” she says. “My vocab isn’t great, and I am conscious that I can speak a lot better with my body, and that’s where I get my confidence from.”
Perhaps she will have to learn to be more emotionally open in her off-stage life? “I think so, yeah. I am very good at being able to put a barrier up because I have my dance to express myself. I’ve never looked at it like this, but it’s very true – The worst thing is just losing my confidence as a person, not being able to fall back on knowing that I can do something really well.”
Bussell started attending the Royal Ballet School at the age of 13. This was a couple of years later than most girls, so she found herself far behind. At first she had a horrendous time (“It was a bit like joining the army, or entering a convent”), being shouted at by teachers, ostracised and humiliated by the other girls. “I had big doubts in my first year that I was doing the right thing. But there was obviously something inside me that felt I could change that. I also realised that dancing wasn’t going to be all lovely. I realised that if you weren’t bullied and put down then you weren’t going to make it. If you couldn’t take criticism then you weren’t going to achieve anything. It was the nature of the job.”
She persevered and quickly surpassed all those who had laughed at her. She denies this was sweet revenge, but admits to feeling a degree of oneupmanship when she was one of only four girls to land a job with the touring arm of The Royal Ballet at the end of her course. She continued her fast rise, and in 1989, aged only 20, was made a principal – meaning she could play lead roles in the great ballets. Britain fell for her.
IThasn’t been all roses, though. She was forced to take six months off in 1994 while recovering from a serious injury. She had been asked to perform Sleeping Beauty, and was keen because it was going to be filmed. However she was having terrible problems with her right ankle; she had developed a bone spur which was rubbing against the tendons. “So I did some very stupid things. I had a cortisone injection in my foot, and then a second one. I even had some bones removed from my ankle. It didn’t sink in until afterwards how stupid I was, how I was ruining the longevity of my career by forcing myself to make this film.”
Bussell was so keen to have Sleeping Beauty filmed because she can’t stand the transient nature of ballet – she might give a brilliant performance, but there is no record of it. “That’s really tough. I think it would be wonderful to be like a footballer where you have a replay of you scoring that goal.”
Since her marriage in 1997, her husband has filmed all her shows so that she has an archive of work. For someone whose reputation rests on their exquisite movement, Bussell is surprisingly interested in stillness – in capturing and preserving a moment.
That’s why she loves being photographed – “You get an end result you can have forever” – and why she finds significance in something as seemingly trite as being cast in wax for Madame Tussauds. “I wanted to keep the whole body. I thought it would be fun to have it in the garden and watch it deteriorate and grow mouldy and get rained on.”
Bussell has lots of plans for life after ballet, although she isn’t keen to get into specifics.
She has bought a pair of tap shoes, and aims to go skiing (forbidden before, lest she broke a leg). There is a workout book and a bit of TV presenting; she is also involved in an interior design business.
It’s hard to say whether she will be happy without the fantasy world of ballet. She tells me that she can relate to those actors who got into the profession because they didn’t like themselves and wanted to pretend to be other people – “I knew I wanted to be better than I was.” For 28 years she has been a dancer – it is “a being” within her – and now she is on the point of banishing that dark angel. She is putting a brave face on things, but in so far as you can feel sorry for a beautiful international star with a wonderful life, I feel sorry for Darcey Bussell. “I know how to let go, ” she assures me, but when it comes time to move on with her life, will that be the one leap she is frightened to make?
Darcey Bussell’s Dance Body Workout is published by Michael Joseph on January 11.
She presents The Magic Of Swan Lake on BBC1, January 21
(c) 2006 Sunday Herald. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
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