The following article is reprinted from Dance Now

Made for Fame

The elusive Sylvie Guillem talks about her past, present and future,
with Debra Craine

Rudolf Nureyev loved to make a splash. And he must have known, when he stepped out on stage as the curtain fell on his Swan Lake at the Paris Opera on 29 December 1984, that he was about to make a big one. To the surprise of his audience, he announced the appointment of a new étoile, the young redhead they had just seen as Odette. She was 19 years old, her name was Sylvie Guillem and she was the youngest étoile in the history of the Paris Opera Ballet. It was an extraordinary moment, one that could have overwhelmed the young ballerina. But if ever a dancer was made for fame, it's Guillem. With the talent and confidence to do anything she wanted, that 19-year-old went on to become a French national treasure, a Covent Garden star and the world's leading freelance ballerina. Ever since 1989, when she marched out of the Paris Opera and joined the Royal Ballet, she has thrilled audiences in Britain with her amazing technical prowess, her stage glamour and the intensity of her commitment to danced drama. From Manon to Marguerite, from Juliet to Jerome Robbins, Guillem has demonstrated an unerring instinct for developing herself as a dancer. And now, at 35, she is more interesting and intuitive on stage than she has ever been.

We are sitting in her tiny, well-ordered dressing room at the Royal Opera House. With its meagre furnishings - a dressing table and a bench sofa - it's a far cry from the lavish sitting room she once enjoyed as an étoile at the Paris Opera. But it's home, and more than ever these days Guillem feels like part of the family. She is informally dressed, as all dancers are while they are at work, and her famously arched feet are encased in snuggly pink slippers. She is nursing a cold and her intelligent face is looking slightly rheumy, but she's in the mood to talk. About her past, her present and her future.

Guillem was born in Paris on 23 February, 1965. She came to ballet late after early training as a gymnast. She entered the Paris Opera Ballet School at the age of 12, and joined the Paris Opera as a quadrille four years later, in 1981. When Nureyev took over the company in 1983 he took the young prodigy under his wing, and with his help she quickly came to prominence. Guest choreographers were eager to work with her. She created roles in ballets by William Forsythe, Rudi van Dantzig, Karole Armitage, Maurice Béjart, John Neumeier and Nureyev, a period of creativity that she has never been able to match. She danced frequently with Nureyev, both in Paris and abroad (he chose her for his Giselle when the Royal Ballet invited him to Covent Garden in January 1988 to commemorate his fiftieth birthday).

He taught her what it means to be on stage, what a performer has to give to make a performance worthwhile. He created his Hollywood Cinderella for her in 1986, and it was one of his - and her - biggest triumphs in Paris. But on 21 February 1989, stifled by the lack of freedom at the Paris Opera and wanting more control over her own career, Guillem bolted. The French were shocked at the loss of their favourite star. Le Monde called her departure a national catastrophe; and Claude Bessy, head of the Paris Opera Ballet School, described Guillem as 'the one dancer no company can afford to lose'. Nureyev was devastated, doubly so because his young protégé had chosen the Royal Ballet, the company he felt had abandoned him after Margot Fonteyn retired. Yet, in Guillem's determined bid for independence, he must have recognised something of his younger self.

'At the Paris Opera then,' Guillem now remembers, 'although I created many works, there was no freedom to be responsible for your own choices. You were just there to be available, to be ready. At least I am now responsible for my choices. Be they bad or good, they are my choices and my fault. I think that is important.

'I was not unhappy at the Paris Opera until the moment when I could see that I could be unhappy. We had some nice creations there, but then I felt I was banging my head against a wall, being obliged to do something I didn't want. The career of a dancer is very short and you start to ask yourself "How long am I going to sit here, spending six hours a day waiting, in case someone needs me?". That's a lot of time to lose.

'When I was in the Paris Opera I was still growing up and I didn't know exactly who I was. I had experiences, a kind of life, but I was still trying to find out where to go, who to be, how to react. I felt something was wrong and I think that's why I left because something was not there for me.

'When I arrived at the Royal Ballet I kept growing up, but I found something else, and I could be more nourished by that even if I was not, in the beginning, really into the company because I was still dancing a lot outside the company. It is true that always when I come back here it's still a company that I respect a lot even after eleven years.'

'Guillem is the first to admit that a decade at the Royal Ballet has moulded her as a dancer. Her repertoire at Covent Garden is wide-ranging, from the classics such as Giselle, La Bayadère and Swan Lake, to Ashton's elegiac A Month in the Country, William Forsythe's thrusting In the middle somewhat elevated and Herman Schmerman and Kenneth MacMillan's doomed heroines, Manon and Juliet. Early on, she danced both The Sleeping Beauty and Frederick Ashton's Cinderella, but they were roles to which she is uniquely ill-suited - in a way, she was just too grand. Then last season came two important debuts: as a comedienne in Jerome Robbins's riotous The Concert, and as the inheritor of one of Margot Fonteyn's most illustrious roles in Ashton's Marguerite and Armand. This season she tackles Antony Tudor's classic psychological drama Lilac Garden. Taken as a whole, it's an impressive CV that attests to the versatility and adventure with which she approaches her career.

'The Royal has given me freedom,' she says. 'But they have given me more than that too. They have such a strong theatrical history and style that I also learned whatever you are, whatever you do - if it's a small part, if it's a big part - you try to make it true and alive, and you are not ashamed of doing it. And this is like almost 50 per cent of the performance. It's not only dancing - nice feet, nice legs, beautiful pirouettes - that makes a whole performance. I was really impressed to see the company, whoever they are, the corps de ballet, even the supers, being really into it and in love with what they were doing. They think of what they can do to create a character; they don't just do what they are told and sit back when they have finished their little solo. I think the Royal Ballet is really unique for that. This is a company which loves what it is doing.'

Today, reactions to her are much less hysterical than they were back in 1989 when she arrived in London. Colleagues then didn't know how to take this 24-year-old firebrand. A product of the elitist French system, she was perceived as arrogant and demanding, and - like Nureyev - not afraid to speak her mind. She also dressed to kill, a rock chick ballerina who showed up for her first photocall in knee-high lace-up leather boots, black leggings and a bowler hat. A long-limbed, natural beauty with lively dark eyes and cascading auburn hair, she was the ultimate in French chic. But she also came with 'attitude'.

What her Royal Ballet colleagues didn't know then was how much of that was an act. She admits she was shy, a foreigner living in a country where she didn't know anyone and didn't speak the language well (although Guillem spoke English better than she realised).

Expectations on her arrival at Covent Garden were high and Guillem knew it. 'I have so many responsibilities on my shoulders,' she told me at the time. 'I can't afford to make a mistake. Each time I put a foot on stage, it's to be the best I can, to give the best of what I can give.' She drove herself hard, just as she drove those around her. 'I am difficult, that's right,' she admitted ten years ago. 'I am difficult with myself so I have the right to be difficult with others. I think I have the right.'

Dancers were surprised to find themselves given 'notes' by Guillem after a performance. Her high-profile clash with MacMillan - two strong egos determined to have their own way - further cemented her reputation for being a prima donna, while some of her fellow ballerinas openly expressed their resentment of Guillem's influence with the management. She had extraordinary freedom as a permanent guest artist: she had control over her repertoire, partners, performances, even her costumes. Often, she adapted her roles to suit herself, and if that meant changing steps or changing frocks Guillem wouldn't hesitate to do it. She was also notoriously picky about her publicity photographs, influenced perhaps by her fashion photographer boyfriend Gilles Tapie.

Audiences, though, were in thrall to her technique (as were most of the dancers). Guillem was - and is - an astonishing technician. She was flamboyantly flexible (those trademark 'six o'clock legs') and strong like steel, but in the early days she relied too much on the circus tricks. There was a physical arrogance in some of her performances, and the critics (including myself) complained of her excessive desire for display. I remember one lurid performance of Grand pas classique which was shamelessly exhibitionist.

Nowadays, though, things have calmed down. Both Guillem and her technique seem to have mellowed. She is still intensely private, and isn't the sort to hang about after rehearsals for a cup of tea and a chat, but her colleagues no longer approach her with a mixture of awe and caution. Even those critics who once carped about her cold technician's perfection have warmed to her, and rightly so, for she has grown up as an artist. Her charisma and sophistication have found a new partner in the deep understanding of character that she brings to her roles.

Her regular Royal Ballet partner Jonathan Cope speaks of Guillem's sense of humour, and in interview she evinces a light humour that acts to leaven her Gallic love of intellectual analysis. 'I love to laugh. People say I have a sense of humour and I'm pleased to believe it. But it's more witty than big. You can work very well with a sense of humour.

'What we do as dancers is already very hard and if you try to be very heavy, if you try to take it even more seriously and try to torture yourself even more, well, I don't see the pleasure in that. And I want pleasure, especially in the rehearsal room where life is hardest.

'If you have a sense of humour, if you like laughing, if you know how to take things in perspective, even in a dramatic role, even with Manon, it helps. Manon can laugh at herself. Juliet is not always dying; she's a young girl with a life and she has freshness and humour inside her. There needs to be humour in drama: you can switch from something very light and playful to something very serious.'

Guillem was able to indulge her lighter side in The Concert, Robbins's riotous parody of music-lovers attending a Chopin recital. In a delicious new facet to her stage persona, she portrayed the woman in the big floppy hat, butt of several of the ballet's funniest jokes. 'You don't need to do a lot to it as a dancer,' she says. 'In fact it is not easy because you are tempted to do a lot and put too much on top of it and then the ballet becomes like a tarte à la crème, which is really awful. This ballet is so well done that if you just act natural and innocent it works.'

Despite her frequent absences, the Royal Ballet is the closest thing Guillem has to a base. 'I'm very happy with my performances here,' she says. 'I do at least 15 to 20 a season, and I've just signed another five-year contract.' She is pleased with her repertoire at Covent Garden, although she does wish there could be opportunities for her to create something new. It almost happened with the choreographer Michael Corder, who had planned a full-length version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses for the Royal Ballet with Guillem in the starring role. The project fell through, and now there is nothing on the horizon for Guillem. Although who knows what will transpier when the Australian Ross Stretton takes over from Anthony Dowell in the summer of 2001?

'It seems we don't have the same kind of taste,' Guillem says of the current Royal Ballet management. And she's probably right. Choreographers she likes include Béjart and Kylián, Europeans who have never really cracked the British market. 'You know the Royal Ballet has a very strong image, maybe the wrong one for certain choreographers. I'm sure if you are talking to someone like Mats Ek about the Royal Ballet they just couldn't imagine being able to do something with the Royal. But if they can do something with the Paris Opera they can do something with the Royal. It's just the reputation this company has had for a long, long time, that they are classical and that they will stay classical. I think it's hard to fight against that and also for someone like Kylián to cope with the reputation.

'I did work on the creation of Forsythe's Firstext for the Royal, but it's the only one I did. I wish there could be more.'

Outside the Royal she has created works with Ek, Jonathan Burrows, Robert Wilson and Béjart (with whom she enjoys a close working relationship). She is currently trying to set something up with the Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard, although their schedules are both incredibly full. Others have made demands she can't possibly meet. 'I have approached several choreographers whose work I like and they automatically say, "Well, you have to come three months into my company to learn the style". When I have three months I'll let you know! You make a step forward and it's three steps backward. Choreographers are not easy people.'

From her flat in West London (and her home in the South of France) Guillem organises all her own projects, be they choreographic commissions, books or films, but she finds negotiations a minefield of bureaucracy and self-interest. 'It's difficult to put things together when you are not commissioned by a theatre. Suddenly you have to deal with lawyers and you have to deal with money. It gets in the way. I know there are money problems; I just think that to put money considerations first before everything else is not logical. There is something not right about that. It's a lot of work, it doesn't give you any pleasure. You are very excited to meet someone, to work with them. But it is like this with everyone now. Whatever you want to do, if you want to use a bit of film for instance, it's like money and ego - those are the first things you meet. I find that very frightening.

There is no more pleasure, there is no more spontaneity in creation. It comes down to money, lawyers, ego. 'It stops the excitement of the creative side. You know we talk about money, we talk about rights and things, but now can we get on and do it? Sometimes it's the ego problem. People think you are Sylvie Guillem and you are asking for that so, fine, "I have this little power so I'm going to make her pay". That's more or less what is happening. Maybe if I was not famous it would be much easier, because then there would be no ego.

'I am excited about doing new things. I've proved, I think, that each time I go on stage I try my best to explore, to improve. When you ask someone something, whether it's a bit of a film to put in another film, or whether it's a new creation, it should not be a fight.'

Guillem's professional life keeps her on the go constantly. This past summer, for example, she was away in Japan and Australia. Her diary must be a nightmare of planning, yet she refuses to have a manager. 'I wish I was more organised,' she admits. 'Some people say I should be more organised. Sometimes I say yes to too many things. I spend a lot of my life in a plane, it's not fun. But I have learned to have a masseur with me; I have learned that I don't do more than two shows in a row. If I go to Japan I always take three or four days off to rest before a performance to get over the jetlag.

'I do make every minute count: I hate to waste time. Maybe that's not a good thing because sometimes I just want to do a lot - so you can end up going everywhere. It might be a fault. When I come here I know I have to rehearse a ballet and I want to make it very intense for a very short time. Then I still have some time left. I don't see the point of making things longer and longer.

'I don't have much time to relax. When I do have time it takes me a while to learn how to do nothing. If you are into an energetic life, it's difficult to stand back and watch the time passing by. Sometimes I feel very lazy and I spend time in the garden. But most of the time I do things.

'Yes, life is very intense. But it's important to find the right people to work with. If I had partners who were too intense or too depressed or too heavy I couldn't do what I do. I try to establish a real communication with the people I am dancing with. Partnership is about communication. You can dance with a partner and you can be dancing alone if that person doesn't respond. I have had that; I know what it's like to do a full ballet on your own, to do Romeo and Juliet by yourself. I try to establish a communication to make it logical, so that if they know the right question they automatically have the right answer. I never do the same thing on stage so they have to be able to react.'

Her three regular partners are Cope at the Royal and Laurent Hilaire and Nicolas Le Riche from the Paris Opera. She takes them with her on her travels. 'When you have a small amount of time to put things together you can't just take a chance on a partner that is not right for you. The result will not be good. I did that before; I don't want to do that again.'

Most ballerinas have trouble finding one good partner; Guillem has three, and knows she is more fortunate than the other women in the Royal Ballet. 'I'm lucky to have a choice; I have three partners whom I like and I have danced with plenty I didn't like. All three have good communication, good understanding. Jonathan is my main partner. I like having him as a partner. I have learned a lot from him. He's very secure, he's a very nice man and we have had a bit of time together. That's important. I have known him for ten years now so we have gone through a lot of things together. I understand him perfectly well and I think he understands me perfectly well. So it's real communication; automatically I know, automatically he knows. I have such confidence with him

' If asked, I'm sure Cope would return the compliment. It is thanks to Guillem that he has raised the stakes in his performance: he is never better than when dancing with her. Their special relationship is at its best in Manon, a ballet in which both of them have blossomed over the years. Ironically it was over Manon that Guillem and MacMillan almost came to blows, for today it stands as possibly her most accomplished performance. Involving a sexy French heroine who has to combine the allure of beauty with the tenacity to defy even death, it is a part tailor-made for Guillem's looks and personality. She regularly sets the stage on fire with the ferocity of her passion - for Des Grieux, for money and finery, and, in the last act, for life itself. As Jann Parry wrote of Guillem's Manon in Dance Now (Summer 2000): 'She is only briefly a girl to whom things happen: once she understands her sexual power, she happens to other people.'

'I love Manon,' says Guillem. 'I think I make her live. I don't know if it's good or bad for the ones who are responsible for Manon now ...' and here she lapses into a diplomatic silence.

Swan Lake, meanwhile, is one of the few classical roles Guillem still dances, but it's not one of her favourites. 'No I don't like it very much. It's good for my health; I take it like a medicine. It's not my favourite because I'm still looking for some pleasure out of it. That's it. It's that I have not always had pleasure out of it. It's the build-up. When you are on stage it's fine because on stage you don't have the choice; you must do it with pleasure. That's the only way it's going to go through. But all the training! God knows there are a lot of difficulties in this ballet. The build-up is very intense and very hard.'

Seeing her in performance recently (with Cope) it is almost impossible to believe that Guillem finds the role such a challenge. Her wild beauty as Odette and her mocking superiority as Odile are effortlessly delivered. It is a reading rich in supernatural mystery and sheer physical excitement. Sixteen years after her historic debut in Nureyev's Swan Lake, Guillem has become one of the world's great Swan Queens.

Marguerite, that other fated French courtesan, is the exact opposite, a role that Guillem embraces with total affection. Reviews for her performance in Fonteyn's part have been ecstatic, and deservedly so. It is a masterful portrayal. Guillem's Marguerite is an emotional hothouse, fervently commited to arriving at love and heroically self-denying at the leaving of it. If only her old mentor had been here to see it. 'Nureyev was the first one to show me the video of Marguerite and Armand,' Guillem explains. 'He was so proud of it. He took me home one day to his Quai Voltaire apartment and said, "Look at that".'

Guillem never imagined then that she would one day be dancing Fonteyn's role. And when the powers that be at Covent Garden offered it to her, she was reluctant to take it on. In fact, she turned it down twice before finally deciding in 2000 that the time was right. 'I agreed to do it even though I wasn't very convinced about the piece, I must say, and then it grew in me like something completely new. I took the book, I took the play, I took everything written about it, and I made my own Marguerite. I imagined who she was - in my head I made my own film - and then I could digest what I had seen, what I had read, and then I listened to the music. This music brings you so much. When you know the story well, when you decide who she was going to be, then you just let the choreography and the music in. And the way the choreography is constructed is perfect. It was a big risk for me to do it, yes, but it is a fantastic piece for an artist.'

When I spoke to Guillem rehearsals had not yet started for Lilac Garden, but she was already looking forward to them with enthusiasm. Tudor, one suspects, offers the kind of dramatic intimacy that Guillem craves. 'I danced in Tudor's Continuo while in the Paris Opera, but this is my first real Tudor. When I saw Lilac Garden it touched me a lot because it's very close to theatre. It is so well-organised. To give so much importance to a look - in dance you rarely see this kind of thing. It was like watching a ping pong match, the audience could follow everything on stage just by looking at the dancers' eyes. I saw it with Ghislaine Thesmar and she was so beautiful. You have to act it. It's like Marguerite and Armand. I see exactly the same kind of small details: a breath, a look, a lot of things going on behind your eyes. If you are just dancing it, you are not saying anything.'

As with Marguerite and Armand, the young Caroline in Lilac Garden is a role for the mature dancer, and Guillem is clearly enjoying her maturity as a ballerina. 'There is more and more pleasure in it nowadays. Even if the work is harder because you are more doubting, you have more questions and the more questions you have the more answers you have to find, the balance of the pleasure is more. So it goes deeper on one side, but it's so good on the other side. I enjoy dancing more and more, and I realise that even if I was 19, with the strength I had at 19, and the facility to go on stage and not to think, I wouldn't like to go back to the way I was at that time. I prefer my job now, the heightened intensity now, the pleasure I get from it now - even if there is more doubt. Older is better. You have wisdom, you have maturity, you have experiences, and you want to live all the minutes.'

Like Nureyev, she is eager for new experiences. 'I'm always ready for that. I want to always be able to push my limits even if I think that's too scary. I like people who help me to pass through those limits. It's always a great relief to see that you still have the courage, the will and the power to take on different experiences. For example, I wish I could have a relationship with the theatre, the spoken theatre. I would like to try to speak on stage. If someone had some trust in me, and would like to tempt me with something right, I would jump at it.'

Until then, she is broadening her artistic horizons as a producer. In 1998 she staged Giselle for Finnish National Ballet. In 2001 she is restaging it for Milan with new sets and costumes. 'They want it scaled for touring so I have asked the English designer Paul Brown to do new sets and costumes for La Scala. It premieres in June 2001. And yes, I will be dancing in it, but not the first night. Later on in the run.'

Why did she choose Giselle for her first production? 'Even if Giselle hadn't had a heart attack, the ballet was dying by itself,' she complains of productions she has seen. 'It was becoming more and more stupid, without any sense. It was empty, it was dead. And I was sad about this because I think Giselle is a good example of what a ballet performance can offer to an audience: a bit of real life, a bit of unreal, there is some magic, some love, some passion and there is a big drama. It's what people expect. They want to go through all of those emotions when they come to see a performance, and Giselle has it all. You can have a first act which is completely real, with real emotion and real people, like a theatre play, and then you have the second act which is much more classical, with all the visual effect that classicism can procure. It's black and white.

'It took me a lot of time to do Giselle in Finland. I was there for two months and there was a huge amount of preparation beforehand. I liked it and I would like to do something else. I enjoyed putting things together to make it work, following a logic. I liked working with people.' And although she isn't thinking that far ahead yet, it's all been good experience should she decide to follow in Nureyev's footsteps and run a ballet company some day.

For now there are other things on Guillem's wish list besides producing another ballet. 'There is some Kylián I would love to dance; I would like to work with him. There is still Onegin that I would love to do. It's such a nice ballet. When I arrived here at Covent Garden I said "It would be nice to have Onegin in the repertoire", but someone told me that the Royal Ballet can't do it because English National Ballet has it in the repertoire.' And then she shrugs, as if such contractual niceties mean nothing when an artist's career is at stake.

Although she has made herself the face (or should that be the body?) of Rolex, and photographed herself nude for French Vogue, Guillem has never pursued celebrity. She can still dine in a London restaurant without being recognised, and isn't troubled by over-eager fans. And she certainly isn't a media darling, like her fellow ballerina Darcey Bussell. Guillem, though, has directed her own television series that looked at the philosophy of dance (Evidentia), and is currently working on both film and book projects that she hopes will come to fruition in 2001. 'There are things I have to do now because I won't be able to do them later. And I love it. I get tired and fed up sometimes, but I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

'You have to enjoy what is good in life. I am lucky and I try to tell that to myself every day, even when it's not such a good day. To put things in perspective is important, because you find that your problems are not the most important problems in the world.'

Guillem is not the sort of person to have regrets, but I allow myself to believe that there is just one chapter in her life that she wishes had ended differently. The one with Nureyev. They effected a reconciliation of sorts before he died in 1993 (and today she regularly guests with the Paris Opera Ballet), but Guillem is aware of how much more Nureyev could have helped her if he had lived. 'I wish he was still alive to finally exchange things,' she says, perhaps remembering the tempestuousness nature of their relationship. 'To talk to him, to ask him some advice, ask him if he went through certain things, ask him many things. I would love him to see me, to judge me, to see if I have improved in his eyes.' And would he have been proud of his old protégé? 'Well, you never knew with him.'

© 2001 - Dance Books & Debra Craine

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