It takes more than a little organising to schedule an interview with Maina Gielgud.
The London-based repetiteur, former ballerina and artistic administrator was in Australia recently at the invitation of Australian Ballet artistic director David McAllister, but despite being in the same country, co-ordinating timetables was proving challenging.
Gielgud was travelling between Melbourne and Sydney for Swan Lake rehearsals New Zealand for the International Genee Dance Competition. Just a normal week in Gielgud’s peripatetic life, and she’s not complaining.
It wasn’t so long ago that Gielgud was juggling her freelance life with that of artistic advisor and principal repetiteur at the English National Ballet, a position she held for five years.
All that changed when dancer Tamara Rojo took over the reins of artistic director from Wayne Eagling last September, bringing a new team with her.
If Gielgud is disappointed about not having her contract renewed she isn’t showing it. “I know Tamara Rojo very well, we get on together very well, but she’s bringing her own team and making changes. Fair enough,” she says, with characteristic diplomacy.
Not that she has had much spare time on her hands. In the past 12 months Gielgud has staged Rudolf Nureyev’s Don Quixote for Boston Ballet, Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc with English National Ballet and later San Francisco Ballet; and Maurice Bejart’s Song of a Wayfarer for the National Ballet of Canada.
When we caught up recently she was in Italy rehearsing the Rome Opera Ballet in Erik Bruhn’s La Sylphide after which she will travel to Milan to work with the principal dancers of La Scala for their upcoming season of Nureyev’s Swan Lake.
These are just a handful of the 10-plus ballets Gielgud has received permission to stage over time. Her 50-plus year dance career has taken her to numerous companies throughout the world, from Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet where she was principal artist, to the AB where she was artistic director from 1983-97 before becoming the director at the Royal Danish Ballet.
Along the way she has either danced with or worked alongside many of the 20th century’s most acclaimed choreographers, earning their respect and resulting in her being granted the rights to stage various works by Nureyev, Bruhn, Bejart and Serge Lifar.
Working as a freelance repetiteur and teacher with dance companies around the globe is a privileged role, and one that Gielgud relishes. However it has also allowed her to observe a worrying trend among many of the world’s dancers: a fear of the classics.
“There seems to be a tendency worldwide of putting classical ballet into a separate category. In the old days the contemporary dancers would be very snooty about classical dancers; nowadays almost all classical companies do a generous quota of contemporary work in which they are for the majority, fantastic.
[But] somehow now, in the minds of classical dancers doing a classical ballet, it’s like they’re going to be measured with a ruler to see if they’re in the perfect fifth position or if the extension is high enough.
The movement and purpose of the ballet can get lost because of detailing, so it doesn’t breathe. It’s a fine line, but I think we have gone way over the top in accenting polish at the expense of creativity,” she says.
“The other terrible thing is ballets that are done like carbon copies of the great ones that have gone before. First of all you don’t achieve it, and second you bore the audience and people say classical ballet is dead, or dying.”
Ironically, this fear has coincided with great improvements in technical proficiency, but at the expense of individuality and artistry.
“The classical technique has become more and more polished, technical virtuosity has progressed so that the corps is technically as proficient as principals would have been 20 years ago,” Gielgud says.
“[But] quite often worldwide that takes the emphasis off what the public are going to receive, because of course the performance is a gift to the audience. It’s so important for the dancers to be generous with their love of dancing, to share that with the audience.”
Gielgud is at a loss to put her finger on exactly why this is happening, but suggests it is because classical companies are increasingly performing contemporary works at the expense of the classics.
“I wonder if part of it is a feeling it’s a rarity, rather than the norm, to do a Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty. In England there’s a thing about it being holier than thou, as though the weight of the great ones who’ve come before [means] that dancers are in such awe,” she says.
“I also hear a bit of a cry, believe it or not, from [the dancers in the] Paris Opera, saying they don’t feel they do enough classical work.”
Australian dancers are not immune from this “bug”, as Gielgud refers to it. When rehearsing the AB for Stephen Baynes’s Swan Lake she observed an initial sense of fear at taking on this revered work.
“They’re quite extraordinary in the more contemporary pieces [but] it seems as though they’re slightly lacking in confidence in the classical repertoire. But this can be easily fixed, as they have more than enough technique to feel free and make these their own.”
Gielgud believes it is the job of the repetiteur or coach to help release dancers from this fear and inspire individuality and freedom of expression in the classical works, providing of course they respect the choreographer’s intention.
For Gielgud, Russian dancer Natalia Osipova is one of the greatest exponents of this, along with the great Russians Maya Plisetskaya and the late Galina Ulanova. Gielgud will work with Osipova, who is guesting at La Scala, and admires her ability to make a role her own.
“I recently saw her dance Swan Lake for only the second time in her career and it was as if she had reinvented the story. There wasn’t one moment where you couldn’t read her mind, it was so legible,” Gielgud says.
“She does everything that a true creative artist can. She uses the ‘text’ and style of whatever piece she is dancing as the starting point and is nobody’s clone. Her Giselle and Odette-Odile take me to the place that made me to want to make dance my life in the first place.”
2014 is already shaping up as a busy year although Gielgud is coy about mentioning anything specific until contracts are signed.
What she can say is that she will be staging yet more ballets, including some she hasn’t done previously, which will take her to “the Far East, happily Australia and maybe the USA as well as Europe.”
One could say all the world is her stage.
This article was first published in the August-September 2013 issue of Dance Australia magazine.