Raising the barre: prima ballerina Sylvie Guillem

March 28, 2008 – The Times

The dancing star, 42, talks about diet and determination - and why she likes to exercise her mind as well as her body

Sylvie Guillem, one of ballet's great dancers, admits that she was never cut out to be a ballerina. Not only that, but the ballet world seems almost to bore her. The lean, leggy, auburn-haired superstar, whose career began at the Paris Opéra and was crystallised at the Royal Ballet, appears dismissive of almost every aspect of the discipline; the barre, the tutus, the tiaras and the fame.

Yet at 42, an age when other prima ballerinas are getting creaky joints and going off to do other things, here is Guillem, still dancing, still hell-bent on driving her uncompromising career.

Mademoiselle “Non” - her nickname at the Royal Ballet, where she was touchy about being photographed and would sometimes veto various roles and costumes - has led a somewhat contrary life. She insists on exercising her brain while exercising her body and yet, for an athlete at her peak, she still smokes. She is beautiful, but tough. Her sinewy, angular body, her lack of make-up, her wish for public anonymity - she used to once suffer from crippling shyness - and the absence of airs and graces are not what you expect with the “prima ballerina” package.

Yet Guillem is no ordinary product of the dancing world; she came to ballet after a childhood as a budding gymnast and says that her suburban upbringing made her anything but starstruck about taking on the great classical roles. Indeed she seems relieved that her glory days as Odette or Giselle are behind her and that an atypical future in contemporary dance beckons.

We meet in her functional dressing room at Sadler's Wells, in North London, where she is associate artist. She's about to headline at the Coliseum in Push, a contemporary dance show by the choreographer Russell Maliphant and produced by Sadler's Wells, which has won an Olivier for “best new dance”, a Time Out award, and the South Bank Show dance award. The New York Times described it as a “spectacular showcase for her unique gifts”. It's a weary description, but “unique” does apply well to Guillem. Brought up in the tough world of Paris suburbia, ballet was simply not part of the story.

A budding Olympic gymnast at 11 “To be a ballerina at the Paris Opéra was not my dream,” she says. “I was not born into a family that went to the opera or ballet. I didn't even know it existed.” Her father was a garage mechanic, her mother taught PE. At school, Guillem excelled at gymnastics, displaying such prowess that, at 11, she was put up for Olympic-standard intensive training, much to her dismay.

She was frightened, she says. “The beam was my nightmare. I was starting to do somersaults on it, without hands. At that time the beam was still made of polished wood, 10cm wide, with wooden feet. So if you fell, you could hit both the beam and the feet. You could really hurt yourself in two seconds.” Mercifully, her parents were not desperate for her to represent France.

The 11-year-old was offered a choice; continue with gymnastics or enter the Paris Opéra Ballet. She chose ballet, but unlike many other young girls, she was not immediately taken with it. “It was less pleasurable than gymnastics. I hated the discipline. You arrived every morning at the barre, you had to do one side and then the other. It was much more serious than gymnastics, and very frustrating.”

Her eureka moment came when she first ventured on stage. It is clearly still there; the complex thrill of performing as a character before an audience. “The stage was really what it was for me, not the rest.” None of the other things counted. Even though she was made “étoile” - the highest rank of the Paris ballet - at 19, before joining the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in 1989, where she was until last year, performing was, and still is, her raison d'être.

She seems uninterested in public acknowledgment, enjoys going about unrecognised and confesses that at the start of her career she was so shy she would hide in the theatre rather than be interviewed by the press. “I couldn't talk to journalists. I wasn't made for that,” she says. “Eventually, I overcame it because when people asked me questions, I felt I had to try to put into words what was instinctive for me. Doing it was not enough. I had to put words to it. I started to think, to analyse.”

Guillem is friendly and communicative, readily admitting to things that her peers would possibly never confess to. Like the fact that her auburn hair comes out of a bottle, and has done for the past 20 years - “I always dreamt of being a redhead.”

Yet while she can now face the press with aplomb, and seems to be unfussed about ageing, can she still expect her body to do the same? “It's OK, my body,” she says, laughing. “I was lucky to have this sort of machine, because I have done a lot and I started doing a lot when I was young. Usually you start quite slowly, with the corps de ballet, but I was made étoile very young, with big roles. So I say ‘thank you very much' to it, every day. I have asked a lot from my body and I am lucky.”

Unlike many dancers at her level, her career has been relatively injury-free. “I have had only one serious injury, in my Achilles tendon. I hardly noticed it because I wasn't used to injury. So I went on, until the pain travelled up my calf. Eventually I had to stop for six weeks, for the first time ever.”

Naturally slim, she attests that she eats everything and won't hear of vegetarianism. “If I go on a diet, I do it to put weight on.” She also smokes, a habit that is ingrained within the ballet world and one that she doesn't appear to be agonising over how to give up. “I smoke just a little bit. About four a day. It's very disciplined.” Discipline is the Guillem way. “Not having it is like having an orchestra without a conductor. If you let it go, it doesn't sound right. Discipline is my conductor.”

It is this focus that has kept her body going; which has kept her progress sure and certain. Nothing else gets in the way. She has a long-term partner, Gilles Tapie, a photographer, with whom she lives in Notting Hill, West London. She has never wanted to have a child. “I made the choice. Even if I might have liked the experience, physically and psychologically as a woman, the responsibility afterwards is something else. So, I thought, well, I won't experience that.

“I've seen women plan it out, thinking: ‘Well, if I have a baby, I can dance for four months, stop, then go back, so I will miss only such and such a production'...of course they think like this. But afterwards you are not alone. There is someone else with you.” She seems free of any regrets. “It didn't come into my mind. It was not the time for it and I made the choice. I'll experience other things.” Learning Japanese with her pliés

She forces herself to do class every day. It's not something that she enjoys. “To work the barre for a minimum of 45 minutes every day, you don't want to do it. But I know that if I do, it will be much easier when I really have to push it.” Not a morning person, she works in the afternoon. Where? “I can always find something that is the right height to hold: the window frame, the door, anything. I do it in hotels I do it anywhere. And I learn languages while I do it.” Not something simple and European, mind you.

Guillem likes a bit of Japanese with her pliés. “I think it's quite amazing, what you can try to do with your brain,” she says. “On one side, you are doing something physical, and so on the other side, you can think.” Why Japanese? “Because I was working in Japan, and then just because I liked it. I just wanted to see how it works.” Is she any good? “Well, I will never speak Japanese properly, although I will never die of hunger, or get lost, in Japan. The grammar is not that complicated, but the protocol is.” She learns either on an iPod or the computer. Sometimes, in hotel rooms, she uses a DVD and the TV to learn.

Guillem isn't going to let a mere issue of technology restrain her. Besides, she knows that exercising her brain helps to exercise her body. “If I don't think of the barre, it is easier,” she admits. “It helps because there is a concentration on your body, which then puts you in a state where you can really learn. At least I now have the discipline to do my Japanese daily, which I didn't have before. I would pick it up and do it every only two months. There is no point in doing that. Once you do it regularly, you feel you possess it. And some things are sticking, bon.”

Far from being Mademoiselle Non, Guillem seems to be rather open to thinking “oui” about all sorts of things. She loves horses, for example, and one of her ambitions is to learn to drive a horse and carriage. She also wants to improve her skill in Japanese martial arts.

Does her nickname of negativity irritate her? “No. It surprises me, but then it is so easy to be categorised.” In her view, saying “no” is contiguous with taking command of your fate. “You start to realise that you have the choice. But you are not used to it. You are put into this or that class, or told to put on a certain pair of shoes, or go here, go there. But actually you do have a lot of choice. It's very comfortable to be told what to do and much tougher to make up your mind, particularly if it goes wrong.”

She seems to be so clear about herself, knows her weaknesses and strengths so well, that it's not surprising she has steered her career into its latest niche. She has said that when it is time for her eventually to leave the stage, it will be a big change and a tough one, but she is too full of self-extending plans to imagine that she will be bereft without it.

Does this self-determination come from a sense of destiny? “Not especially. You have to know yourself, how far you can go, what you can learn, what you can put in the luggage. My choices have come from passion; call it a coup de foudre.” Guillem laughs. “It's like when those people accept the Oscar and say ‘I want to thank my mother, my father, my agent'. But actually, you need to thank yourself. The only one who has done the job, is you.”