Georgina Parkinson: A dancer in her time/making the blueprint, cont.

3/6

This effort to become a "sponge" went beyond the time spent in the studio. Parkinson's last role created with MacMillan was Empress Elizabeth in Mayerling, a ballet set in Imperial Vienna on the eve of World War I. "I don't think there was a book on that period that I didn't read. I absorbed myself in that character; it was just thrilling," she recalls today. Tellingly, Parkinson speaks of the process in a literary way, describing how "Kenneth wrote me the steps and then through the steps I was able to hold my own personal opinion about the Empress. So that's really what I call creation."

Yet the narrative frame of MacMillan's ballets did not prevent the dancer from delving deeply into other genres. "Even if [the ballets] were abstract like [Ashton's] Monotones it was up to us to do the steps Fred set on us and to make it grow from there, to absorb the atmosphere, the music."

Parkinson's close involvement in the creation of new ballets with choreographers who were at the forefront of the European scene anchored her career. In her own characteristically sanguine words, she affirms that "It was one of the best parts of being a dancer in my time." This fertile aspect of artistic life at the Royal Ballet exerted a far-reaching impact on Parkinson as she ended her performing career and migrated to New York, where she had to come to terms with a very different national ballet culture.

"What I [initially] missed in New York after my move was a certain lack of creativity compared to what I'd had when I was with the Royal," Parkinson remembers. "Ashton and MacMillan alone taught me things about myself and the way I danced that I didn't know. They pushed and stretched [me]." In her years at the Royal, Parkinson was not typecast as a particular kind of dancer. "I was never told," she reflects, by way of example, "'Oh, she's lyrical,' or, oh, she's this [or that]." She feels that she "was challenged on all sides" and asserts that this eclectic background "certainly helped me when I came to America."

With the benefit of her perceptive hindsight, Parkinson remains her own artist. She came to understand that regardless of all the influences at work on her artistic development it was still, ultimately, the challenge of what she could bring to the mix that would make the real difference and define her own gifts. The years spent at the Royal Ballet analyzing and provoking herself as a performer have become her best resource in working with new generations of dancers at American Ballet Theater.

Georgina Parkinson backstage at The Royal Ballet for Raymonda, Act III, chor. Rudolf Nureyev; photo by Roy Round, 1967.

Georgina Parkinson in Raymonda, Act III, chor. Rudolf Nureyev, The Royal Ballet; photo by Roy Round, 1967.

In the role of coach and ballet mistress at ABT, empathy for and practical knowledge of a range of ballet genres are essential. Parkinson works with a diverse pool of dancers who perform in both traditional and contemporary idioms. Importantly, her own relationship with the classical ballets of the nineteenth century was pivotal in defining her response to choreography created on her by living choreographers. The classics, she reflects, "were more of a challenge to me technically. I never felt–apart perhaps for a period when I did Swan Lake–the ownership that I did [over roles by MacMillan, Ashton, or even with Andree Howard]." (Parkinson was a last-minute replacement for Lynn Seymour in Howard's La Belle Dame sans Merci very early in her career and later worked with the choreographer on La Fete ÿýtrange. She describes Howard as a "wonderful woman" but a choreographer who was "crazy, dotty, all over the place" and, as a result, the experience made it difficult for the young dancer to find her way into the work. Parkinson's memory of Howard is perhaps salvaged by the fact that the choreographer got along with Parkinson's husband, photographer Roy Round, like a "house on fire.")

As they are at ABT, the classics at the Royal Ballet "were the backbone to everything we did. The full-length ballets were our heritage." Yet Parkinson came to feel that while the classical repertory could offer the satisfaction of technical accomplishment, creating roles in new works by MacMillan, Ashton, Nijinska, and others brought the fulfillment of discovering expressive and self-created meanings. "I could hide," Parkinson explains, "behind the character of Winifred Norbry" [in Enigma Variations] in a way that was very different–less transparent–than in the classic repertory. "It wasn't me who was on show, it was Winifred Norbry."

Georgina Parkinson as Winifred Norbury in Enigma Variations, chor. Frederick Ashton; photo by Leslie E. Spatt, 1968.

In the classics, "I was always nervous that I wouldn't make the last pirouette of the day. I never felt completely free when I was doing classical ballet. I mean in Swan Lake you can feel pretty free but there was nothing to hide behind. I was stronger than I thought, but never entirely confident when I went on stage in the classics. There was always a doubt in my mind."