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Paris Opera Ballet coach Patricia Ruanne works on a lift with Kader Belarbi while his partner Isabel Guerin looks on. Photo: Jacques Moatti
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BB: Were there other personal role models or other people that influenced you while you were dancing or when you began coaching and teaching?
Ms. Ruanne: Artists certainly—obviously Fonteyn. The generation we had then—performers we learned from just by watching—has no parallel today. In fact today’s generation very often feels artistically feeble in comparison. There was a richness—a tapestry of such richness that it’s hard to credit today because they were all highly individual. I mean that was the most astonishing fertile field to look at and to admire and to try to emulate. You could never be like those people and learn everything of what they were passing on. They were all just amazing for us—Svetlana Berisova, Merle Park, Beryl Grey, Lynne Seymour, Antoinette Sibley.
I was very fortunate that I was in the touring company of the Royal Ballet, directed by John Field. He had a very clear passion. He believed that you shouldn’t wait. He believed in developing dancers while they were young enough not to be frightened, not to put too many obstacles in their own minds against themselves. So, we were all thrown into the deep end at very early age, and I think that that was also tremendous gift that you didn’t have to wait seven or eight years before you got your first role—it was almost immediate. And that practical experience is inevitably so precious. In all that generation I think I credit John, particularly, for helping me understand and get ahead with my dance career. I think that his first great love was for the theater; this was what was important to him, and he was right. In some of those little towns in the north of England they had never seen a dancer; it was the kind of environment where Billy Elliot [the fictional character in the recent film of the same name] was raised. But the English do have a very strong theatrical tradition. What we seemed to touch as dancers was the public’s sense of theater. I realized that what we were doing in dance—in a way—was telling a story. If you do it through dance, though, it still needed to speak to you in that sort of narrative or storytelling way. And this view, which John held to so firmly, was a tremendous influence on me and other dancers because it gave us another handle on what we were doing on stage. What became important to me was the credibility of the character, the narrative element that we could find in the movement that audiences could relate to. There is a little bit of actor in all of us, I guess, and that was the thing that I became most passionate about. I was never very comfortable in abstract pieces—though I did not hate them—but I loved the roles where I could find a personality and make people believe in that person. And so John Field was very influential in this sense on my development.
John was the only director I knew on terms well enough to talk to and understand his point of view and thought processes—or purpose—as a director. With de Valois I never had this kind of familiarity—she was already the great woman and I was far too young to have had any social contact with her. Beryl Grey at Festival Ballet was wonderful and she was an excellent director, but at the same time she wasn’t a person with whom you would discuss the why and wherefore of directing a company or the problems that come with it. John was more forthcoming. And interestingly, he always believed I should direct. He thought I was director material, whatever that means, when I was still dancing. So inevitably there were conversations about the way he saw things and how he felt about this or that and how he thought dancers should be taken care of. But I think it’s futile information in the abstract because it depends on where you are and what you are doing. I think if you were directing a company where you have an enormous backup assistance and you have an administrator who can take part of the load, then maybe one could take some pleasure from directing a ballet company. I can’t talk to you about being a director of a company because I’m actually a jack-of-all-trades. I suppose I’m fortunate in the sense that over the years I have been exposed to a lot of people who work for dance companies and I’ve always been interested in how everybody else functions within our environment, whether a lighting man or the wardrobe mistress—whomever.
BB: Do distinctions remain between companies like the Royal Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, or La Scala?
Ms. Ruanne: I don’t think there are many differences. I know there was a period when you could tell a French dancer before they even danced. An English dancer had the same impact. I think, for a start, dancers have become so much more gymnastic. The whole formula has altered. Our perception of the perfect physique has altered. Male dancers tended in the past to be blocky and now, there is a certain androgyny that is part of the picture. Many male dancers have legs and feet that could be those of a girl. This physical look is always in the process of altering. Physical change is very organic to the art form, I think. Tastes change, ideas change, there are elements that can be bred, but I am almost certain that in ten years it will all change again.
