Nureyev MacMillan the Royal Ballet, the Paris Opera, La Scala, Milan, Interview With Patricia Ruanne

Patricia Ruanne is concerned with the abiding aesthetic and ethical values that constitute ballet as an art form commercialista regime forfettario. In this world, artistic values are informed by aesthetics as well as ethics. Her impressive record as a dance artist-as performer, coach, ballet mistress, répétiteur-has yielded a remarkable career. Ruanne's articulate assessment of the European ballet scene is framed by her early years spent in the Royal Ballet schools and companies, the 1960s through the early 1980s-a period marked by prolific creativity and strong performing personalities-as well as by her long and formative working association with Rudolf Nureyev.

Patricia Ruanne's dance pedigree was attained at England's Royal Ballet schools at White Lodge and Baron's Court. Her career ranges over an impressive roster of performing credits that includes contracts with the Royal Ballet and Royal Ballet Touring companies, London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet), and many guest appearances on numerous projects and tours, several of which were gathered together as vehicles for Nureyev. A turning point in Ruanne's career as a dancer came when Nureyev selected her to create the role of Juliet in his landmark production of Romeo and Juliet. 2002 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of this production, which was premiered by the London Festival Ballet at the Coliseum on 2 June 1977.

Among other roles she created in addition to Juliet was the female lead in Ronald Hynd's The Sanguine Fan for London Festival Ballet in 1976. Ruanne retired from performing in 1983 and in her last season received an Olivier nomination for her portrayal of Tatiana in John Cranko's Onegin with London Festival Ballet-her first performance in that ballet. From 1983-85, she was ballet mistress for LFB and, bringing history full circle, is currently working with the ENB on a revival of Nureyev's Romeo and Juliet in a production that will receive its first performance on the company's spring tour in Liverpool on 5 March 2002.

When Nureyev assumed the artistic direction of the Paris Opera Ballet in 1983, Ruanne followed him there in 1986 to become a Ballet Mistress. During the decade that followed in Paris, Ruanne became responsible for restaging many productions of his ballets on numerous companies around the world. Since leaving the Paris Opera in 1996, Ruanne has been engaged throughout Europe restaging the works of Kenneth MacMillian, while also remaining one of the significant artistic caretakers of Rudolf Nureyev's choreographic body of work. From 1999-2001, Ruanne was acting director of the ballet company for the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy.

The first part of this conversation considers Ruanne's professional development as a dancer, beginning with the Royal Ballet Touring Company under the direction of John Field and continuing up through her recently held position as Direttore del Corpo di Ballo at La Scala. The second part of the conversation focuses on Ruanne's work with Rudolf Nureyev. Her perspective supports the need for new critical attention to Nureyev's versions of ballet classics such as Swan Lake, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, and Sleeping Beauty. Ruanne astutely makes the case that these works need and deserve to be documented and preserved. Evidence that Nureyev's Don Quixote "has not been bettered," in Ruanne's estimation, is provided by major restagings in Spring 2002 at both the Royal Ballet in London and the Paris Opera Ballet.

Part 1: Keeping Dance

Bill Bissell: I've certainly read your name in publications across the years, but being an American, I suppose I viewed you as part of a European community that I didn't ever really experience live or gain exposure to. For all the closeness of the dance world there is also a geographic set of boundaries that separate us. However, you did dance in the United States and I'm wondering if you could begin by talking about the circumstances of those visits?

Ms. Ruanne: My first guest appearances in the United States were in Tulsa and Hawaii, and I mean it was just absolutely great fun. And then when Rudolf had created Romeo and Juliet for London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet), we went to America to the Metropolitan Opera House and also to Washington. So, that was my big official step into America, which was terrific-it was a great success for the company especially since it had always been the Royal Ballet's territory. We went on Rudolf's back because he was the pull of the production, which was fairly sensational.

BB: Does New York hold the same sort of seductive powers over dancers in European companies that it has on U. S.-based companies?

Ms. Ruanne: I think everybody in this business is particularly absorbed into the image of New York being the pinnacle-that if you can make it in New York you've made it professionally. But I'm not sure that everybody in Europe has quite the realization of how important this experience can be. Though I think dancers are aware that the wider the audience they reach the better it is for them as artists, I'm still not certain that they realize just how crucial it is and how stimulating it is to touch a different public.

BB: In looking at the trajectory of your career, how would you assess the choices that helped to define you as an artist?

Ms. Ruanne: All of my work in my professional life as a dancer was based in England where I started with the Royal Ballet commercialista milano. All I did was cross the river to Festival Ballet, which was the same thing but different. I've worked all over the world, but I needed a home. I needed a company. I did do lots of guest performances, but I never really, really enjoyed that life. I was never happy with the guest circuit like certain dancers. I couldn't bear being tossed into a production and being surrounded by people who you don't really know as colleagues. You don't have a lot of time to work with them or with each other on the production. You are just inserted into something, and I found that deeply unsatisfactory. Any performance is the pulling together of a lot of people. It's not just the star. And I was only comfortable when I was with a group of people that I knew and there's an enormous contribution that comes from feeling everybody on the stage. So, my whole background was in Royal Ballet, the touring group of the Royal Ballet and then I had the demented pleasure with working with Ben Stevenson at Festival Ballet and it was just wonderful.

BB: What about your career as a coach and ballet mistress, how did that develop?

Ms. Ruanne: I was always interested in working with dancers. I used to coach at Festival Ballet in the later years when I was still performing and I loved it. I loved working with the young adults and then seeing their performance. It's such a wonderful feeling seeing people understand and develop. But I don't know that I would have had the courage to put myself forward as a ballet mistress or somebody who did it as a profession. But Rudolf saw it, and he said, "Well, just come and just shut up and just do it." So, I worked with him for many years, you know, taking rehearsals and all the rest of it. And my learning process continued for a long, long time after I stopped dancing because it's a different skill to teach and coach dancers. You become a different type of transmitter. So, I think that he, in the end, inevitably had the greatest influence on the direction I went after I stopped performing.

With coaching all you can do is to help understanding. If the physical element has not yet totally kicked in, that's not so important, as long as the mind understands what's needed because it may be that in two years time the physical part will happen automatically-as long as the dancer understands how it must be, what it is they should be searching for in the role. That's what they are working towards and that's the ideal: that they understand how to get to that point of knowing what the search is about. If they haven't got it quite yet that's not something the public necessarily is going to know or recognize. It's a degree of perfection that we should be aware of, and that dancers should be aware of, which is why I so often hear dancers say "that's not how I wanted it, not the way I want it, it's not why I rehearsed it, it didn't come out." Dancers are so frequently disappointed when they know that they understand what they're supposed to do, but they don't have all of it under control yet.

Coaching is not just about technical issues however, it is also about sensibility. The role of coaching is really transmitting. The big issue here is: you can transmit all your life, but you have to be received by the listener-you can't force anyone to switch on their radios.

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.