Dance star at height of glittering powers

Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant perform Push. Photo / Supplied

Once in a lifetime there might be a star of the very stuff legends are made of. Once in a lifetime, if you are lucky, you might get to see such a star at the height of her powers.

The sensational Sylvie Guillem - tall, thin and freakishly flexible - is without doubt the leading candidate for her generation. Her extraordinary career already glitters with grand awards: "chevalier" of the Legion D'Honneur, an "officier" of the Ordre National du Merite, a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

The Daily Telegraph, in an early review of Push, her contemporary collaboration with Russell Maliphant, declared "there can be no doubt that Sylvie Guillem is one of the greatest dancers ever."

Reviews of Push in Australia this month, before the New Zealand leg of its international tour, have been only marginally less ecstatic. "Utter bliss ... work of such beauty brought tears to my eyes," said The Australian and "Sylvie Guillem has the movement of a cheetah: sleek and silky smooth with muscular power in reserve and a whiplash finish when required" was the opinion of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Guillem first shot to fame in 1984 when Rudolph Nureyev, then leading the Paris Opera Ballet, burst on to the stage after her performance in his Swan Lake and declared her "an etoile" - the highest possible accord. She was just 19 years old and it was only eight years since she had stepped into her first ballet class.

Ask Guillem, friendly and warm on the telephone from Sydney, with a charming French accent, how such an early triumph felt and affected her and she says simply, "I was relieved. I am impatient. I didn't want to be stuck in the corp de ballet. I didn't want to be just a principal dancer. You can get stuck there too, and it would be deadly. So I just thought thank goodness. For me it was the starting point of what I wanted to do and I knew there was a long, long way to go, after that."

Guillem's way was never the expected way.

While she adored Nureyev and his special attention, she was never awed by his fame and frequently stood up to him over artistic matters so it was a stormy professional relationship. Even so, Nureyev once declared Guillem the only woman he could possibly marry.

When she turned her back and defected from Paris to London, aged 24, it caused such shock waves that questions were asked in the French National Assembly. In England, the feisty young star had negotiated a contract with the Royal Ballet which guaranteed her what she most wanted - complete artistic freedom. In asserting that right she soon gained the nickname "Mademoiselle Non" when she refused certain roles, vetoed partners, demanded costume changes and challenged the likes of choreographic icon Sir Kenneth MacMillan. It was behaviour that definitely ruffled the tulle and set askew the diadems of the traditional dance world, even as her amazing talents inevitably rewrote many of the rules of classical dance.

At 44 and finished "for now" with that classical world, Guillem's star is still ascending. Push has received an Olivier Award, a Time Out Award, Best Choreography (Modern) at the National Dance Awards and the South Bank Show Dance Award since its debut in 2005.

The Push programme consists of four works: the duet for which the whole is named, performed by Guillem and Maliphant and an exercise in the melding and resisting of two very different bodies, his compact and muscular, hers ultra-malleable and light; two solos for Guillem, Solo, performed to the guitar music of Carlos Montoya and Two, another of Maliphant's dazzling creations; and Maliphant's own signature solo work Shift.

Guillem's unique physique has been an enormous factor in her unparalleled success in both the classical ballet and contemporary dance worlds. She once described herself as "looking like an asparagus," and confessed that when adolescence failed to add curves to her angular shape she hunched her shoulders to try and create breasts, and descended ever deeper into the shyness that had blighted her childhood.

Then, she says, she discovered her body could express on stage all that she found so difficult to get out in words.

"It has been a great gift," she now says, "actually many gifts."

She credits her grandfather for the genes that enable a range of movement still seeking its limits, that have kept her remarkably injury-free, and for a constitution that enables her to eat like a French farmer and remain reed slim.

"I have it - so I work with it," she says of her famous body. And no one would deny Guillem's work ethic - she will practice all night if need be, in her search for perfection. Her strong-mindedness is also "in my genes".

But she explains her unusual attitude to her career on the fact that unlike her peers, she never dreamed of becoming a dancer, that it all happened by chance. Her mother was a gymnastics teacher and Guillem was enrolled at the Paris Opera Ballet school initially to improve her performance in that discipline.

"So I was never driven by the ambition to be a great dancer. It was far more important to me that I felt comfortable with what I was doing. I did have this strong conviction about what was artistically right and what was wrong - an instinct."

So while her talent was immediately obvious, Guillem's reactions were always unexpected.

"I did refuse to do things a lot of other people just dream of doing. I was just following my instinct - and at first it was blind instinct, I couldn't explain it in words."

Today she can, and describes her dance as "the offering of a gift" to her audiences.

"And I want that gift to be the best it possibly can. So I put everything I have into the moment and no one can interfere with that. There can be no compromise. It has to be a pure thing. The stage is not a place where you can lie. You have to honour that place and the people who decide to come and see you. You owe them ..."

Performance

Who: Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant in Push
Where and when: Aotea Centre, tonight and tomorrow, 7.30pm; www.buytickets.co.nz