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Une rare entrevue de la danseuse
étoile
En entrevue au quotidien anglais The
Gardian, Sylvie Guillem livre ses impressions sur sa
vie et sa carrière. À l’aube de la quarantaine,
la danseuse étoile de l’Opéra de Paris
multiplie les projets avec de prestigieux chorégraphes
contemporains.
 Fear
is the drug
Judith Mackrell, The Guardian, Thursday September 14, 2006
She is the high-flying ballerina who switched to modern
dance - and now she's about to give her most personal performance
yet. In a rare interview, Sylvie Guillem tells Judith Mackrell
what makes her tick.
Ever since she was promoted to étoile
of the Paris Opera Ballet at the dazzlingly young age of
19, Sylvie Guillem has been the superballerina of our time,
celebrated not only for the fluky perfection of her body,
but for the extraordinary glamour she radiates on stage.
Fans trade details of her performances obsessively over
the internet, they hang around outside the stage doors.
For them, Guillem descends straight from the stage divinities
of the 19th century, "sacred monsters" such as
Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse, after whom her latest
project is named.
The term monstres sacrés was coined to reflect the
extreme reverence and hysteria with which these early divas
were worshipped. It was arguably their levels of fame that
ushered in the modern cult of celebrity, elevating Maria
Callas, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, even Madonna
and the Beckhams, into minor gods. Yet talking to Guillem
about the background to her new work, developed in collaboration
with dancer and choreographer Akram Khan, it is clear that
she defines her own celebrity in rigidly circumspect terms.
"I am only interested in being famous for my dancing,"
she insists. "For me the concept of the sacred monster
is only about the stage - it is not about image."
When I meet 41-year-old Guillem, straight after rehearsing
with Khan, image seems to be the last thing on her mind.
Grey roots show through her auburn hair, which hangs in
a limp, fraying pigtail; the delicate steely length of her
limbs is concealed by an oversized man's shirt; and she
wears battered dance gear. Her beauty is, in fact, all the
more startling for its scruffiness, but so far is it from
the diamantine elegance of her stage persona that Guillem
boasts she can largely go about her daily business unrecognised.
"If I am out in the street or buying bread or taking
a taxi," she says, "no one knows who I am."
This is exactly as she wants it, for Guillem is largely
contemptuous of the modern currency of fame. Her gaze flickers
lethally when she says: "I'm not the kind of person
who is on television and in magazines every five minutes
selling clothes or washing machines." A few years ago,
when she agreed to do a photospread in Vogue, she typically
turned the assignment into an act of artistic provocation,
posing stark, non-airbrushed, naked and - more shockingly
still - refusing to wear a single lick of makeup.
Her body looks as if it could go on for ever. Still preternaturally
slender and supple, it has thrown very few injuries at her,
and Guillem says she has got much better at managing the
chronic pain that is a daily fact of her dancing life. "It
is difficult in the mornings," she admits, imitating
herself creeping wincingly down the stars, "but I have
learned to ask my body different things. Maybe I can't always
do what I once did, but I sometimes end up discovering something
new that may be even better."
Behind her professional brilliance, Guillem is a fiercely
private woman. "It is strange: I love to be in front
of the audience, but I have this opposite side that is afraid
of meeting people, that doesn't want to talk. I feel it's
like having a little hard stone inside me, of problems,
doubts and shyness." She admits she has suffered from
this since she was a little girl in Paris, the daughter
of a garage mechanic and a gym teacher, who found herself
gifted with such extraordinary physical prowess that she
was targeted as a future Olympic gymnast before being taken
into the Paris Opera Ballet School. Still, she believes
absolutely that it has made her what she is today: "Having
limits to push against is how you find out what you can
do. I have always been full of contradictions. I am shy
but I love the freedom of the stage. I need reassurance
but at the same time I don't want it. I hate being afraid
but I can't help wanting to frighten myself. That is how
you grow."
There is a long history of frightening herself that lies
behind Sacred Monsters, a work she regards as the most challengingly
"human" of her career; the piece will also see
her expose her classically trained body to the Kathak-schooled
prowess of her partner Akram Khan. "I discovered even
when I was dancing in Paris that it was good to be scared.
When I worked with choreographers like William Forsythe,
I never knew where we were going. It was very exciting."
She shapes a vivid little box with her hands then makes
it disappear. "Although I liked tradition, I could
never stay inside it."
It was an inability to stay in the boxes that led to Guillem
walking out of Paris Opera after only five years as an étoile,
determined to find more independence with an international
freelance career. Throughout the 1990s she was constantly
looking for opportunities to challenge herself, although,
frustratingly, she discovered that some of the more experimental
choreographers with whom she wanted to collaborate were
too intimidated to believe she was serious. "It was
something about my reputation," she says. "I appeared
too hard or too classical. Your reputation is made up of
so many things, true things and false."
During the past five years, however, Guillem has finally
been able to push her career in a radical new direction,
turning the page on tutu roles and working with choreographers
from modern dance. Her most fruitful relationship has been
with Russell Maliphant, whose stylistic fusion of meditative
stillness and reckless athleticism has brought out glowing
revelations in her own dancing. Maliphant admits that in
their first collaboration, Broken Fall, which Guillem danced
with Ballet Boyz William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, he never
expected her to tackle everything he threw at her, especially
the more aggressively bruising aikido rolls and capoeira
moves. Yet, he says: "She went for all of it, without
any questioning." Guillem fell so deeply in love with
Maliphant's style that she badgered him to continue their
association.
It was while they were in the early stages of the duet programme
Push that Guillem also began meeting with Khan. She was
fascinated to discover how much experience they shared,
as prodigies in their separate traditions (Khan was as much
of a sacred monster in Kathak as Guillem was in ballet)
and as rebels. In the work they have made together, which
premieres next week, the two dancers have not only re-created
the trajectories of their separate pasts but have gone on
a stylistic journey towards each other, with Guillem adapting
herself to Khan's grounded strength and speed, and Khan
opening up his body to her lyricism. They close with a duet
that Guillem jokes has been the biggest challenge of all.
"We are such different sizes. He is small and fast,
but" - she mimes herself drifting through the air -
"I am like this tall asparagus."
In finding their common areas, Khan says they have moved
into very intimate ground. He believes that when audiences
view the work "they will see Sylvie herself on stage
for the first time". They will also, for the first
time, be hearing her speak, during sections in which she
and Khan exchange verbal as well as physical information.
Guillem admits this has been an unsettling as well as a
fascinating experiment. "I have discovered how much
you give of yourself just from the way you talk and react
to the other person. When I am just dancing there is always
something round me, a character, a role, that protects me.
Here it feels much more myself."
So dedicated is Guillem to giving herself new challenges
that sometimes she gives the impression that taking risks
has motivated her more than a simple love of dance. Yet
she says the two are inseparable. "Working with new
people is what life is about for me - it is like confronting
a new country, a new vision." She cites her recent
encounter with Lin Hwai-min, the Taiwanese choreographer
with whom she and Khan have been collaborating on part of
the material for Sacred Monsters. "This little man
of 60 was explaining some movement. It looked at first very
simple, almost banal - but the feeling he had in these movements,
the tradition he was coming from, were so powerful it meant
I was having to learn to use my eyes completely differently.
Moments like that are fantastic - you are given a new perspective,
not just on your job, but on life."
However, Guillem's passionately high expectations of her
work mean she is unlikely to stay in the dance profession
once her stage career is over. She cannot envisage settling
into the routine of teaching, nor does she want to take
on the responsibilities of running a company. Even a small
ensemble has little appeal. "It would involve too many
compromises. For me, work is about the pleasure of doing
things only when the idea is right." As for taking
on a monolithic ballet institution like the Royal, the prospect
fills her with horror. "I'm not made for that. My ideas
are too strong. Politics and finances get in the way of
everything you do."
Of course, at the moment there is no question of her retiring.
She has tours of Push and Sacred Monsters scheduled for
next year, and she is in the early stages of planning a
major new project, in her recently appointed position as
Associate Artist of Sadler's Wells.
But while she might seem indomitable, Guillem knows perfectly
well that her body will eventually let her down, and she
has enough self-awareness to predict that she will suffer
miserably when it does. "I don't think you can ever
leave the stage easily. It will be a big change, even if
you know that you are ready to stop."
Nor will it just be the colour and drama of the theatre
she loses. Although she is based in London, where she loves
her "little garden", she and her long-time partner,
the photographer Gilles Tapie, have been living a privileged
nomadic existence for the past 17 years as they've followed
the international trajectory of her career. She has friends
and colleagues in many different cities: a kind of global
social life that she squeezes between the exhausting demands
of her work schedule. It will surely be hard for her when
that journey comes to a halt.
But another of the contradictions in Guillem's character
is that her restlessness is grounded in a deep core of self-reliance,
even of solitariness. When I ask how she imagines filling
her future leisure time she addresses the question with
dreamy enthusiasm. "There are so many things I want
to do. I know this fantastic potter in Japan who I plan
to go and study with for six months. I want to garden more.
I love nature." Her expression turns almost childishly
animated. "Most of all, I want to learn how to drive
one of those carriages, like they have in the parks. Those
old-fashioned carriages with just one or two horses. I have
an image of myself riding alone through a big open place
with no cars, no pollution."
The professional rebel, who for years danced under the nickname
Mademoiselle Non, will be dreaming outside the box even
in retirement.
Source :
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1872011,00.html
Retourner
au sommaire du numéro d'octobre 2006
© i-mouvance est édité
par le Regroupement québécois de la danse.
Les articles signés expriment l'opinion de leurs
auteurs et pas nécessairement celle du RQD.
Pour toute information : info@quebecdanse.org
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