Yes, I've been bad about posting here. I really have no excuse. I can promise that I have not failed to post about any performances I've seen. I just haven't seen any lately!
There has been plenty of time to sit on the couch lately, though, and watch documentaries, including this rather thorough one about
Dame Margot Fonteyn. Coming in at over 2 hours, it traces Dame Fonteyn's life from her birth into an Anglo-Brazilian family (as Margaret Hookham) to her death as a pauper in Panama.
Fonteyn is one of my style idols and the famous dancer I believe I most resemble stylistically, so it was fascinating to take a closer look at her training and career. (For the record, my other style idol is
Audrey Hepburn.) I have always been inspired by how Fonteyn could do so much with what, by today's standards, would be considered so little. She doesn't have high extension, turn a lot, or jump high, and she had terrible feet. What she did have was precision, line, grace, passion, and musicality. As one of her former partners put it, refering to her technique, "The young dancers looking at it, they probably wouldn't be able to spot it because it was so amazingly disguised." (Unfortunately I was too lazy to identify the speaker, who was not shown on screen at the time he said this.)
I knew Fonteyn performed to quite an old age (60, to be exact) and that she was married to Roberto de Arias, a Panamanian diplomat, but I didn't know the two facts were related. Her husband turned out to be a real piece of... work. He used Fonteyn's fame and money for his own ends while cheating on her. He allowed her to be arrested for running guns into Panama. He was paralyzed from the neck down by a bullet shot by the husband of one of his mistresses. Fonteyn was on the verge of divorcing him when this happened, but ended up supporting him financially for the rest of his life. She kept dancing for so long because she had to. Even as a quadraplegic, Arias ran off with his physical therapist!
Keith Money, Fonteyn's assistant during the later years of her life, was extremely bitter at the way she was treated by, well, everyone. As he says, "These people [dance stars] are sacrificied. They are really sacrificial victims. They're put on the stone, and they're pulverized." Later in life, she was, according to him, forced to travel to London while fighting the cancer that ended her life and appear onstage (presumably a curtain call) during a concert given for her benefit. He argues that if these people were solely interested in helping her, they should have just sent her the money rather than making her do the dog-and-pony thing. It's hard to disagree with that and heartbreaking to see how such a talented woman gave so much and had so little for herself.
For that reason, it's even more important to remember just what a marvel Fonteyn was and how much of an inspiration to the dancers that came after her (myself included). What comes across most strongly in this story of her life is her enormous discipline and commitment to her dancing. Combined with her talent, it's no wonder she became a household name worldwide.
"So there are people that transcend...their life on Earth. They become like highlights of humanity." - Ana Cristina Alvarado, "friend in Panama"
