The Stars Beyond

"The other girls dance better than Margot now," a member of the Royal Ballet said recently. "But when she's onstage, you still don't look at anyone else." That admission--and hastily appended tribute--seemed to sum up a transitional moment in the career of the world's most celebrated ballerina, and also in the life and youth of her well-traveled company.

Now 52, Margot Fonteyrt has talked of retiring for several years. But each season, when the Royal Ballet makes its regular visit to the U.S., there is Dame Margot, with Fellow Superstar Rudi Nureyev, nearly as captivating as ever. During the current tour, for instance, she may have looked a shade worn to be doing The Sleeping Beauty. But her Juliet was so youthfully supple that she seemed to yield to Nureyev's lifts like some delicately submissive scarf of chiffon.

English Charm. Fonteyn and Nureyev have been dancing a great deal in New York. But many of the major roles and productions have also been performed by dancers other than the leading couple. Circumstances in the company, too, have encouraged an assessment of the Royal Ballet's talent and future--with or without Fonteyn.

This season, after seven years as director and 35 years with the company, Sir Frederick Ashton is retiring. The Royal Ballet bears Ashton's personal mark in many ways, particularly in its fondness for classical ballet, its elegant expressiveness and sheer English charm. The company's cheerful penchant for the stately pleasure domes of dance--the long romantic narrative ballets that delight the public, began when Ashton revived them soon after the war. Now Scottish-born Choreographer Kenneth MacMillan is replacing Ashton. He is best known for Romeo and Juliet; but he once transformed The Diary of Anne Frank into a ballet, and no one yet knows what he will do with the company. The triumphant New York tour shows that whatever happens, MacMillan and his new codirector, John Field, have inherited a whole new wave of younger dancers. Especially in the U.S., their vitality and brilliance have been too little noticed, because of the popularity of the famous pair.

Jump for Joy. The best-matched couple for doing such things as Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet and Daphnis and Chloe are Antoinette Sibley, 31, and Anthony Dowell, 26. They work together as often as Nureyev and Fonteyn but could hardly be more different in style. For Nureyev's lynxlike power and dramatic presence, Dowell, who greatly resembles the Royal Danish Ballet's Erik Bruhn, substitutes the cool grace and the effortless movement of a danseur noble. Compared with Fonteyn's magical feminine magnetism, Sibley seems shy, vulnerable and distant. But she moves in such harmony with Dowell that they could be brother and sister, trained together from the cradle.

The group's most accomplished ballerina is Merle Park. At 32, she is now technically a better dancer than Fonteyn, and her Giselle, danced with Dowell or Donald MacLeary, is already ranked with the best in modern dance history. Park conveys to audiences great warmth and tenderness, as well as humility and humor in a way that make her someone very like a Julie Harris on points.

Dancing Lise in La Fille Mai Gardee, she is as lighthearted as her partner, Michael Coleman, who can hardly be matched anywhere in the art of jumping for joy. Coleman seldom dances the gloomy-prince parts. But as the company's paramount performer of pas de deux, he invariably stops the show by turning intrusive exhibitionism into sheer exuberance. Coleman and Park together in Fille are a perfect blend of countrified slapstick and sweet sentiment. Romping round Maypoles and through clog dances, winding themselves into skeins of ribbon, they prove conclusively how hard it is to marry off a pretty daughter to a rich gimpy-legged clod--especially when there is a poor but lively lad lurking behind the nearest haystack. A visual blend of gaitered Thomas Rowlandson and unbuckled Kate Greenaway, Fille is a reminder that what dance does best is delight the eye and ease the heart. If the Royal Ballet Company should stop bringing it to America, this ballet alone would be well worth a grand jete to London to see and savor.

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