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Excerpted Inspirations #170

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • Mar 17
  • 0 min read

Margot was enormously fond of [teacher] Goncharov, but it was for the small, birdlike, chain-smoking [Vera] Volkova, full of physical effervescence and imaginative verbal flights of broken English, that she now pushed herself beyond what she perceived to be her limits. She says: “I worked so hard in Volkova’s class that I used to wish I could faint, as the great Taglioni is reported to have done at the end of two hours’ training with her father.” But Margot’s body remained stubbornly conscious as her limbs sought to obey the quaint poetry of Volkova’s exhortations: “Arms are holding delicate flowers you must not crush,” or “Pull God’s beard,” or “Leg does not know is going to arabesque.” Sick with exhaustion after a particularly difficult enchaînement, Margot would look to her for praise, only to be told: “Well, somehow it didn’t quite come out, isn’t it.” The story of a dancer’s life. But a story of greater consequence than might meet the eye. The French ballerina Violette Verdy elucidates: “It’s almost a privilege of our profession that we have to go about things the hard way. Margot’s slow development, as exemplified in the way she worked with Volkova, is absolute proof of a truth that wants to be ignored these days, but which still exists – that nobody from the outside can impose something and pretend it looks real if it’s not grown from the inside. The gorgeous result that we got from Margot could only have been achieved the hard way. It was a pilgrimage. There’s no need to do it on your knee and bleed: Margot didn’t look for unnecessary suffering. But whatever difficulty she had, she confronted honestly, with humility, and when you work like that, without anger, without unnatural forcing, it gives you a sense of reality. The strengthening of the foot leads automatically to the growth of character. It’s surprising how, if you stick to the one thing you should do, life is going to deliver what you need.” Meredith Daneman, Margot Fonteyn: A Life (2004), pp. 157-158

 
 
 

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