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 Wayne Sleep | |||||||
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After Wayne Sleep's graduation performance with the Royal Ballet School, John Percival ended a glowing review with 'I would guess we are in for some fun'. Right. Sleep's short stature kept him out of most of the roles we associate with the great virtuosi, but in those created for him and many others he was unforgettable. A technical dynamo with an extremely irreverent attitude, he was too multi-talented to find fulfilment within a classical company, and carved out for himself a unique career, bringing accessible stage dance to a new popularity all over the country. Plymouth-born in 1948, but growing up in the North, he took his first serious lessons from Muriel Carr and under her care won his first competition - in, prophetically, the song and dance section. At the age of 13 he successfully auditioned for the Royal Ballet School - missing, fortunately, the 'projected height' test until it was too late to cancel his scholarship. Given his size - he never grew past 5'2" - he needed to be quite exceptional to make it into the company: his graduation performance of the Blue Boy in Les Patineurs showed that he could already out-dance many previous interpreters of the role, and give it character as well. De Valois liked him, and so did Ashton, who was at that time the director of the Royal Ballet, so that four years after joining the company Sleep had already danced the Peasant pas de deux in Giselle and Bluebird, and Ashton had given him Puck in The Dream as well as creating roles for him in Enigma and Jazz Calendar. Ashton retired in 1970 and for a time Sleep's career seemed put on hold: he took the opportunity to broaden his acting experience, among other things appearing as Ariel in a Regent's Park production of The Tempest. Back with the Royal Ballet, he eventually found himself better appreciated by MacMillan, who made two of his best roles for him, in Elite Syncopations and The Four Seasons, where for once the choreography focussed entirely on his technical accomplishment. The peak of his Royal Ballet career was perhaps the ballet created for him by John Neumeier, Fourth Symphony - but for some reason the company gave it only four performances. Sleep was made a principal dancer in 1973 and stayed with the company for another ten years. All this time, though, he had been expanding his career, and had taken frequent leave of absence both to act and to dance in other, ususally non-ballet productions: he devised his own show, Dash, which toured in different formats for years, he was in the first cast of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats and Song and Dance, and these days he tours with his own company, still dancing himself and giving opportunities to many others. He has always been enormously popular with audiences: for my own taste he can sometimes appear too cute by half, but his energy, technical wizardry and irrepressible character have helped him make a unique and important contribution to our dance history.
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