© Daria Klimentova recent ENB reviews English National Ballet website Simonetta Dixon reviews

David Wall, clutching a can of Coke and a pack of cigarettes, greets me in the foyer of Markova House with the words 'Do you mind if we do the interview in a cupboard?' It's such a disarming start, and made even funnier as it turns out to be a kitchen cupboard just off the dancers' kitchenette - itself pretty tiny. No airs and graces for the unassuming Wall whose natural habitat is actually ENB's large ballroom studio and a place that might trigger the odd flashback since his first dance steps were actually ballroom ones.

"Ballroom dancing was compulsory at my primary school (in Windsor), and the teacher who taught that also taught ballet on a Saturday, and she convinced my mother to send me to class. Her name was Miss Durnsford, and I was five. She suggested I audition for the Royal Ballet School when I was ten, and I was accepted." Did he always know he wanted to dance professionally? "Not until I completed my training, at about 15 or 16. At that point, we were witness to two really great ballets: La Fille mal gardee had just been created, and Cranko's Antigone, in which the males took on the leading roles. Also, Nureyev had just defected, so seeing the male get more prominence in the art form spurred me on."

In 1963, Wall joined the Royal Ballet Touring Company, where he was to spend seven years before joining the main Company at Covent Garden in 1970. They were two very different existences: "In my seven years with the Touring Company, I got a lot of ballets under my belt. We used to do two 14-week provincial seasons, a season at Covent Garden and a tour to the Continent or abroad every year, so it was marvellous to do all those ballets…you really learned your trade. Joining the main Company was very different. We rehearsed much harder at Covent Garden, and at the end of the day everyone went home, whilst in the Touring Company we relied on each other not only professionally but also for our social lives."

Wall joined the main Company as a Principal. Was it hard coming straight in at the top, albeit having been a Principal in the Touring Company? "Well, it was a difficult change. I'd been a Principal since I was 19 or 20, but leading a much smaller company. Here, I felt I had to prove myself all over again. I was performing less frequently, and I had a change of repertoire. But I was fortunate to have good support from my wife, who was also in the Company." (Wall has been married to Alfreda Thorogood for 38 years).
 

David Wall in the studio
© Daria Klimentova

1970 was a seminal year in the history of the Royal Ballet. The Touring Company merged with the main Company at Covent Garden, and Frederic Ashton was replaced as Artistic Director by Kenneth MacMillan. Ashton had always taken a great interest in the Touring Company, as had Dame Ninette de Valois before him. When Wall joined the main Company, Ashton created a role in Sinfonietta on him. "That was the first one. But actually two ballets to which I owe so much were both Ashton ballets: La Fille mal gardee and Les Deux Pigeons, both of which I danced a lot in the Touring Company. So although Sinfonietta was the first created role, I was already well versed in the Ashtonian repertoire, which I adored dancing, especially Two Pigeons".

Although Ashton had given way to MacMillan as AD of the Company, he remained active during this period. Of course MacMillan's choreography was very different both from Ashton's and from what the Company had been used to until then, but Wall points out that he was very conscious of keeping Ashton's pieces and his style in the Company.

Wall realises how lucky he was to have been dancing during this golden age of British choreography, and we spend some time discussing the differences in approach of Ashton and MacMillan to the conception and making of a ballet. "Actually, their approaches were quite similar in many ways. But I think Kenneth knew what he wanted almost more than Ashton did…both of them as choreographers relied totally on the people they were creating for. They both had their muses, and what was great about working with them was the extent to which they involved everyone in the creative process.

"I remember the last thing Fred choreographed on me was a pas de deux with Margot called The Amazon Forest, which we actually did in South America. The three of us had so much fun doing that. I remember getting into trouble when I was a young dancer because in an interview I said I didn't feel Fred was a choreographer, but a sculptor. It was Fred's way of moulding movement that was so special. Likewise Kenneth; Kenneth always liked the quirkiness of a movement. They were both lovely to work with, but with Kenneth we didn't always know what was at the back of his mind! But we trusted him, and he trusted us, hence a piece was produced with genuine togetherness."

During his career, Wall danced with many partners, one of the first being Margot Fonteyn, with whom he danced "a great deal." He was 17 the first time he danced with her…this must have been a real challenge to one so young. "I was actually terrified" laughs Wall. "I walked into the rehearsal studio and didn't know where to hide myself. It was Les Sylphides , and I had never danced it before. But within half an hour we were laughing and joking, and she became an enormous inspiration for me, both as an artist and as a person. We always enjoyed working together." Many years later, Wall was to tell the story at her memorial service of how Fonteyn had paid for both his wife's and her sister's early ballet training. Their father had been the fire officer at the Royal Opera House during the war and one day asked Fonteyn how to go about getting his little girls to start ballet school. 'You must take them to Vera Volkova' she said, and with her help, that is what he did. Although Freda hated the lessons at first, she persevered and both girls went on to become professional dancers. Fonteyn changed their lives, and certainly enhanced Wall's.

I try to pin him down to one 'main and special' partner; he ponders this for a minute and then says that in the 60s and 70s it was Doreen Wells…they were known as Wells-Wall! "I did my first Swan Lakes, Sleeping Beauties, Coppelias and Giselles with her. We were the Sibley/Dowell of the Touring Company. In those early days I felt most comfortable onstage with my wife, Freda." When the two Companies amalgamated into one, MacMillan paired him with Lynn Seymour in Romeo and Juliet, and it was so successful that he started creating roles on them regularly. Although, after a lot of thought, Wall says that his main partnership was with Lynn, he is careful to point out that the only established partnership in those days within the Company was Sibley/Dowell, and that he himself danced with many ballerinas, including Monica Mason, Merle Park and Jennifer Penney. Was there anyone with whom he had a particular empathy, either physical or emotional? "Well, I could always rely on Lynnie. We always worked together so well. But I used to take pride in being a good partner, and I tried to take care of all my partners, which meant being adaptable because they were all different."

In part, Wall's adaptability and confidence were due to his learning his stagecraft whilst touring. He had an innate ability to act which was to stand him in very good stead when he worked with MacMillan; one cannot successfully interpret his choreography without being able to impart the gamut of the human experience, whether joy, depravity, violence or sweetness.

MacMillan created the complex character of Lescaut on Wall in 1974 in the ballet Manon. How easy was it for him to portray a character who begins as a pimping libertine, becomes a comic drunk, and ends up the caring brother who decides the right thing to do is help his sister follow her heart and loses his life as a result? "Well, he was depraved, to say the least. We diverted a bit from the book, but not much. The drunk scene was created straight in the first instance. Then it was Dame Ninette who suggested doing something comic since there wasn't much comedy in the ballet" he laughs. "Do you know, it took a lot longer to re-choreograph it inebriated than it did as a straight piece!" He loved dancing Lescaut: "he is very manipulative." I mention the discussion that has been taking place on Ballet.co regarding the very beginning of the ballet, and asked him to clarify it for readers, who had been wondering why the ballet begins with Lescaut sitting on his own, centre stage, with his cape wrapped around him. "We tried many openings to this ballet. One of Kenneth's ideas was to have a parachute silk with slits in it flutter down, then have a character appear, then the silk would move, then another character would appear… but we just couldn't make it work. We tried several other things, but then Kenneth finally had the idea of Lescaut just sitting there in an almost drugged state; it could have all been a dream of his. But it was really just to emphasise that he is central to the piece. It is a very difficult opening for a dancer because you can't even move your eyeballs, which is very hard when beggars are moving all around you, and the lights come up!" It would be interesting to know who he thinks is or has been a particularly good Lescaut since he set such a high standard. "Well, I haven't seen that many performances at the Royal….I don't go to the ballet much! Certainly Stephen Jefferies was a wonderful Lescaut. It's a very difficult role because you really have to be a dance actor to bring it off. I've seen a few slight performances over the years. Although everything is said in the choreography, this has to be danced very strong to counter the slight weakness of Des Grieux's character."
 

David Wall as Lescault in MacMillan's Manon for the Royal Ballet
Photograph courtesy of David Wall ©

One of the biggest challenges of Wall's career was having Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling created on him. Mayerling is clearly very dear to him, and it proved an illuminating discussion. As background, MacMillan had said that he wanted to strip away the padding of the 19th century ballets. He was also most impressed by Osborne's 'Look Back in Anger' and had thought "I can do that with ballet". The choreographer was in a good position when he decided to create Mayerling because there were so many wonderful dancers around at the time, both male and female. "It took about ten months to get it right" remembers Wall. "Kenneth made us all go away and read books on the subject. The facts seemed to change from book to book, and I felt quite lost. It wasn't until I read a chapter on Rudolf's childhood that I suddenly clocked on to how this person might have developed: the fact that he was marched around in the snow at 6.00 in the morning at the age of 6, and shot at, and deprived of his mother's love and attention made me understand a lot about what happened to him. As we were developing the piece, we didn't have any ideas where the pas de deux were going to fit in. Looking back, it's good we did it in bits. Had we done it chronologically, I would have said to Kenneth after Act 1: 'forget it, I can't do this'."

I ask him about the difficulty of dancing this role, and he says it wasn't difficult in that they were such a good team (the original cast included Merle Park, Wendy Ellis, Georgina Parker and Laura Connor as well as Lynn Seymour). They all knew MacMillan well, and they never worked too hard. "Certainly with the big pas de deux with Lynn, it came easily. That very last pdd before Rudolf shoots Vetsera and himself only took about four hours to choreograph and to get it right." I express real surprise at this, and he explains: "We were all SO intense about it and had lived it for ten months. By the time we got it onto the stage, the last thing we thought about was the audience. We knew exactly what we were doing, and could react to each other so well, that we didn't care whether the audience liked it or not. Actually, we thought that they wouldn't like it, but it turns out it was Kenneth's only major ballet that they DID go ballistic about immediately. They didn't about Manon, or Anastasia".

Was Wall, and his colleagues, for that matter, aware that they were making dance history at the time, in that the subject matter and its portrayal in Mayerling were so controversial? "Umm…no, I don't think we were. We were so intensely involved, and halfway through Kenneth gave up the directorship of the RB, and after that he was a different man, so we really went for it and it was a very happy working relationship between the cast and Kenneth". Although Kenneth was happy to rely on his cast for ideas and to interpret his vision, there were times when they had to come to compromises, as when they were discussing how Rudolf took his morphine. "Just think about it", chuckles Wall, "syringes weren't invented yet, so guess how Rudolf took his morphine?" "Er, the French way, I assume?" "Yes!" he bursts out laughing, "so we decided on poetic licence and brought in the syringe…I didn't want to shock the audience more than we already were doing!"

How about the physical and emotional exertions of the ballet? He nods and assents when I tell him that Johan Kobborg had recently said that after Act 1 he already feels like he's danced a three-act ballet. "Yes, it used to take me two days to recover from one performance of Mayerling". Often, the saving grace was the music; it spurred him on, particularly at the end of Act 3. Is it the most difficult ballet he has ever danced? "Yes, it is the most taxing mentally and physically, but to dance Giselle well in that second act used to be equally demanding in a different way."

He had said once that he had to do things in portraying Rudolf that he had never done as a human being or a dancer…what did he mean by this? "Well, portraying that depravity. I mean, that pdd with Stephanie….that's not in my nature!" I tell him I'm glad to hear it, and he continues "I tried to get the audience to be a bit sympathetic with Rudolf, because he was desperate and it was only circumstances that made him that way." Did he succeed in this quest? "I think so. I hope so." The pdd between Rudolf and his mother is pivotal, and that if it is danced correctly, this is whence the sympathy for him should emanate. "Absolutely. That really is a pivotal part of the ballet."
 

David Wall in the studio
© Patrick Baldwin

Wall recently staged Mayerling for the Hungarian Ballet. How did it go? The subject matter is certainly close to home for them. "The real challenge wasn't the actual subject matter, but doing a MacMillan ballet of this magnitude. Once they got into it they were fabulous. Of course it is their heritage.. both the history and the composer, and they danced it magnificently. The audiences loved it."

He has coached a few Rudolfs over the years, including Anthony Dowson and, more recently, Kobborg, who he thought was excellent. "I thought he really did that role justice" enthuses Wall. "Unfortunately I wasn't in the country when Jonny Cope was doing it…I would have loved to have seen him." I make him feel worse by telling him it was another brilliant portrayal. "Yes, that's what I heard." What is his main advice when coaching the Rudolf role? "Well, the one thing I don't do is try to make them do it the way I did it. They need to be themselves, but also get the balance right between the steps and the acting." Has he seen some worthy successors to Lynn Seymour as Vetsera? "Yes." Was he going to tell me more? "No. Ok, yes. Little Alina [Cojocaru]…I thought she was splendid in the part, but" he adds diplomatically, "let me say that I haven't seen many recent casts at the Royal. In previous years, Lesley [Collier] was brilliant, my wife also, and of course [Alessandra] Ferri was sensational in it with Wayne [Eagling]".

Thinking of MacMillan's choreography in general, I broach the subject of his often darker side…themes of depravity and sexual violence in his ballets (Manon, Mayerling, The Invitation and The Judas Tree come immediately to mind). "Well, not all his ballets were like that. Look at Winter Dreams, Elite Syncopations. Gloria wasn't a happy subject, but it is very beautiful, and the same goes for Requiem. Many of his ballets are filled with light and happiness. The last part of Concerto is almost Ashtonesque in its purity. So much of Kenneth's work was so pure, but those don't seem to be the things people remember him for." So he was inclined to show the whole of the human condition? "Yes, exactly. He really wanted to make it part of the ballet scene, showing how people really are. That's why the more you worked with Kenneth, the more he could rely on us not to be frightened of being ugly on the stage, and he'd use that in many ballets, especially Mayerling and Anastasia. Those who worked well with Kenneth were those who had the courage to use more than just the classical idiom they had been taught, and to explore and develop it."

Wall had the unusual quality of being equally convincing in comic, tragic and romantic roles; in fact one of the reasons his partnership with Seymour worked so well was that they were both very accomplished dance-actors. Did he favour one genre over the other? He says that he owes all his acting ability to his first Artistic Director, John Field. "He was a man of the theatre, and he'd encourage the dancers to go to Stratford or to the Aldwych to see actors. He would always allow us, when we were on the road, to explore the characters and interpret the same character differently. Not step-wise, but from the acting point of view. Doing Swan Lake twice a week for 14 weeks could get boring if we weren't able to find new things in the character." Did acting come naturally to him? "Well, I was never self conscious, so yes, it did. This is because I started realising its importance so early." He was cast in The Rake's Progress, his first real 'acting' role within a ballet, when all he wanted to be was Rudolf Nureyev. He said that he couldn't do it, but Field just told him to learn it. He had a great ballet master, Henry Legerton, who had also been a great Rake, and soon he was having a wonderful experience with it. "I didn't have to worry about my double tours en l'air…you could be onstage and capture the audience's imagination in another way. That suddenly made me realise 'my God, that's what it's about, actually.' People say 'well, you've got Lescaut, you've got Rudolf', but those really were the result of years of trying to get Albrecht right, Siegfried right…and Florimund, and Colas, and the boy in The Two Pigeons. I wanted people to look at me differently…I didn't want them to see David Wall dancing Siegfried, I wanted them to see Siegfried."

His romantic favourite is Giselle. Having said that, he then adds "Actually I say Giselle, but Romeo was a brilliant role, as was Tybalt." I point out that 2005 is the 40th anniversary of MacMillan creating Romeo and Juliet, and he is astonished. "40 years? Oh God!! Romeo is certainly a meaty role."

Wall retired from dancing in 1984, and became Associate Director of the Royal Academy of Dance until 1987, when he became Director, a position in which he remained until 1991. In the four subsequent years before becoming Ballet Master at ENB in 1995 he worked with remedial ballet students, taught a boys' class at the London Studio Centre with Margaret Barbieri, and freelanced as a teacher all over the world, as well as at the Rambert Academy. He was also guest repetiteur at London City Ballet.

Did he ever consider trying to choreograph? "No. I did a few classical pieces for students to show off their versatility in the classroom. Over the years I've heard pieces of music and thought, someone should choreograph something to that, but it won't be me!"

Had he ever considered moving on to being a character dancer? "No. I could easily have stayed at the Royal Ballet and done this, but when I stopped dancing I decided that was it, that I wanted to move into a different area. I've always thought the teaching of ballet is SO important…that's why I went to the RAD. After I had created Rudolf in Mayerling, I think that was the pinnacle of my career, and I probably would have just become complacent doing character roles. I needed other challenges."

Wall is clearly an incredibly dedicated teacher - watching him take class and rehearse dancers in pas de deux you see his natural empathy and rapport with the dancers, and their response to him is lovely to watch. This is obviously Wall's natural milieu, and he stresses the importance of a ballet master having to understand all aspects of a dancer's makeup: "I have seen so many people move on into teaching who seem to forget what it was like to be a dancer, with all the anxieties and insecurities it involves. It's important to be aware of those things." His main responsibilities are taking class, boys' class and girls' class, and coaching the Principals, or the younger dancers being given a chance at Principal roles. ENB's dancers are from all over the world. As Ballet Master, it must be difficult trying to subsume all the different styles into an 'ENB' style. Wall agrees: 'When Derek [Deane] asked me to join the Company, I took a few months to think about it because the one thing the Company didn't have was its own identity as far as their technique was concerned.

"We get dancers in from different countries and we have to teach them to interpret the choreography in a way that reflects best on it, and as a group to try to format an ENB style, otherwise we'd end up with legs all over the place, hips up to here, etc." He says that inevitably things change the further away you get from a certain style, say Ashton at the Royal Ballet, but that you must always remember the period in which a ballet was created. "Yes, we have dancers who can get their legs up around their ears, but in for example Giselle and Sylphides they couldn't do that when they were created…and even if they could, they weren't asked to. These pieces demand lower leg work and different ports de bras."

This is what Mary Skeaping tried to achieve with her Giselle, created for the Company in 1971, and they are trying to re-create that with its upcoming revival. It has been a very enlightening experience for Wall because he hasn't worked on this Giselle before. "Mary tried very much to bring it back to an original basis, and the production has great charm. It's got a lot of extra choreography in it that was in the original piece. We were lucky because Lynne, our choreologist, had worked with Mary in the original so we had the score, and some videos, so it was quite easy putting it all together. Dame Beryl [Grey] has been wonderful, inspiring the dancers."
 

David Wall in the Studio with Beryl Grey rehearsing Daria Klimentova
© John Ross

Thinking back to his performing days, does Wall miss the buzz of performing? The accolades? "No. You know, when you give a class, you have to perform it because sometimes you wake up in the morning and think 'oh God, I can't do this today', but then you're standing there in front of 25 or 30 people, and you have to get your act together. Sometimes I have to lift the Company's spirits, and sometimes dampen them down, so I have to be different at different times. You have to be very aware of the atmosphere that's around. So teaching a class is just as much a performance."

I cautiously mention the fact that 2006 will see Wall celebrate his 60th birthday (a gutsy laugh is the reaction when I remind him of this). He has also just become a grandfather for the second time. Does he feel old? "No, no, no…this makes me feel YOUNG! It's a new lease of life, and we love it. My wife and I have gone mad…we can never wait to see our grandchildren. It's a very different thing from being a parent…it's wonderful being a grandfather." I tell him the adage about the grandparent-grandchild relationship being so special because they both have a common enemy, and he laughs loudly. He can laugh because he is a happy family man. Do his children have anything to do with ballet? "No. They quite like it, but they used to tour with us when they were small, so probably got enough of it then…and they could see what a difficult life it is".

Is he starting to think of retiring? Not yet, it seems: "I'm the sort of person who is happy to keep doing something as long as I can do it and enjoy it. When I stop enjoying it, I'll stop doing it. What I do want to do is enjoy some… what's it called… quality time with Freda. She has recently retired from being the Artistic Director of the Elmhurst Ballet School and is enjoying her retirement. It was very hard work, which she did wonderfully successfully, and now she's enjoying not working." Wall is concerned about being presumptuous when he says that "the amount of knowledge and expertise that we gained in our careers should be imparted to the young dancers. That's what's been so great about having Dame Beryl in to help us….it is so useful to get information from someone who was there when that information was being nurtured and created." Wall adds that "the ballet scene is changing, and they have to consider their audience. That's what was so good about the 60s, 70s and 80s…there was so much creativity, not all good, but it was about. To be involved with all those great choreographers…Ashton, MacMillan, Tudor, Van Manen, Jerry Robbins, Balanchine was working with us…that was amazing." Since we hadn't mentioned Balanchine, I asked whether he enjoyed dancing his works. "Oh yes, very much…we did lots of his ballets. It was quite a repertoire he had!" The schooling that they were given at that time, says Wall, was such that it enabled the dancers to be versatile and dance many different styles. "These days certain styles don't sit very well on a rigid training with only one focus."

Time's up - it's flown by - but I wonder if one of the leading, and most dramatic, dancers of his generation is often out topping up on the best of London arts and theatre? Not really: for a dependable great time he'd usually prefer to take the known pleasures of a Chateaubriand and a fine glass of red wine. High art has its place but perhaps the dancers' kitchen cupboard was not so distant from Wall's heart as I first thought!