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Monica Perego
English National Ballet Interview by Jane Simpson & Bruce Marriott | |||||||
Forthright and Fun
An eager recruit stepping off a City street into the local TA headquarters last week would have met with quite a surprise: right inside the front door were the first of the 120 dancers of English National Ballet, starting the last few days of rehearsal for Derek Deane's mammoth 'Swan Lake' at the Royal Albert Hall. The company's size has been nearly doubled for these performances, and we were there to hear about it from Monica Perego, a rapidly rising soloist who will be dancing 3 different roles over the season. The new 'Swan Lake' has been 9 weeks in rehearsal and is obviously looked forward to with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. It is a huge undertaking for the company, both financially and artistically, and the 'in the round' production is literally a step into the unknown. Monica is dancing the pas de douze in Act 1, and one of the 8 (!) cygnets in Act 2 - two sets of 4, apparently, doing the traditional steps but with the lines at changing angles to each other and to the audience: very confusing for a cygnet who's been doing the 'old' version for the last 4 years. In Act 3 she will be doing the Neapolitan Dance, with Yat Sen Chang - "lots of jumps", she says, "I'm jumping like a man, BIG jumps!" Perego is Italian. She started dancing when she was 6, having seen another girl in a school performance - "I told my mother to take me" is typical of her robust approach to life, knowing what she wants and feels and stating it pretty clearly! By the time she was 15 she was helping her teacher, conducting classes for gymnasts and the youngsters. A year later she won the Benetton Competition and a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School. A mixed blessing at first: she arrived in London at 16 speaking scarcely a word of English, which meant that initially she did not have enough to do at the RB School. The dancing was fine, but when everybody else went off to do the 'academics' she was left with nothing to get on with. "In Italy I was working from 9 in the morning to 9 at night" - so the lack of hard work was a real problem.
Her natural aptitude and drive landed her a 3 month contract with BRB
before the offer from ENB, which she joined in February 1992. She talks of the 'family' atmosphere in the company - so many of the dancers are on their own, away from home, so that they face the same problems and provide mutual support. Monica has worked hard in her 5 years with the company - already she's danced the leads in 'Giselle' and 'Coppélia' - and at the start of next season, she is to be promoted to Principal. In this company, this brings responsibilities as well as rewards: Deane believes strongly that the senior dancers can and should have an influence off stage as well as on, and Monica is to work with the new girls coming into the corps de ballet, who in many companies would not expect a principal even to notice their existence, let alone to speak to them! It's this sort of thing, perhaps, which helps to create the family feeling.
Life in a touring company can be interesting; does she enjoy it? "Not really" comes the reply with a laugh. Gulp; is it really so we ask? And of course it's not (well not wholly so anyway!)... "it's the stages that are difficult (in the mini-tour in particular); small and very hard so it's very easy to get injured. But the programmes are actually quite interesting for the dancers to do, because they are all short pieces and not many people are doing them so its quite a challenge". There can be the odd problem of a small audience too as she recalls the fun of "a matinee in Preston with 45 people in the audience". It's not all a life of glamorous solos at the Albert Hall and Coliseum. The step up to Principal - a major achievement at the age of 23 - is timely: one feels she is ready for it. She has some very clear aspirations still to be fulfilled. Like so many other young dancers, she longs for the chance to dance Juliet. She seems to see herself as a dramatic dancer - although she's also enjoyed such ballets as Balanchine's 'Who Cares?' - and Juliet has the perfect combination of drama and dancing: "It's got everything, from the young girl to the grown woman, to love, to sadness, to pain, to everything". She is lucky in this company to have the possibility of two different versions - by Ashton and Nureyev - or, better still, both! She's fortunate, too, in that she has already found a partner who suits her in Dmitri Gruzdyev. Deane's policy is to switch the partnerships around to start with until he finds one that seems to work, and then give the two dancers a string of performances together to develop their rapport: we'll hope to see them soon in 'Swan Lake' and 'Romeo'. "After Juliet, I can give up" - she's teasing, we hope... Although Monica has a flat in London, ENB's life is largely a touring one. and at this stage in her career she has little time for outside interests. Visits to her family in Italy or to the boyfriend in San Francisco fill in any time off! "When I was a little girl", she says. "I had two dreams: to be a dancer and to travel the world." Maybe she'll manage to combine the two by guesting around the world: she mentions Japan and the US as places she'd particularly like to dance in. And Italy? Not much opportunity, she thinks - too few performances and small audiences - "they're too busy watching football!"
British companies have gained enormously over the last few years from the influx of talented dancers from Italy. We asked Monica if she thought there was a particular reason for their success. "Mediterraneans are warmer...you have got to be a performer as well as a talented dancer; if you just go on and do it technically, people are just not going to get anything out of it."
The dancer she quotes as her inspiration is Makarova - a great performer though hardly Mediterranean! - whose dancing she first came to know at home in Italy, from the video of her 'Swan Lake' with Anthony Dowell. Which brings us back to the subject we started with. Even amongst the 70 swans, jesters, tumblers, and a lot of etceteras, the liveliness of Perego's dancing, and the BIG jumps, should make her very easy to spot!
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