Remembering Dame Margot -- Though Her Dance Technique Was Impeccable, It Was Fonteyn's Personality And Urgency That Set Her Apart

Seeing Dame Margot Fonteyn dance with Rudolf Nureyev in Royal Ballet's ``Giselle'' at the Seattle Opera House in 1965 was my first exposure to top-of-the-line classical dance.

To this day, it is a standard by which other dancers, other companies, are judged. As is her record 89 curtain calls, for a 1964 Vienna performance of ``Swan Lake.''

It's not merely a matter of ``the first time.'' The style, technique and presentation of today's performers may surpass those qualities as embodied by Fonteyn with Nureyev. But Fonteyn, who died yesterday at age 71, especially had a a personality and elegant urgency not often seen today.

``Pure technique is common nowadays,'' Fonteyn told me when she danced here in 1974. ``The schools stress it so much. . . . The trouble is, sometimes all you get is technique. The personality of the individual is sacrificed.''

And while I had read other dance biographies, my reading of Fonteyn's autobiography in 1976 revealed fluid phrasing, expression tempered with wit and common sense brightened with sensitivity and proportion.

In other words, Fonteyn was a superior human being as well as an artist.

Her artistry, her teaching, her tending to her paralyzed husband Roberto Arias for years after an assassination attempt in 1964 (he died in 1989), simply came out of who she was. It made her ``Giselle'' the more poignant.

``Fonteyn's death is going to make every dancer in the whole world feel as if they lost a member of the family,'' said Francia Russell, co-artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet. (Russell studied in London in the late 1940s with Russian teacher Vera Volkova, one of Fonteyn's coaches.)

``Fonteyn wasn't just a dancer,'' Russell said, ``but the Great Lady of Ballet. Her passing will leave a tremendous hole. She could never die.''

Russell also took occasional ballet classes with Fonteyn at the old Ballet Theatre School, which Fonteyn would attend whenever she was in New York.

``She was impeccable,'' said Russell, ``in pink from head to toe, wearing lipstick, not a hair out of place, and worked like a student, focused. She was learning, not giving a performance. Nureyev would come late and everyone would have to start over. She started over like all the other students.''

Nearing retirement at age 57 (she retired at 60, in 1979), Fonteyn told me in 1974 that she never read the critics, that their calling attention to a particular move or shape meant she would be too conscious of it to do it that way again.

Still impeccable at that interview, wearing a low-key Chanel suit, her hair in the familiar French topknot, she laughed, ``I'm surprised I'm still (dancing). Every time I think `I can't still do that,' then I do, and I'm continually being surprised.''

She danced on a mixed bill in a small touring troupe with David Wall that time around, and looked meltingly soulful, all fawn eyes and expressive arms, in the balcony scene from ``Romeo and Juliet.'' But her technique was fading.

After retirement, having gone to tend five dogs and 400 cows on her Panama ranch, Fonteyn said, ``I don't miss (dancing). At least when you're taking care of a herd of cows they don't come up and ask you to dance `Swan Lake' all the time.''

Fonteyn died in a Panama hospital after a long, undisclosed illness. When her husband died, she reportedly said, ``It's not death I'm afraid of. It's living too long.''