At the time most ballerinas would have packed their Pointe shoes away for less gruelling pursuits Margot Fonteyn joined with Rudolph Nureyev to become one of the most electric partnerships of all time, and as the extensive programme notes tell us, performed for another seventeen years.

In Steel Ballerina, Mel Dodge and Pagan Dorgan, with director Jacqueline Coats, explore expiry dates, the public and private persona of the legend, and the magic of performing through a mix of theatre and dance.

It is clear that extensive research has taken place, and their bibliography is referenced in the programme, along with a timeline of Fonteyn’s life. Her story is one that easily parallels that of a great romantic ballet.

Steel Ballerina begins to the sound of a train. The mood is pensive, reflective, uncertain, and I assume the worried looking figure sitting alone in a white dress is the public Fonteyn (Dodge), later joined by Dorgan: the inner woman, or spirit of the dancer. The duet to Bjork and Thom Yorke’s I’ve seen it all that follows is characterised by hands touching and interchanging, the ‘spirit’ leaning. The tiny ‘nudge’ gesture by Dodge as Fonteyn makes me wonder if this section is an expression of inner conflict, perhaps at her proposed retirement?

Dodge subsequently becomes Anna, Fonteyn’s real life care-giver, but developed as a "character from a book" in the piece. Fact and fiction become intertwined as the journey back into Fonteyn’s life begins, starting with the onset of her fatal illness. 

It is confusing at times, and takes a bit of work to follow the ‘story’ as Dodge goes from Anna to Fonteyn, to Nureyev and back to Anna again but she transitions well and captures the accents and mannerisms beautifully.

As Anna implores the hospital staff to give Fonteyn a pseudonym, and tells us the story of how the audience shred their programmes and throw them during a twenty minute curtain call, it’s like ‘being there’. The desire to have been in that crowd tugs at my heartstrings, as does the haunting mystical soaring music of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. 

The intersection of dance with drama and narrative in this piece is aided by the well thought out and executed sound design by Sebastian Morgan-Lynch. A wide range of music is employed reflecting different aspects of Fonteyn’s life, from performer to wife of a Panamanian diplomat, to woman of resolve. The imitation of Nureyev’s ‘voice’ at pertinent times and snippets of character quirks add humour as the relationship between Fonteyn and Nureyev is explored at the table over cups of tea.

Dorgan wisely uses elegant contemporary vocabulary with a ballet touch, rather than attempting to emulate Fonteyn’s spirit in classical form. The white tunic over long sleeved leotard top and tights with ballet shoes is an effective costume and the tutu remains a prop, spilling out of an old suitcase. I wonder if the very short length of tunic and often showing of the ‘boy shorts’ allude to the danseur as well as ballerina, since Dorgan also becomes Nureyev in part.

The dramatic representation of the pressures and rigorous schedules of Fonteyn’s life expressed through repetition is just one instance where Corinne Simpson’s lighting design also aids the transition from narrative to dance and brings to life the magic of performance throughout. The interchanging of warm to cool white fluorescence accentuates Dorgan’s embodiment of excruciating pain and exhaustion and portrayal of steely spirit.

Rather than an exact action replay of her life, a conveyance of Fonteyn’s essence appears to be the goal. Although a mammoth task, there are moments where this is achieved and in parts this work is very moving, including the final ‘floor barre’ before the "magnetic indefinable porcelain" magic dancer is laid to rest in ethereal light and drifting paper.
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This hour-long show is a little pearl, with occasional diamond flashes. The script is devised by Jacqueline Coats and the two performers, Mel Dodge and Pagan Dorgan, who keep an unpretentious style sustained throughout a play that is both whimsical and poignant.

"Inspired by the remarkable life of Margot Fonteyn", the work in fact touches only a tenth of that enigmatic woman’s life and career, yet succeeds in capturing the "real" topic of the play – viz. the essential mystery of whatever motivates an exceptional artist.

It is quite daring for a young actor to emulate Fonteyn’s dancing but this is done with sensibility. The danced sequences themselves might with profit have been choreographed into phrases that build and cadence, rather than simply start and stop, but they do adequately state the case.

Sound, arranged by Sebastian Morgan-Lynch, is suitably varied, and mercifully not over amplified – but I would make a plea for Purcell’s song, When I am laid in Earth, to be carried through to its conclusion. If the director intends it to end prematurely for dramatic effect, that needs to be made clear. (It’s the difference between a natural death and a murder.)

The overall effect is impressionistic, with highlights from Fonteyn’s life selected and skillfully woven into a layered text that includes experiences of the narrator.  The dresses worn by both actors seem insipid and not particularly flattering, whereas Fonteyn was one of the snappiest dressers of the century. 

But this essay into the heart of dance (reminiscent of Helen Moulder’s and Jon Trimmer’s fine work, Meeting Karpovsky) holds our attention by its focussed playing throughout.

The show will have seasons next month in the Tempo and The Body dance festivals, in Auckland and Christchurch respectively. The numerous typos in the programme notes should be fixed before then as these, unlike DYSO, are curated festivals and such minor distractions are easily removed.
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Part of the Dance Your Socks Off Festival, Steel Ballerina is a gentle impressionistic homage to the great British ballerina, Margot Fonteyn. Director Jacqueline Coats has drawn engaging performances from Mel Dodge and Pagan Dorgan, who share the role of Fonteyn during different periods of her career, as well as playing various other characters. And the show does contain a large amount of actual dancing – something that has been remarkably thin on the ground this Festival. Hurrah!

Dodge is the actor of the two (although she also dances) and ably narrates a great deal of the show as ‘Anna’, Fonteyn’s fictionalised assistant/housekeeper. But at times she is also the older Fonteyn, pouring tea for the young Rudolf Nureyev, the dance partner who was to galvanise her into dancing for another seventeen years. Their remarkable partnership and friendship is the focus of much of the work, which digs and delves all over the place and could be quite confusing if you were not familiar with much of Fonteyn’s life (although the dateline in the programme is very helpful, and how lovely to have a bibliography included in it!).

Dorgan is Fonteyn the dancer, although sensibly, she never dons pointe shoes or a tutu. She possesses lovely flowing movement, with beautiful arms and hands and manages to convey a little of Fonteyn’s magic – no easy feat. (Cough…)

Choreographically the work is a pretty basic mix of contemporary and classical ballet movements and is not particularly demanding.  But it admirably extends the dialogue and there are some clever sequences when the two women shadow each other, one talking, one dancing, elaborating different aspects of Fonteyn’s career and character.

The only jarring section is the floor-based movement of the dancer on her death- bed. This is extremely unflattering and just looks silly. It is also too long drawn out and does not sustain interest. This also applies to the Red Shoes sequence. Toward the end, the script teeters at times into sentimentality, but manages to pull back from the brink of excess.

Steel Ballerina is by far the most cohesive and accomplished production I have seen at this Festival. All aspects of production have been well thought out, from the script, performances, publicity and the excellent sound of Sebastian Morgan-Lynch. The latter is an eclectic mix of classical excerpts from the ballets Fonteyn made her own, including Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet, to Bjork, Astor Piazzolla and the Dave Brubeck Trio, to name but a few.
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Those with a rudimentary knowledge of English ballerina Margot Fonteyn (Peggy Hookham as a child) may well feel inspired by Steel Ballerina to discover more. Those with a greater awareness – who have perhaps devoured Fonteyn’s autobiography, Meredith Daneman’s biography or Pierre Jourdan’s documentary film, all cited as sources for this work – may happily add what they know to the lightly touched-on story elements. Or they may feel dismayed that so much has been left out or under-explained.

Created by the performers, Mel Dodge and Pagan Dorgan, and their director, Jacqueline Coats, Steel Ballerina is billed as "inspired by the remarkable life of Margot Fonteyn". It is a 50-minute performance piece, then, that makes no claim to tell the whole story. It simply evokes some sense of the Fonteyn legend, dwelling mostly on her partnership with Rudolph Nureyev at an age (her forties) when most classical ballet dancers had retired to teach, choreograph and/or nurse their punished bodies.

The timeline in the programme is worth studying before the show starts, to get the framework from which the performance elements float in enigmatic style. Left-brainers may struggle to locate which bit of this life each part represents while right-brainers may abandon themselves to the experience for its own sake, enjoying the ambiguities and mysteries inherent in the performers’ fusion of acting and dancing.

Sebastian Morgan-Lynch’s excellent sound design starts with a rhythmic effect that suggests a train before giving way to Björk and Thom Yorke’s ‘I’ve Seen It All’. I assume the anxious-looking woman in the elegant frock (Dodge) is Margot Fonteyn and take her lithe and playful companion, clad in a silk shift, to be her younger self. Is this a painful memory, perhaps …?

But now, on the same two chairs, Dodge is telling us she is Anna, fictional, her name taken from a book, and we are witnessing a fictional story based on fact about fantasy and fiction. They are at a hospital and we sense we’ve begun at the end of Fonteyn’s life.

Enacted scenes – like taking tea, where Dorgan presumably takes the role of Nureyev (20 years younger than Fonteyn) – are interspersed with narration, mostly from Dodge, and dance sequences performed by Dorgan, who is evoking Fonteyn most of the time while not attempting to emulate her, hence the white ‘swan’ tutu remains un-donned …

And sometimes Dorgan speaks as another character and Dodge is imbued with the need to dance … Either struggle to keep up and blame dramaturgical shortcomings or accept the impressionistic convention for its lightly brush-stroked overview.  

The light touch is exemplified in Fonteyn finding her dancing feet to ‘Heart and Soul’, a piece favoured by novice piano players. Sequences aimed at evoking Fonteyn and Nureyev at the height of their partnership are necessarily less literal but – abetted by Rob Larsen’s lighting – do suggest there is magic afoot.

Discovering what made her so magical seems to be Anna’s quest. Also explored is Fonteyn’s drive to keep dancing despite actual physical pain (not to mention the emotional pain of her Panamanian husband’s infidelity and his becoming a paraplegic when shot by a vengeful husband). So where was the steel: in her resolve, her nerves or her heart?  

I have a nagging feeling that the creators understand more about the content of their work than they have succeeded in sharing with their audience, and I am not sure the old rationalisation "the audience is free to make of it what they will" is entirely valid here.

Nevertheless the grace and skill with which this work is presented in performance makes for an absorbing hour.
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