Category Archives: Royal Ballet

Marianela Núñez: ‘What lockdown taught me, one more time, is that dance is my true passion’

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The Royal Ballet’s phenomenal principal dancer was the fixed star at the heart of an extraordinary year for the company

It’s been an oddly fractured year for dance. Repeated lockdowns stifled talent, thwarted new ideas. Online and outdoor offerings provided some release but when theatres reopened in May, dancers emerged as if from hibernation, full of life, anxious to get on with their notoriously short careers.

None more so than Marianela Núñez. The Royal Ballet has excelled as a company this year, but she is the fixed star gleaming at its heart, never disappointing, always moving towards her aim of perfection. Her smile irradiates the stage, but it is the purity of her classical technique, the sense that you are watching someone at the absolute peak of their abilities.

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Patter of tiny feet: dancers on leaping into motherhood

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Juggling babies and a job is always difficult – what are the particular pressures for performers and how is the industry taking steps to improve?

Followers of Royal Ballet principal Lauren Cuthbertson cheer ardently for her Juliet, Manon and Sugar Plum Fairy, but are in raptures about her latest role, as mum to baby Peggy, born in December and already the toast of Instagram. Cuthbertson is one of a flurry of dancers at the Royal who are about to give or have recently given birth, in a serendipitously timed lockdown baby boom.

It’s a long way from the early days of the company, when founder Ninette de Valois set the tone. “‘You’re pregnant darling, goodbye!’ That’s how it was,” says Jeanetta Laurence, a dancer in its touring company in the 1960s and 70s. Even now, she says: “It’s hard to think of another industry where having a baby is so intrusive to the work. I’m in awe and wonder at how they manage it.”

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