A few years ago, when I asked Beryl Grey what makes a good dancer, she told me it was sheer delight in movement. Not fine technique, but personality. “We all had this wonderful joy of dance,” she said, speaking about her contemporaries in the Sadler’s Wells Ballet – later the Royal Ballet – of the 1940s and 50s. It was a quality that shone through in Grey’s own dancing. If Margot Fonteyn was an adored icon of elegant, graceful restraint, Grey was the sparky girl next door, bright, beaming and quick on her feet.
Grey was tall for a dancer of the time (about 5ft 7in), but strong and speedy. Watch the Pathé newsreel of her landmark Swan Lake at the Bolshoi theatre in 1958, the first western ballerina to perform there, and she rips through Odile’s famous 32 fouettés at pace. Her black swan is not the hard-faced antiheroine we see so often now; she can’t hide that pleasure in performing, the warmth and wide smile. She has character, panache and class, gliding over the music. It was all about the music for Grey, the story all there to be found in the score.
