Dame Darcey Bussell is 5 ft 7 inches. In ballet terms, that’s much too tall. Two inches too tall to be exact, if we’re talking ballerina height averages. As a result, Bussell was told to quit early on. “Everybody thinks that when you’ve made it, you’ve had [an] easy trajectory,” she tells me from her airy home office in London. “But it wasn’t like that at all. I suffered with injuries. I was very weak and overly supple. I had all sorts of things that weren’t in my favour. I was told, ‘Oh, you’re going to be too tall so you probably won’t make it. I thought, ‘...Great’.” The word drips with sarcasm.
Bussell was just 20 when she became the Royal Ballet’s youngest-ever principal dancer in 1989, and went on to play all the plum roles. Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty. Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Giselle in Giselle! She retired in 2007 at the age of 38, deciding to devote more time to her two daughters. She would then spend seven years judging contestants on BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing between 2012 and 2018. Today, the 53-year-old Bussell is working to improve physical education in primary schools. Through her charity Diverse Dance Mix (DDMIX), she provides “inclusive” dance classes for children, and says that her students have reported improvements in their moods, their mental health and their confidence. For every child that has to log roll around the floor of their crumb-littered school lunch hall in PE lessons, Bussell is here to save them. She’s basically a post-pandemic Joe Wicks.
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