The ‘Bad Girl’ of Ballet Is Back at Age 49

Lynn Seymour trudges into the lobby of her Pasadena hotel resembling a youngish nanny or a put-upon Dickensian heroine, but hardly the celebrated muse of choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan.

Oversized spectacles dominate her round cherubic face. She carries a huge leather satchel and wears a heavy green coat with matching floppy felt hat, its wide brim pushed up in the style of Teddy Roosevelt. Her expression is almost flat, though pleasant enough, and she seems sensible. Anyone searching for the alleged bad girl of British ballet, England’s Isadora, might have walked on by.

And for a 49-year-old star making a comeback after eight seasons away from the spotlight, well, one might expect a little offstage flamboyance. Forget it. The Canadian-born dancer saves her dramatic arsenal for such occasions as the performance she will give tonight and twice on Sunday with Rudolf Nureyev and his “friends” at Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

“I’m boring, actually,” she says quietly, settling down in the bar to a glass of Chablis and a cigarette.

“I wish I was badder and could live up to my reputation. And maybe that would be possible if I weren’t pursuing a vaster organization--to help me catch up with everything I’m trying to do.”

Seymour, who left her home in Wainwright, Canada, at 14 for a scholarship at the Royal Ballet School in London, grew up alone, save for the parental influence of ballet masters. Her three marriages, assorted lovers, illegitimate children and, most of all, an outspoken, unapologetic life style attest to why her U.K. compatriots branded her a rebel whose dancing was neither polite nor decorous in the accepted English manner. Rather, she was the personification of a dramatic dancing actress.

Nevertheless, she says she’s “astounded by the assessment--I’m always astounded to hear it because I see my life as being so ordinary, so much a logical progression. It comes partly because I’m not English. Somehow, they think of me as a heathen from the desolate Canadian wilds.”

Of her first marriage, still legally intact when she had twin boys (now 20) by another man, she says “divorce was a nasty business, requiring us to name correspondents, so staying married to the wrong man was a less hurtful path.”

But the reputation also thrives partly because of her onstage persona: a traumatized heroine bursting from what has been called a thrillingly expressive body. Last July, when Seymour made her comeback in John Cranko’s “Onegin” (a London Festival Ballet production), she recaptivated public and critics alike.

Seymour will not dance on pointe in Pasadena, however (“just by fluke,” she says), since her two pieces (Ashton’s “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan” and Limon’s “The Moor’s Pavane”) require barefoot and soft slippers, respectively. In fact, it was her “Isadora” portrayal last January at the Nora Kaye memorial in New York--requested by Herbert Ross--that triggered the decision to return to the stage.

“Since then it’s been a slow drip,” says the understated Seymour. “But even before that I did the bad stepmother to Carla Fracci’s Cinderella in Palermo. The whole thing, including a move from the country back to London and a contract I’ve signed with the Festival Ballet, just crept up on me. Always, you worry that you can cut it.”

Never sylph-like, Seymour says she “used to puff up under stress. But now in my dotage, I’m weight-stable.”

But she never stopped working during her hiatus from the stage, turning to teaching and choreography. The time she gained by not dancing was invaluable, she said, for “spending with the kids, fitting in a book, meeting people ordinarily outside of a dancer’s schedule--because I could stay up and not worry about the next day’s toll of fatigue. And, no, I didn’t miss the stage.”

While many performing artists live for the intoxication of curtain calls, Seymour confesses that applause is not oxygen for her.

“Because doing the job is hard,” she explains. “You must forget about yourself, become another character, integrate the music and choreography, use your muscles and intelligence concentratedly.

“Creating the desired illusion is like solving a mathematical problem. It’s quite an abstract challenge and has nothing to do with how the audience will feel. If everyone likes it, that’s just a bonus, not a goal.”

This work ethic partially explains why she gave up dancing at the end of 1980. “The wind had been knocked out of my sails following an injury,” says Seymour. “What was the point of struggling to do roles for which I had already set standards?”

Now she’s mixing the new (Emilia in “The Moor’s Pavane” instead of Desdemona, which she did 15 years ago with Nureyev), with the old but can’t predict how long her dancing career will last.

Typically candid, she talks about the physical travails, her “ongoing search for strength and control.”

Clearly--as for another similarly demanding ballet star, Gelsey Kirkland--the stage is no lark. But Seymour, an autobiographer herself, is “very ambivalent” about Kirkland’s book.

At this point in her life the philosophical dancer sees herself “just like everyone else--fretting--but the nice part about being older is that I do less of it.” Without blinking or wincing or attempting any sort of self-promotion, Lynn Seymour offers a final admission: “The only time to ever feel happy about a performance is when it’s all over.”