Margot Fonteyn

In a few days' time, on November 8th, an excited array of young dancers will take the stage at the London Coliseum for the final of the Margot Fonteyn International Ballet Competition.

The Fonteyn.

It's the Royal Academy of Dance's flagship event, an impressive entry point for many a professional career.

And at the Coliseum, the finalists will also get to watch some top-notch professional dancers, as if to say, one day, this could be you.

The next thing, the year after that, he did a ballet called Mamsa Ongo.

And the most amazing thing about it all was that my partner was Margot Fonteyn.

So here I was, just a year in the company, dancing with Margot Fonteyn.

Can you believe it? The other principals were Maura Shearer, Margot Fonteyn and Michael Soans.

And we took five months nearly to do that ballet because he was at the same time making Red Shoes.

So he was with Moira Shearer.

And that is another corrective and another way of pulling yourself out of discouragement when you get bogged down in the weeds of, oh my gosh, if I hear I'm out of line with the woman's left shoulder in front of me and the swan line, I'm going to go crazy.

But if you go back and you rewatch that video of Margot Fonteyn doing white swan that you saw when you were 10...

There might be something inside of that that reignites the fire.

And I pulled this book off my shelf here in my office because Paul Taylor wrote an essay called Why I Make Dances.

She'd taken dad on a few dates to the ballet.

And she had a recording of the Royal Ballet doing Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Opera House, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev.

And I do sort of remember watching that as a five-year-old, I think.

Yeah, and I was just totally transported.