Although, to my regret, due to personal, family, and artistic reasons, Moira Shearer is not present with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet on its 1953-1954 North American tour, I know her devotion to the Sadler’s Wells institution remains unchanged.
The simple fact is that Moira Shearer is preparing to enter a new and different aspect of the theatre, a development with which I hope I shall have something to do in the near future.
Among the personalities of the company during the first two Sadler’s Wells tours, American interest and curiosity were at their highest, for obvious reasons, in Moira Shearer. The film, Red Shoes, had stimulated an interest in ballet on the part of yet another new public, and its ballerina star had acquired the questionable halo of a movie star. This was something that was anything but pleasing to the gentle, intelligent Moira Shearer; and was, moreover, something she deplored.
Born in Dunfermline, Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1926, Moira Shearer came to ballet at an early age, having had dance lessons in Rhodesia as a child at the hands of a former Diaghileff dancer. It was on her return to England, when she was about eleven, that her serious studies began with Madame Nadine Nicolaeva-Legat. In 1940 she joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School, remaining briefly, however, because of the blitz. But, early in 1941, she turned up with the International Ballet, another British ballet organization, dancing leading roles at the age of fourteen, another example of the “baby” ballerina. In 1942, she left that company to rejoin Sadler’s Wells School.
In 1943, Shearer became a member of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, achieving an almost instant success and a marked popularity with audiences. What impresses me most about Moira Shearer, the dancer, is a fluidity of movement that has about it a definite Russian quality; she has a fine polish in her style, coupled with great spontaneity and a gentle, easy grace.
Distinctive not only for her Titian-coloring and her famed auburn-haired beauty and her slender grace, Shearer is equally noteworthy for her poise and an almost incredible lightness; for her assurance and classical dignity; for her ability to dominate the stage. The “Russian” quality about her dancing I have mentioned, I suspect stems from her early indoctrination and her training at the hands of Madame Legat; there is something Russian about her entrances, when she immediately commands the stage and becomes the focus of all eyes. All of these qualities are particularly apparent in Cinderella.
Moira Shearer’s reputation had preceded her across the United States and Canada, as I have pointed out, because of the exhibition of spontaneity, beauty and charm that had been revealed to thousands in the motion picture, Red Shoes. There is no denying this film was highly successful. I suppose it can be argued successfully that Red Shoes brought ballet to a new audience, and thus, in that sense, was good for ballet. Whatever it may have been, it was not a true, or good, or honest picture of ballet. I happen to know how Moira Shearer feels about it, and I share her feelings. Although she dislikes to talk or hear very much about Red Shoes, and was not very happy with it or about it, she was, I fancy, less disturbed by her role in The Tales of Hoffman, with “Freddy” Ashton, “Bobby” Helpmann, and Leonide Massine. Best of all her film excursions, Moira feels, was her sequence in My Three Loves, which Ashton directed for her in Hollywood.
Once, on introducing her to one of those characteristic, monumental California salads, her comment was: “My, but it’s delicious; yet it looks like that Technicolor mess I should like to forget.” Shearer feels Red Shoes was rather a sad mess, a complete travesty of the ballet life which it posed as portraying; that it was false and phoney throughout, and that, perhaps, the phoniest thing about it was its alleged glamor. On the other hand, she does not regard the time she spent making it wasted, for, as she says, she was able to sit at the feet of Leonide Massine and watch and learn and observe the concentration with which he worked, the intelligence he brought to every gesture, and the vast ingenuity and originality he applied to everything he did.
I happen to know Shearer has no illusions about the film publicity campaign that made her a movie star overnight. She was amused by it, but never taken in, and was hurt only when the crowds mobbed for autographs and Americans hailed her as “the star” of Sadler’s Wells.
Cultured and highly intelligent, Moira Shearer is intensely musical, both in life and in the dance. This musicality is particularly apparent in her portrayal of the Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, and in the dual role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake. Again it is markedly noticeable in a quite non-classical work, for of all the dancers I have seen dance the Tango in Façade, she is by far the most satiric and brilliant. She is well-nigh indispensable to Wedding Bouquet.