After a career that defied convention, the French ballet dancer Sylvie Guillem went with the traditional for her final act, bowing out with a performance of Boléro in the Japanese city of Yokohama.
A capacity audience of 2,400 burst into 15 minutes of rapturous applause as she left the stage, which was covered with bouquets of flowers.
Guillem first announced her plan to retire in 2014, three decades after she was made the youngest ever étoile – or top-ranking dancer – at the Paris Opera ballet as a 19-year-old. The young gymnast turned dancer was famously nurtured by Rudolf Nureyev but went on to forge her own remarkable career in classical ballet and, latterly, contemporary dance.
She joined the Royal Ballet as principal guest artist in 1989 after dancing opposite Nureyev in his 50th birthday performance of Giselle. In London she earned the nickname “Mademoiselle Non” due to the number of roles she turned down, but wherever she travelled in the world, Guillem’s performances were a sellout. “I just feel honoured to have been born in the same era as such a great artist,” said Andi Matsui, a Japanese woman seeing the dancer live for the third time.
Many in the audience were long-term fans. “I’ve seen her probably 100 times, and have travelled overseas to watch her,” said Yuka Koike. “As always she was perfect. But for me, today was extremely emotional. From now, I’m going to have to find a new dancer to follow.”
That sadness, however, was tinged with a sense of the inevitable. All respected Guillem’s decision to hang up her shoes. “It’s natural for a dancer to stop, and she decided on her own terms when to finish,” said Björn Neumann, a German living in Japan. “It’s better that she stopped before her performances started getting worse.”
He, however, was not as enthused with her final performance. “It was good, but I am not really a fan of these ‘best of’ performances. I preferred Two and Dreamtime to Boléro at the end. I’m more into contemporary dance.”
Daisuke Satogami, from Tōhoku, said the performance “really struck me in the heart. I saw her perform Boléro in Tōhoku in the October after the 2011 tsunami. I wanted to offer her so much thanks for that, for being pure enough of heart to perform up there at such a time.”
Guillem was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale arts prize in Japan in September for her contribution to theatre. The award includes a 15m yen (£84,000) cash reward. “Guillem’s brilliance lies in her ability to combine physical excellence with a passionate honesty and a desire to explore what can be achieved through the medium of dance,” the award body said.
Before finishing for good, Guillem will perform one last time for a live Japanese TV broadcast of Boléro on Thursday to see in the new year.
Yokohama’s Kanagawa Kenmin hall may seem an unusual location for the dancer’s final show, compared with somewhere in the capital, Tokyo, or Japan’s cultural heart, Kyoto. But Kenichi Nagai, the director of the foundation that runs the venue, said Guillem had wanted to perform there one last time.
“It’s our 40th anniversary this year, and in our time we have seen a lot of history-making performances at the hall,” Nagai said. “We did not have the space to fit in a performance by her, but then the organisers of the tour contacted us and offered to put on a show on either 30 or 31 December. To have been chosen to host Guillem’s final show … It’s nothing short of a miracle.”
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