It’s been an oddly fractured year for dance. Repeated lockdowns stifled talent, thwarted new ideas. Online and outdoor offerings provided some release but when theatres reopened in May, dancers emerged as if from hibernation, full of life, anxious to get on with their notoriously short careers.
None more so than Marianela Núñez. The Royal Ballet has excelled as a company this year, but she is the fixed star gleaming at its heart, never disappointing, always moving towards her aim of perfection. Her smile irradiates the stage, but it is the purity of her classical technique, the sense that you are watching someone at the absolute peak of their abilities.
She returned to performance in June in Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering, a piece for 10 dancers to Chopin’s piano music, which is both wistful and joyous, a subtle celebration of friendship and love. As the girl in pink, she was by turns playful and melancholy, carefully poised so as not to reveal too much but suggesting hidden depth. “It was just so lovely to be back and to feel the atmosphere with the other dancers,” she says. “We’d all been stuck in our little bubbles, working on our own, and it was very emotional to be back.”
Being part of a company is important to Núñez. She is a principal but not a prima donna. Last month, she danced the title role in Giselle but also, at other performances, the secondary part of the threatening, ghostly Myrtha. “I danced Myrtha a lot in the beginning of my career and then as...
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