First Western Dancer To Appear In Peking

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30393, 18 March 1964, Page 2

First Western Dancer To Appear In Peking

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SUSAN VAUGHAN]

It was really not the sort of place you would expect to find an English ballerina. But there she was in Peking recently, the guest star of the Chinese National Theatre, smiling graciously as the distinguished audience gave her a standing ovation. Beryl Grey, the ballerina, was the first Western dancer to appear in Peking since the Communists gained power and the first Western dancer (as far as anyone can remember) to have partnered a Chinese in Peking.

Since 1957 Beryl Grey, who, with the possible exception of Margot Fonteyn, is the most talented ballerina Britain has produced, has been a kind of roving ambassador of British dancing. She has taken the British cultural image into places where, previously, it has been

less than evident. She has been to Mexico and South America, to Sweden and Finland; to the Soviet Union, where she became the first British dancer invited to dance at the Bolshoi. The Russians received her rapturously. Later she recalled: “I have never worked so hard before in my life but I must say the audience willed me to dance well. I felt the huge audience were desperately anxious for me to be a success.” Many Gifts To be a successful ambassador, though, calls for a range of gifts. Beryl Grey is well supplied. She is an intellectual and a charmer, has a good voice and can write well. As a result of putting these talents together she has done hundreds of highly successful lectures, and

radio and television talks. She is also something of a linguist. She learned enough Russian on her Soviet trip for her hosts to feel flattered. She is 36, married to a Swedish doctor and has a son. On stage she looks as spry as a teenager. She keeps herself in trim as remorselessly as a second-year ballet student. “For a dancer,” she says, “the body has to be continually tuned by work. A violinist carries his violin in a case—a dancer lives in hers.”

Beryl Grey made a tour of New Zealand in June 1960.