Guillaume Graffin: ardent and exquisite grace - ballet dancer

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1997 by Elizabeth Kaye

PARIS OPERA-TRAINED GUILLAUME GRAFFIN HAS RISEN TO THE TOP AT AMERICAN BALLET, THEATRE.

Toward the conclusion of the 1996 spring season of American Ballet Theatre, principal dancer Guillaume Graffin stood backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House, preparing to make his third-act entrance as Romeo in Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. On this warm night, the surpassingly delicate Marianna Tcherkassky, a romantic ballerina who had stirred ABT's audiences for more than two decades, was giving her farewell performance by dancing the role of Juliet.

The emotion Tcherkassky's departure engendered infused the performers. Later, Graffin would say that dancing that final act was like "walking someone to the guillotine." And when it was over and time came for the curtain calls, he dropped to one knee and kissed her hand, classic gestures executed with an ardent and exquisite grace that capture t e reverence of the moment and amplified it. For anyone who had not yet recognized it, the evening confirmed that Guillaume Graffin is no ordinary dancer. Instead, it revealed what those who have taught, nurtured, and worked with him have observed from the start: he is a performer who is by appearance and temperment the absolute embodiment of a romantic dancer and an artist who welds passion to refinement, demonstrating in the process ballet's crucial link between thought and emotion, between intellect and artistry.

At age thirty-one, recently married to Lydia Harmsen, a former member of New York City Ballet, Graffin knows what it means to summon the rich range of emotions that have the power to command a stage. From the start, he was blessed with sufficient acuity and style to have met the exacting standards of Rudolf Nureyev, who favored dancers as diverse as Julio Bocca, Irek Mukhamedov, Charles Jude, and Graffin, in whom he detected a capacity for the unbridled romantic ardor that had been his own distinguishing feature.

Like Nureyev, Graffin has benefited from being a devoted student of the art of dance. As a an exception in the narrowly focused dance world. Nureyev used to bemoan the fact that dancers tend to care about or learn little of the world around them, reducing their gaze, as he put it, to "only what happens in their company." Graffin's artistry, however, is based in an intellectual curiosity and restlessness which spark his passion for history, language, astronomy. Credit for this, he maintains, goes to the milieu he was raised in. "I come from a culture where reading and philosophy matter," he says, "where politics are discussed at every meal." At the same time, like Nureyev, he is an amused and sharp observer of the nuances and foibles of his profession's practitioners, saying, for example, of a ballerina who is constantly getting injured, "She likes the light, but dimmed."

These qualities shaped his feeling about dancing, an attitude which has always been a mixture of commitment and caution. "I was fascinated, driven, excited," he says, "but I always felt that dance was a way for a dancer to avoid being a human being. For dance to be all-consuming. I did not want that to happen to me. I wanted to be a person in my life." As it turned out, it was precisely by being that person that he enhanced his art. "What makes him so special," ABT ballet mistress Georgina Parkinson observes, "is that he's an artist well funded with material. Because he's curious and interested in life and living, everything he does goes more than skin deep."

He was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine to a mother who had briefly been a dancer and a father who was an aspiring painter, making a living as a businessman. Guillaume Graffin was just a few months old when his father died. To this day, a painting done by his father of himself as a newborn remains in his possession. In the wake of his father's death, his mother returned to her family in Normandy, taking up residence in a beautiful house on the cliffs. She opened a ballet school, and there he would receive his introduction to dance. At the same time, his grandmother, a lover of opera, provided an introduction to music, which would become for Graffin a lifelong passion. "Listening to music is like a diet," he says now. "It has to become part of your routine."

His mother would be his first instructor, and she would see in the little boy with the exquisite features and dazzling blue eyes a person capable of achieving the success that she herself never garnered. The burden of parental expectation is not unusual in the world of dance. For Graffin, it would loom especially large and make dancing difficult.

He was ten years old when he took his first professional class, working with a teacher so brutal and tough that she made him cry. The next day a gentler teacher took the class, and after that he decided to attend class each day. Two years later, at age twelve, he went to Paris to study at the Conservatoire, an arm of the Paris Opera Ballet. He lived on the fourth floor of a building where the other tenants were a Felliniesque crew of drug addicts and a young man--soon to became Graffin's best friend--who was studying to be a clown. Even then he was strong-willed, firm and resolute in his opinions, and requiring the same of others. "People who don't have strong opinions," he says now, "are people I don't trust."