Noted more for his skill at princely adagios than at ballroom turns, Ivan Nagy nevertheless kicked off his directorship of the English National Ballet (ENB) on April 3 by partnering Princess Diana - the company's royal patron - in a fox-trot on the stage of London's Royal Albert Hall. The occasion, a celebration of the troupe's fortieth anniversary, was a gala display of past accomplishments, present assets, and a glimpse of future ambitions, with the announcement of Nagy as the ensemble's new artistic leader. He begins his official responsibilities this moth. “I'm thrilled,” he says, “and very excited, because the ENB has always represented, to me, a company with impeccable classical standards and a truly contemporary aesthetic.”
Very Special
While he has not served before in a professional capacity with London's second largest ballet institution, Nagy has had very special personal contact with the group since his youth in Budapest. London Festival Ballet (the company's name until 1989) was the first Western dance ensemble that he saw. On tour with a glittering roster that included Toni Lander, John Gilpin, Marilyn Burr, Belinda Wright, and Ben Stevenson, the group's appearance in Hungary in the early 1960s electrified Nagy because of its repertoire. A member, at the time, of the Hungarian State Opera Ballet, he was intrigued by Festival modernist approach to classicism, especially apparent in Harold Lander's Etudes and Jack Carter's Witch Boy. Such abstraction and dramatic pungence had not even been dreamed of by artists in Eastern Europe, whose province was mostly limited to the nineteenth-century Russian ballet tradition.
Nagy's second encounter with the British ensemble was in 1966, when he married ballerina Marilyn Burr. If the old theater superstition “third time pays for all” holds true, his present position at the helm of ENB is surely marked for good fortune.
Something of a charmed career path, in fact, opened for Nagy when he left Hungary twenty-five years ago. Acclaimed for his elegance as a cavalier, he is best known to audiences as a globe-trotting international star and a premier danseur with American Ballet Theatre for more than a decade. As one of ballet's foremost princes, he was considered by critics to be unmatched, on either side of the Atlantic, for his ability at partnering. That fit, combined with a dashing mien and courtly technique, led to extended performance alliance with Natalia Makarova, Margot Fonteyn, Carla Fracci, Lynn Seymour, Gelsey Kirkland, Cynthia Gregory, and Violette Verdy, among many others.
Video footage of the second-act adagio from Swan Lake with Nagy and Makarova has preserved what is surely one of the most definitive interpretations of this benchmark of classical purity. With Gregory in the film of William Carter's popular In A Rehearsal Room, Nagy is also seen in a close-up demonstration of his quite masculine tenderness, and the athleticism that gave a boost to male dancing, helping to attract an increased number of men to the ranks of ballet during the 1970s. On stage, he linked poetry with passion and tempered strength with finesse.
Less visibly documented is Nagy's distinctive track record as an artistic director, which he began soon after retiring from the Ballet Theater in 1978 and launched with typical pragmatism and flair. Nagy was a member of the dance faculty
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