Monica Mason,, is a former ballet dancer, teacher, and artistic director of The Royal Ballet. In more than fifty years with the company, she established a reputation as a versatile performer, a skilled rehearsal director, and a capable administrator.
Taken into the corps of the Royal Ballet in 1958, Mason was, at 16, the company's youngest member. She soon caught the eye of choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, who had been commissioned to create yet another dance version of The Rite of Spring, set to Igor Stravinsky's score that had caused such a ruckus at its premiere with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1913. Impressed by her talent and energy, and conscious, no doubt, of her youth and innocence, he cast her as the Chosen Maiden, around whom the rite evolves. She scored a marked success and thereafter became a particular favorite of MacMillan. Over the years, she danced in almost all his works in the Royal Ballet repertory, creating roles in six of them. Besides the Chosen Maiden, they are as follows.
1974. Manon, music by Jules Massenet. Role: Lescaut's Mistress.
1975. Elite Syncopations, music by Scott Joplin. Role: Calliope Rag.
Appointed a soloist in 1963, Mason was promoted to principal dancer in 1968. The range of roles in her personal repertory was broad, encompassing the classicism of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake and Nikiya in La Bayadère as well as the austerity of purely abstract works such as Song of the Earth, set by MacMillan to Gustav Mahler's meditative Das Lied von der Erde. She was dramatically effective in such disparate roles as the ruthless Black Queen in Checkmate by Ninette de Valois, and the gentle Lady Elgar in Enigma Variations , by Frederick Ashton. Coldly implacable as Myrtha in Giselle and furiously malevolent as Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty. She displayed warmth, charm, and grace in such evocative works as Liebeslieder Walzer by George Balanchine, and Dances at a Gathering by Jerome Robbins.
Administrative career
After many years on the stage of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Mason began a new phase of her career as a ballet mistress and teacher. She was appointed principal répétiteur for MacMillan's ballets in 1980, when she also began teaching classical variations to senior girls at the Royal Ballet School. She became the company's principal répétiteur in 1984, assistant to the director in 1988, and assistant director, to Anthony Dowell, in 1991. Capping her administrative career, she was named artistic director in 2002. After ten years' service, during which she fostered many talents and greatly enriched the repertory, she retired in July 2012. Peter Wright regarded her as the best artistic director since Ninette de Valois
