Laura Morera "In Conversation" with Gerald Dowler
20th April 2023
Welcoming Laura Morera to a combined in person and Zoom In Conversation Susan Dalgetty Ezra said she had been unable to decide which had been the dancer’s best performance because there were just so many.
The sentiment was echoed by interviewer Gerald Dowler who commented: “I’ve seen you dance for your entire career and it’s a pleasure and privilege to talk to you this evening.”
He asked: “How would you characterise your career?”
Laura replied: “Colourful, varied, harlotty and mistressy. I’m lucky because I’ve done so much work from romantic to humour, to young, to older. It has been fruitful.” She added: “The career itself has been hard but every time I’m on stage I don’t think there’s one role that I haven’t enjoyed or loved. Sometimes you just have to ground yourself. How lucky are we?”
“You’re a company dancer,” said Gerald. “You joined the company and stayed through thick and thin.”
“I fell in love with the Royal Ballet when I saw it,” she said. This was at the age of 12. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They were so elegant. It was in another reality.
“And when times get hard in the company, when you think ‘will I be appreciated somewhere else, will I move somewhere else?’ I just didn’t want to because this company had the Ashton and the MacMillan rep and that is really what I wanted to do and then Liam (Scarlett) started and I wanted to dance that work with those people that I admired.”
All this had inspired her and she decided: “I’d rather struggle here and make it than be a star somewhere else that wasn’t fulfilling me so much.”
Gerald wanted to know what it was that attracted her to the Ashton and MacMillan repertoire?
It was, she replied, the quality of their work. She hadn’t realised till then that one could speak through the work. “With both Ashton and MacMillan how I do a step is going to affect the narrative.” She went on: “When I did my first Manon Act 3 I remember Deborah (Lady MacMillan) coming up to me at my first stage call and saying: ‘Remember, it’s all in there.’ It took me quite a long time to truly understand what that meant and it stayed with me for a long time and it’s completely true.
“It’s all in there with both choreographers. They are geniuses with how they tell a story with both very different ways … to have done so much work from these two choreographers has been my biggest honour, my privilege.”
Gerald commented: “What you say is something that struck me over the decades that there are very few choreographers where the steps contain the meaning within them and, with so many choreographers, if you took away the lights and the costumes and everything you have no idea what’s going on.”
He asked, when she was portraying incredible emotions on stage was she feeling those emotions?
Yes, she said without hesitation. “I do think about it all the time. It is real and there are moments when it reflects on your life,” and, reflecting on her forthcoming retirement, “I’m going to miss that because you can become someone and live their life,” adding, with a smile: “…even if their life is a bit horrendous”.
Was it a good or bad thing, Gerald wondered, to be taking on some roles later in her career?
“In hindsight, it’s been good,” said Laura. “I’ve done a lot of debuts after 40. One of them being Mayerling. I’m 45 now and I’m about to make my debut in Cinderella. It’s, like, crazy, but you have a maturity and an understanding of your own body and you can own the stage in a different way. You’re not trying so hard, you’re embodying a lot more.”
She added: “I’ve always been an actress that is thinking but sometimes you’re thinking so hard you’re not putting it in your body. It’s something that watching Lynn Seymour, I really learned from that. You have to put it in the body or it’s not actually going to relate.”
A downside of taking on roles later in her career was the risk of injury and taking longer to recover. “Now I’m doing Cinderella I can see how a younger me would have done it. It’s now better but it does burn a lot more than it used to.”
She was pleased to have taken on the challenge of Cinderella at this stage in her career. She was fortunate, she said, because it was an Ashton work and there were aspects of that she found comforting that other dancers would find difficult. Then she said: “It’s a challenge because I haven’t done many principal tutu rôles. Suddenly to be 45 and I’m putting on a tutu …” She had worked with Lesley Collier extensively. “She pushed me and pushed me, she knows my issues and strengths and it came to a point a few weeks ago when I felt I’d made a real breakthrough.”
She had danced in Cinderella many times previously but as stars, a lot of autumn fairies, and quite a few fairy godmothers, but finally she would be going to the ball.
Having taken a range of roles in other ballets had certainly helped her when at last she landed the lead role in a production. She recalled dancing Coppelia quite late in her career. “I thought ‘I’m going to nail this’ and then I started learning Act 3 with Leanne Benjamin and I was ‘I’m sorry, you want me to do what?’ and I was ‘no, I gave that up at 40, that’s not in my rep anymore.’” She added: “People think that because we’re principals, we’re always having a great day. We’re really not.”
This moved the conversation on to the importance of feedback for dancers. Laura recalled the effect of having one of the younger ballerinas come up to her and say “Oh, Lau, it’s so lovely to watch you.”
“It would make me feel, I am worth something to these people. It’s really nice, if you think someone’s done something, to make sure you tell them. It might just make their day or make a difference.”
The conversation turned to working with the late Liam Scarlett. “I really can’t talk about my career without mentioning Liam,” she said. “It was 12 years of collaboration.” They had not known one another before working together but once they had Liam had commented to an interviewer that Laura was the reason he choreographed. “We just clicked,” she said. Among the ballets they collaborated on were Asphodel Meadows, Sweet Violets, Hansel and Gretel, Age of Anxiety and Frankenstein.
“He was so young and he had so much to give yet,” she said. “His loss is really a loss of a great artistic talent. I was breathing his work and then I came in one day and he was no more. As far as the work was concerned my heart broke. I don’t know how to put it back together.”
Following her forthcoming retirement from the stage, Laura will be coaching at the Royal Ballet and also taking on the formal responsibility of teaching the MacMillan repertoire. How, asked Gerald, had that particular arrangement come about?
She had, she explained, been involved in a project working with young dancers from other companies who had expressed the fact that they had no chance to know about MacMillan and to do his work. Then Lady MacMillan had said she was thinking about taking this forward and asked Laura if she would lead. “I was, like, why me? This is huge and I haven’t had a lot of gifts in life … that was just something presented to me on a silver tray. It’s maybe because I’ve done so much of the work and I really honour the choreographer.”
Gerald asked Laura to identify her two favourite partners.
She said when she first joined the company her first partner and stage soulmate was Ricardo Cervera; the two of them first being put together by Twyla Tharp in Mr Worldly Wise. “I think the thing about Ricardo and I is that we are actually the same person but in a different body and in a different gender,” she said. In due course their respective careers took them in different directions but they did manage to perform La Fille Mal Gardée together. “His whole family came and my whole family came,” she recalled. “Half the theatre was Ric and Lau’s family. We loved it, we had so much fun.”
Her other favourite partner was Federico Bonelli who, after an initial paring in Manon became her regular partner. “For people to say, I booked your show because it was Bonelli-Morera, that’s more exciting for me than someone coming to watch just you.”
She had also twice been partnered with Vadim Muntagirov and although a difficult rehearsal schedule meant they had barely seen one another “we got to the first night and it was so spontaneous and we just really loved working with each other.” Later they performed Month in the Country together. Laura said; “He’s just got these honest eyes. You look into these eyes. Fedi had that.”
Laura’s final stage performance for the Royal will be in Anastasia, the final act of the ballet which will round off a triple bill including work by McGregor and Wheeldon. She was pleased to be dancing MacMillan one final time and said of the role: “I go into Anastasia absolutely believing that I’m Anastasia, there’s no doubt in my mind but also that ending is very liberating for her. I have had my challenges in my career and there were very dark periods and I think I look at it like I have freed myself from these narratives and I really felt artistically very free. I’m really grateful that I’ve got the chance to retire with that.”
Written by Phillip Cooper, approved by Laura Morera and Gerald Dowler.
© Copyright LBC
