Monica Mason
Monica Mason (born September 6, 1941, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a South African ballet dancer and dance administrator known for her multifaceted association with the British Royal Ballet, which spanned more than a half century. As a dancer, she coupled remarkable physical strength with solid technique and dramatic skill. As the company’s director (2002–12), she balanced respect for tradition with artistic innovation.
Dance was an ever-present element of Mason’s childhood in Johannesburg. She had her first ballet lesson at age four, but, owing to her exceptional energy, her dancing soon had to compete with other athletic activities, including tennis and swimming. By the time Mason was 12 years old, however, she had become intent on pursuing a career in dance. At age 14, after the death of her father, Mason moved with her mother and sister to London. There she studied dance at the Nesta Brooking School of Ballet and the Royal Ballet School. In 1958 Mason joined the Royal Ballet, becoming, at 16 years old, the company’s youngest member.
Mason’s major break came at age 20, when, while dancing at a party, she caught the eye of choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. Impressed by her ability, MacMillan recruited her for the lead female role in his new version of Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky’s famous 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring. In 1963 Mason was made a soloist at the Royal Ballet, and in 1968 she was incorporated into the elite corps of principal dancers. Later MacMillan created a number of roles specifically for her. As a tall, strong, intense, and physically beautiful dancer with an affinity for the unorthodox, Mason found her forte in abstract contemporary roles—such as Lescaut’s mistress in MacMillan’s Manon—rather than in the more concrete, hyperfeminine roles of many classical-ballet standards.
As a dance professional, Mason was acutely aware of the physical and mental toll that injuries typically take on dancers. Owing in part to her own experience as a principal dancer recovering from a broken foot, she developed an active interest in physical therapy. Aside from subsequently teaching other dancers how to deal with their injuries, she campaigned for the company to hire a full-time physical therapist. Largely as a result of Mason’s initiative, the company not only hired such a professional in the 1970s but continued to expand its health care programs into the 21st century. Later in her career, Mason worked to promote early detection of eating disorders in professional dancers.
In 1980 MacMillan, who was by that time the principal choreographer of the Royal Ballet, hired Mason as his assistant. Although she continued to dance assorted character roles through the 1990s, the appointment marked the start of Mason’s gradual shift from career dancer to dance administrator. While assisting MacMillan, she refined her skills as a coach and teacher. She began to learn the intricacies of organization management in 1986 when she took on additional duties as assistant to the director of the Royal Ballet, Anthony Dowell. In 2002 Mason herself became the company’s director, a position she held until her retirement from the company in 2012.
Although she had been somewhat of a maverick as a dancer, as the director of the Royal Ballet, Mason adhered strongly, but not inflexibly, to tradition. The approach drew both praise and criticism. On the one hand, Mason was admired for upholding the institution—a bastion of the “classic” classical repertoire. On the other, she was accused of relying too heavily on MacMillan’s choreographies and being overly conservative in her commissioning. In 2006, however, Mason made a move that surprised her admirers as well as her detractors; she appointed as resident choreographer Wayne MacGregor, a specialist in experimental modern dance rather than ballet.
Mason remained a risk-taking traditionalist through the final season of her directorship, for which she commissioned a cadre of contemporary choreographers, classical-music composers, and visual artists to create three new works in collaboration. The new productions, triple-billed as “Metamorphosis: Titian 2012,” were based on the Greek myth of Artemis (or Diana [Roman]) and Actaeon, as recounted in the 1st century ce by Ovid in his Metamorphoses and as depicted in a series of 16th-century paintings by Titian. In recognition of her contributions to the arts in Britain, Mason was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2002 and was created Dame Commander (DBE) in 2008.