The Irish Ballerina - Monica Loughman

I finally finished reading "The Irish Ballerina" a few weeks back. I say finally because its been sitting on my bedside locker since when I bought it at Christmas. Its quite a short book, disappointingly so, and I finished reading it in two nights, two nights two weeks apart mind you. I don't really feel like giving it a full-on review, instead I'll just lash out a few notes I made along the way.

The book details both her early life at school and her professional career upto 2004. Her school life in Russia was pretty brutal. Living conditions were awful, the food consisted of cabbage and stink burgers, and she got bullied a lot, even by teachers who would tell her to "Fuck back to England!" She's a devout Catholic, and explained how she said a few prayers to get her through the hard times. Between the misery and the praying, I was beginning to think that this was the Angela Ashes of ballet.

A few other Little random points I remember. She took up smoking to keep herself thin. Although with all the gastric problems she began having at she needn't have bothered. She started off as a thin child and every second page she seemed to be ill and loosing weight, I'm surprised there was anything left of her by the end! At one stage all she could stomach were cups of tea and porridge. To liven things up she used to add some lemon juice to the tea. If she really felt like splurging, she'd have a tomato! Her black hair is a big dye job! I was so disappointed when I read about this. Snowflakes from The Nutcracker is really really hard apparently, and she was prone to murderous thoughts if the conductor played it slow.

She details a few boyfriends she had down the years, but none can compare to "lovely" Gavin. Now I'm not jealous or anything, honest, but it seriously got a bit vomity at times. Poor old Alan Foley must have been kicking himself when he found out. After taking her under his wing in the 90's, paying for her flights and accommodation in to and from Cork, this Gavin guy just waltzes into her life. He must have been livid with jealousy, or possibly not?* :)

Anyway, she deserves all the success shes gotten and more. There is no way to begrudge her. She spent the early years of her life is absolute poverty and dank but made it through all that on her love for ballet alone. She made practically no money from dancing and indeed would have been happy living in squaller if it meant she could continue as a ballerina. This is a refreshing outlook on employment from an Irish person. Nowadays people only seem to be able to answer a question like "Whats your job like?" with "Oh, about €50,000". She did eventually accept a sponsorship deal from Allienz Insurance.

I have only one real complaint with the book, and that is that its too short! I remember Monica being interviewed on Radio 1 a few years back, and she was describing all the difficulties she had with her feet. In the book, that only took up a few lines. This type of abridgement seemed to appear all over the place. Perhaps the books ghostwriter, Jean Harrington, felt that the casual reader would have grown weary if too much detail was given, but personally I think they would have gobbled it up. The only other thing it could do with is an update, a lot of things have happened in three years. Thats what happens when you write an autobiography in the middle of your career I guess.

To round it off, I've included a short video clip from her (and Alan Foleys) DVD, "The magic of Ballet", which I mentioned in a post back in 2005. I'm not sure if this is still available or not, but its deffinately worth a purchase if you come accross it :)



* Taken from a 2006 Sunday Tribune article:

"We [Monica and Alan] quite often play lovers on stage, and it is not difficult to convey the emotion needed, because I love the bones of Alan as a friend and have the utmost respect for him, even though we don't fancy each other.

My partner Gavin is absolutely brilliant and has no problem with it because he knows it's just a performance. The thing is that even though you may be gazing lovingly into someone's eyes on stage, in your head you're calculating the next moves you have to perform."