Remembering Lynn Seymour, by her best friend

Lynn Seymour died on 7 March 2023 at the age of 83.

Kenneth MacMillan created several works on her and said, “Lynn Seymour has a wonderfully expressive body, great musicality and independence.” The Guardian's obituary stated, “Seymour was a dancer of individuality with fine musicality and in all the roles she created left a high benchmark for successors to try to emulate. She was noted for a fluidity that MacMillan in 1980 said made her ‘movements melt one into the next'. He added that ‘Lynn is as real as anyone can be on stage when wearing pointe shoes.'” Alastair Macaulay, writing her obituary for the New York Times, said that she was “one of the greatest of all dance actors” and “the most radically original dancer in British ballet history”. The Times wrote of her “flowing lyricism and flawless sensibility”.

The Canadian-born ballerina's career was mainly linked to The Royal Ballet and London became her home. On hearing of her death, Kevin O'Hare, Director of The Royal Ballet, wrote, “Lynn was an extraordinary force of the ballet world, possessed of the most startling and spontaneous dramatic gifts that infused her every performance.”

Her funeral was a private affair with only about forty people in attendance, including her three sons. The funeral reception was held at London's Playground Theatre where Lynn Seymour was a patron. It was formerly known as The Playground Studio, a name that Seymour came up with seeing that it began life as a research and development studio – a place for artists of all disciplines to ‘play' with their ideas. Her connection with the theatre was through her best friend Naomi Sorkin, former American dancer and actress whose husband created and is co-artistic director of the Playground Theatre.

We reproduce Sorkin's eulogy below.

Naomi Sorkin

Naomi Sorkin was one of America's leading classical and dramatic ballerinas. She began her career at 14, dancing with the Chicago Lyric Opera, and joined the American Ballet Theatre at 17 where she rose quickly through the ranks to become the youngest soloist dancing many principal roles before leaving to become a principal dancer with both the San Franciso and Eliot Feld Ballets. She became known for her varied repertoire which spanned dramatic, classical, lyrical and contemporary dance. Her dramatic power and lyricism combined with a strong classical technique made her a favourite with choreographers worldwide and a leading guest artist.

Sorkin became a freelance artist to pursue an even broader repertoire, guesting with many of the major dance companies (both ballet and contemporary) and shortly thereafter starred in the PBS film Swan Lake Minnesota, a critically acclaimed avant-garde version of Swan Lake. She came to Europe as a guest artist with the Lindsay Kemp company, where she created the Ballerina role in his Nijinsky Il Matto, touring Italy, before settling in London. As a guest artist with William Forsythe's Ballet Frankfurt, she performed the central speaking role in his full-length masterpiece Artifact in Stockholm, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Yokohama and Lisbon. In London, she played principal roles in two West End shows, Grand Hotel and Brigadoon. It was in London that she began working as an actress, and her theatre work includes The Creditors at the Gate Theatre, The Dancing Master at the BAC, Blue Eyes Red at The White Bear, amongst others.

Henryk Baranowski, twice winner of Russia's Golden Mask award adapted The Idiot for Sorkin to play Nastyasia Filippovna in London at the Riverside Studios, as well as creating the role of The Black Angel for her in his Macbeth in Poland. She inspired and starred in Madame Ida which was shown at the V&A, London Short Film Festival as well as in Paris, Capri, Brescia, and St Petersburg, where it resides permanently in the collection of the Theatre Museum of St Petersburg. She also starred in Roman Fever, based on the Edith Wharton short story of the same name which screened at Riverside Studios and the Aesthetica Film Festival.

Sorkin played the leading role of Anna in The Devil's Choice by Russian writer Irina Ionnyasen and with her collaborator Christian Holder, Naomi created Isolation Waltz, a short film in response to the lockdown.

Most recently she played the title role in Ida Rubinstein, The Final Act, which was created for her by Christian Holder who wrote, choreographed, and directed this multimedia evocation of The Untold Story of Dance's Forgotten Diva at The Playground Theatre.

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.