Q & A with Monica Mason

(CNN) -- Monica Mason joined the Royal Ballet in 1958 at the age of 16, becoming the youngest member of the Company at that time. Ten years later she was promoted to principal dancer. She has been director of the Royal Ballet since 2002. Here she gives CNN her assessment of Tetsuya Kumakawa prodigious talents.

CNN: When did you first see Kumakawa dance?

Monica Mason: I first saw him dance when he was a student at the Royal Ballet School. I think everybody recognized that he was a very talented young person -- very gifted, bold, very brave, full of mischief. I think, sometimes, naughty people are very talented too. Teddy certainly was.

He was full of lots of spirit. When he first entered the Royal Ballet he spoke very little English, so it was extremely difficult for him because he didn't want to loose face when he didn't understand what was being said to him. But he was adorable, everybody loved him and he has remained like that. I think he has very special qualities and they were evident right from the beginning.

CNN: When you say he was mischievous, can you think of any examples?

Monica Mason: You can see it in his face. I suppose less now that he has got the responsibilities of a director and he is of course more mature now. But he was, I suppose, at that time full of twinkle and just lovely, delicious mischief. Nothing seemed to get him down and he was very alert and quick. He was very aware from an early age of how he wanted to come across and he wanted to be a star and he became one.

CNN: You mentioned that there were language difficulties, were there any other cultural or physical difficulties? Can you remember the challenges for him?

Monica Mason: I think for anybody coming from a long way away it is cultural thing. For a lot of people its also missing their family. They get very lonely and frightened and I think Teddy missed his family and thought that he was in an alien place. The food is different, the climate not so much because Japan and UK are similar in many ways. I think he was adapting to a life where you are looking after yourself, living on your own and catering for themselves. It's very different. I think it takes a lot of courage and guts to come thousands of miles when you are very young and settle into a school. So I think the challenge is huge.

CNN: So did Teddy do well?

Monica Mason: Oh absolutely. He measured up. I think a lot of people do and a lot of people don't. Some people go back to the country where they have lived, sometimes they are just so home sick and maybe they might try again the following year when they know what they are in for, but Teddy was clearly determined to do well and did.

CNN: So it is not just athleticism and his technical abilities but also his spirit and personality that made him a star?

Monica Mason: Yes, and it's the character of the person and intelligence. Teddy was always really smart, he didn't miss a trick and that's how you have to be. The career for dancers doesn't last that long and you have to maximize the opportunities you are given and that is what he always did.

CNN: Was there ever a problem that he was too small?

Monica Mason: Well I think that he arrived at a time when Kenneth Macmillan was creating a full length ballet for Darcy Bussell and Jonathan Cope called 'The Prince of the Pagodas'. The story is set in the court, in a royal family and there was the court fool. Teddy was ideal for this role because of his mischief, his sense of fun, and of course his virtuosity. Kenneth made a wonderful role for him. Of course his size and his spirit were exactly right for the role and that was very successful for him. A little later, an American choreographer called Twyla Tharp made a ballet called Mr. Worldly Wise for Teddy and Darcy Bussell and again, she tailor made the role for Teddy. His height didn't come into it.

CNN: It was quite a controversial decision when he left. Were you shocked?

Monica Mason: I think that he had talked about going back to Japan and I knew he had ambitions apart from being a dancer. He was very interested on how a company was run. He was interested in the artistic values behind running a company and he felt, and rightly so with Anthony Dowell as the director, that he had a wonderful role model to love and learn from. They always got on extremely well. Anthony was still performing even when he was director of the company. He was the Emperor in The Prince of the Pagodas, so they would have had a close relationship in the studio even in those days and of course Anthony was a superb dancer.

Teddy had seen videos of Anthony and of course they could not have been more opposite, but I think Teddy, like he always did, learnt from watching. He never stopped listening and learning and I think he aspired to the way Anthony did things, and if he could be a dancer like Anthony he was very interested what it would be like to be a director. And because Teddy made a point of seeing lots of performances around the world and because he had an enormous collection of videos, he was always watching other dancers. I think he became convinced that he could do it and he was right.

CNN: So as we were discussing with Sir Anthony it was not so much the decision but the way he made the decision. Was the fact that he took other dancers with him a real shock to the Royal Ballet?

Monica Mason: I think it was one of the biggest shocks for Anthony in his directorship. But of course with hindsight the Royal Opera House was going through a very difficult time financially and there were decisions having to be made by the board of directors concerning possibly limiting the number of performances a year and even cutting back the number of dancers.

Fortunately for Anthony Dowell and our administrative director Anthony Russell they were able to fight tooth and nail to maintain our full complement of dancers and a year round performance here at the Royal Opera House.

To go from 85 dancers down to 70, if you then want to reopen the Opera House with 85 dancers again, you can't just conjure up 15 dancers out of the air at the flick of the switch. So we all knew that if we lost even four dancers we would probably lose them and wouldn't be able to get them back for a long time. It takes years really. First of all the training is very intense and long for a young dancer. If you are losing people at the height of their powers -- which is what happened with the dancers who left to dance with Teddy -- to replace them took them a number of years and so I think it was such a blow to Anthony as it was done in a quite a cavalier fashion. It is a mark of Anthony's integrity and generosity -- which he has in abundance -- that he has remade his friendship with Teddy. And it is also a mark of Teddy's enormous respect for Anthony because he never meant to hurt Anthony. But it was a huge blow.

CNN: How did the decision affect you?

Monica Mason: I was assistant director at the time and really my job was to be to be looking after the repertoire in the rehearsal studio a lot -- particularly the Kenneth Macmillan ballets -- and to try to recast the ballets minus those people who had left. I was also there to be support for Anthony, so I could see how he suffered and I really tried to bolster him as much as one could.

CNN: Lets go back to the days when he was dancing for you. Do you think he had a signature dancing style?

Monica Mason: I think one of the things that Teddy aspired to was not only the Royal Ballet, but also he was a huge fan of Mikhail Baryshnikov -- the Russian who defected in the 1970's, I think. There was a lot of footage around of Baryshnikov dancing, who was also probably the same height as Teddy. He modeled himself on Baryshnikov and adored the Don Quixote solo, the Le Corsaire solo -- the sort of really flamboyant ballets and also the virtuoso stuff, multiple pirouettes. Teddy could turn like a top. That was one of the most remarkable things about him. Once he took a preparation to turn it was nothing for him to spin around 10 or 11 times. It was magic. And he had a fabulous jump and he made himself better and better.

He studied these videos. I remember he was brilliant at devising a way of learning off the screen. Of course it is in reverse -- your right hand is on the wrong side. I remember noticing one day that he turned the screen in the mirror and then stood behind and then of course it faced the right way so he could learn straight off it. He was very clever.

The Paris competition was a remarkable evening. He was selected to represent the UK. We traveled to Paris and I was sent as a sort of aunt and mother figure and granny and all of that. The BBC were very generous and took us out to meals all the time. Teddy who had a passion, or he did at the time, for shell fish. Being June in Paris every restaurant seemed to have a platter of shellfish and Teddy tucked in. When it came to the final rehearsal before the performance all the other young dancers were dancing full out and their teachers were egging them on and Teddy announced to me that he wasn't going to fully exhort himself, that he would mark some things and take it a little easy. And I said: 'I trust you'.

In spite of his youth -- he was only 17 -- I said: 'Just be careful you get the placing on the stage right and that it is spaced out well and then it is up to you really'. He said: 'I don't want to be too tired. I want to save myself for the performance'. He seemed to have a kind of wonderful gauge inside his body as to how to really prepare himself for performances. And of course he was a complete star on the night and brought the house down. But he actually didn't think he had done as well as he could have done and he thought that the girl who got 2nd place was going to beat him. It was wonderful seeing these two young people, each of them convinced the other was going to win. When it was announced that he had won he was absolutely over the moon. We went back to the hotel so he could call his dancing teacher and tell her. I always remember that he was paid in Swiss francs and he lay back on the bed threw them in the air and they fell like snow all round him and I just had that image always of him relishing every second of that night.

CNN: You've obviously spent a lot of time with him. Do you find him to be a prima donna? Is he very wilful or is he a typical dancer?

Monica Mason: I really do feel I know Teddy well. When he first joined the company and was working with Kenneth Macmillan he needed a certain amount of help with the language and with understanding that when you create a ballet with a major choreographer, it is really the choreographer who calls the shots, not the dancer. I think Teddy had ideas of what the steps might be which didn't always tally with Kenneth's vision. So I use to spend quite a bit of time saying you can not change that step but if you thought you might like to, you must ask Kenneth and if he says no, it's no and that means when you go on stage you do as Kenneth wants and not as you want. I think it was quite hard for him to understand, but he got the message when Kenneth was furious. He didn't hold back and Teddy discovered that Kenneth could get very angry.

CNN: When Teddy left, was he the ring leader?

Monica Mason: Well Teddy wanted to found a company. I think these other dancers that he took with him were a little concerned as to what was going to happen to the Royal Ballet during closure because we were out of the Royal Opera House for two years. We had to limit our repertoire in order to keep ourselves afloat. So I think the young guys were tempted by the idea of an adventure and because Teddy had the confidence, they felt they would like to be in on something from the beginning.

I think that Michael Nunn and Billy Trevitt -- who left Teddy after a little while -- wanted to strike out on their own. I think that Mike and Billy were possibly people with very strong ambitions to be individually creative too and I think that if it hadn't been for Teddy, who knows, they might have spent a little more time with the Royal Ballet. But they might in the end have left to do their own things because they always had all kinds of ideas -- they were interested in filming dance in a particular way. Some of the other dancers -- of course Gary Avis -- came back to us, Mathew Dibble went on to do all sorts of things in America and was very successful and then Stuart Cassidy stayed the longest with Teddy and is now teaching in New Zealand.

CNN: What was Kumakawa's greatest role for the Royal Ballet?

Monica Mason: I think his greatest created role was the 'Fool' in 'The Prince of the Pagodas', but he danced a lot of roles. 'Mercutio' in 'Romeo and Juliet' and he danced one of the leading Mandolin dancer in Romeo and Juliet, which is also a virtuosic role. But somehow that night in Paris when he danced the solo from 'Don Quixote'. It was a role he so adored and wanted to do the full length ballet, but at the time we didn't have it in our repertoire. So I never saw him do the full ballet but I really identify him with that role particularly because he was so full of this kind of Spanish macho and he understood it absolutely.

It used to tickle us that he was also wonderful in the Corsaire variation which of course he'd watched the film of Rudolph Nureyev doing. Rudolph was also a big influence on Teddy. There was something about the stomping tiger and the flared nostrils that really appealed to Teddy, so you've got a bit of that too. I remember him mostly as high spirited, intelligent, smart, very gifted and a joy to know really. E-mail to a friend