Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a ballerina as As a 10-year-old pupil at ballet school, her principal

Dame Ninette de Valois said she had all the gifts it's possible to bestow on a young dancer.

Those gifts took her to a position of Prima

Ballerina at Sadler's Wells where for 15 years she enchanted audiences with all the

great roles of the classical repertoire and had some created for her by the eminent choreographers of the time.

At the age of 30 she went freelance and often pursued by a devoted band of fans danced her way around the world, the first Western ballerina to

perform in Russia and with the Peking Ballet Company. When her stage career

ended she became the artistic director of the London Festival ballet, her love of

performing transferred to her love of dancers training and education. Now in her

mid-70s her innate sense of the beauty of movement is still strong within her.

It has to be something you feel, she says, not something you're told to do.

She is Dame Beryl Gray.

Is that what marks you out, do think as a prima valorina

barrel that you it comes from within? It has to come from within. It has to. You have to

be convinced yourself of every movement you are doing. I was trained by my

chosen teacher, Audrey Devast, to give every movement a meaning to know why I'm doing something.

But you had all of those choreographers,

the great choreophors writing for you,

you know, Frederick Ashton and so on,

and you had Dame Annette Devalwa,

...