Growing up in Belfast the youngster knew little of the world of serious ballet until she was 13 and went to a summer school in Scotland

Credit: David Sanderson – Arts Correspondent The Times

A dancer from a ballet blackspot has defied her teenage naysayers to reach one of the pinnacles of world dance. 

This week Melissa Hamilton, 36, became one of the oldest people elevated to principal dancer at the Royal Ballet and said that she had not even heard of the organisation as a child growing up in Belfast in the 1990s.

She said she had crammed “seven years of training into ten months” in her late teens in an attempt to catch peers who had been intensively coached since primary school.

“The talent of students with the right training and the right teachers from a very young age does mean that if you come to it late there is a very minute or slim chance that you could compete,” Hamilton said. “It was not something that would be possible until I made it possible.”

Kevin O’Hare, director of the Royal Ballet, said Hamilton’s late introduction to professional ballet training and subsequent rise to the top was “unusual especially for a woman”.

“We all say it is great to start really serious training at 11, 12. So it is a phenomenal achievement and it is through her tenacity, her drive and her love of the art form,” he said.

He said Hamilton’s performances in recent productions such as Manon and MaddAddam alone justified her promotion to principal alongside many legends including Natalia Osipova and Marianela Núñez.

“It just feels that this is a breadth of work to an exceptional standard that is deserving of the promotion to that final rank. She is a great role model not only for the dancers within the company but also for young dancers in Belfast and across the country.”

Hamilton said that her elevation had brought “tears like I have never seen” from her mother, Linda, a nursery school teacher who lives with Hamilton’s father, Keith, a builder’s merchant, in Co Down, and who “have been with me every step of the journey”.

Her promotion to principal, a group of about 20 of the world’s finest male and female ballet dancers, at the relatively old age of 36 also appears to be history making.

She said that age was not a “matter to take into consideration any more with all the education we have in the healthcare department and how well we are looked after by Royal Ballet … it is meaning that we can dance way beyond the conceived perceptions of what the age limit in this industry was”.

She said she was fortunate not to have sustained serious injury and that she had been “blessed with quite a pliant, elastic body”.

She started dancing at primary school with classes her mother arranged just to “to burn some [of my] energy and get me and my sister [Victoria] out of the house”.

It was at a summer ballet school in Scotland when she was 13 that Hamilton first encountered peers who were already training intensively and where she first saw that ballet was “an option for a potential career”. She said her parents said they would support her dream but only if she first sat her GCSEs in Northern Ireland.

She then joined Elmhurst Ballet School in Birmingham, where she was “encouraged that I would probably have more success in a different career … purely because it would be so difficult for me to catch up with everything that I didn’t have”.

“With my temperament this was a bit of a red rag to a bull. It incentivised me beyond measure. It made me work harder.”

Hamilton later left the school and moved to Athens where she was privately coached by a former Elmhurst teacher, Masha Mukhamedov with whom she had “an incredible connection”.

“She trained me six days a week a in a tiny little studio in the middle of Athens and for ten months I only saw my apartment, the studio and the supermarket. That was the extent of my life. It was one of those moments where it was make or break. I knew I had a very short timeframe to make it happen and it took everything.”

After ten months Hamilton entered the 2007 Youth American Grand Prix in order to get some stage experience. “The thought that I could be auditioning for companies without having performed on stage was a little bit ludicrous so we entered the competition,” she said. “And I ended up winning. The story just gets more and more ridiculous.”

Upon arrival back in Britain a DVD of her dancing was quickly scrambled together and sent to the Royal Ballet’s director at the time, Monica Mason, who invited her to the Royal Opera House, which Hamilton had never been in, for an audition.

She was immediately given a contract and since then has risen through the ranks of the company.

The dancer, who with her husband Michael Christou, a property developer, has set up a production company which has already staged ballet performances and masterclasses in Belfast’s Grand Opera House, laughed as she agreed that she was Northern Ireland’s greatest ever ballet dancer.

“I have always dreamt of returning home and giving little girls the inspiration and motivation that I never had when I was growing up,” she said.