Guillaume Côté
Principal Dancer
Photo Gallery (6 images)
In conversation with Guillaume Côté 
Guillaume Côté, Principal Dancer
Clothing provided by Holt Renfrew.
Biography
Guillaume Côté is a native of Lac-Saint-Jean, Québec. He studied at Canada’s National Ballet School, joined The National Ballet of Canada in 1999 and has been a Principal Dancer since 2004.
Mr. Côté’s repertoire with The National Ballet of Canada includes lead roles in The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Widow, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet, Giselle, The Nutcracker, Onegin, and Le Corsaire among others. He has created a number of lead roles in ballets by James Kudelka including Ferdinand in An Italian Straw Hat, Her Prince Charming in Cinderella and Will in The Contract (The Pied Piper).
Mr. Côté is in demand as an international guest artist and has danced with American Ballet Theatre, English National Ballet, Teatro Colón de Buenos Aires, Berlin’s Staatsoper and Teatro alla Scala. He has also performed at Covent Garden in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and New York State Theater.
Mr. Côté is also an accomplished musician and composer and has composed music for a number of dance and theatre productions internationally. Mr. Côté was awarded a Gemini Award as well as the Galileo 2000 “A life for music” Prize for his dance and musical collaboration in the documentary Moving to His Music: The Two Muses of Guillaume Côté.
Mr. Côté is sponsored through Dancers First by Emmanuelle Gattuso & Allan Slaight.
Questions & Answers
Posted on: August 2009
1. Welcome back from your summer holidays. What did you do over the break?
For our summer holiday this year, Heather Ogden and I decided to go on a two-week tour of Italy. I was already in Milan guesting with La Scala, so Heather came to meet me in early July. I've been to Italy many times but always for work, so this time I was excited to do nothing but relax, enjoy incredible wine and eat lots of my all-time favourite food: mozzarella di buffala. We travelled through Venice by boat, took the train to Rome and then headed to Florence. Florence for me has always been a very special place.
2. We hear that you and fellow Principal Dancer Heather Ogden came back from the trip with some very special news to share. What can you tell us about that?
I used to sit on a little bridge right across from the famous ponte vecchio in Florence and think about how wonderful it would be to spend the rest of life with Heather, so I decided take her to that same place and I asked her to marry me. To my great relief she said yes! After all the excitement we headed to the coast to a place called Cinque Terre. To anyone who is thinking about going Italy, I would strongly suggest you make a stop there. It's not possible to put the splendour of it into words. After that we headed to Monaco where John and Claudine Bailey, friends of ours as well as patrons of the ballet, had generously invited us to visit.
3. Right before the summer break, you guested in a world premiere of Pink Floyd Ballet by Roland Petit in La Scala. What was it like for you to dance ballet to the music of Pink Floyd?
I've always been a huge fan of Pink Floyd so it was quite incredible to dance to some of their best songs on the stage of La Scala. On top of being a very interesting ballet, it also had the feeling of a rock show with lasers, etc. It was wild! It was also a huge success with the audience. This was my first opportunity to work with one of the greatest choreographers of all time, Roland Petit. He's now 84 years old and it was very fulfilling for me to work with him.
4. You will be heading out west this September to dance in a pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty and Apollo in Victoria, Nanaimo and Vancouver. What excites you most about starting the season with these classic pieces out west?
I love going out west. It’s always great to tour to such beautiful places. Also, Heather has lots of family in Vancouver which makes those shows very special. Apollo is one of my very favourite ballets. I was lucky to dance it at a very young age and it was the first time that I got to work with Karen Kain in the studio so it remains one of the ballets I can't get enough of!
5. Which piece of repertoire are you most excited to dance in the 2009/10 season?
One of the ballets that I love the most in our repertoire is definitely Rudolf Nureyev's The Sleeping Beauty. It's a ballet that is very much part of the National Ballet's history and we are privileged to have it in our repertoire. Prince Florimund is probably one of the hardest roles for a male dancer. Even though the ballet was originally much harder to dance for the Princess Aurora, Nureyev made it more about the male role. He choreographed some incredibly challenging solos for himself and they are still my favourite to dance.
Quotes
IN COLOUR
"[Guillaume Côté is] handsome in manner as in dance"
- Financial Times (London, UK, 2009
The Sleeping Beauty
"We are lucky on opening night to have a magnificent Prince in the person of handsome guest artist Guillaume Côté, a principal dancer with The National Ballet of Canada, whose bold, finely tuned and muscualar dancing he combined with superb partnering skills and a truly noble sense of grandeur into one of the most satisfying interpretations I have seen of this usually dull role."
- Dancing Times, September 2007
The Taming of the Shrew
"...Côté was born to play the swaggering hero in Cranko's charming rendering of Shakespeare's popular comedy. From his first entrance as the braggadocio drunk-cum-wastrel, to his final gentle caress of Kate as a caring lover, he created a memorable character while executing demanding choreography with panache."
- The Globe and Mail, 2007