When I met Woytek Lowkski in the late 80s/early 90s there wasn’t a ballet star around that didn’t 
adore and revere him. Fluent in English, Polish, Russian, French (and Italian?), a graduate of the Vaganova Academy, dancer with Béjart , and an enthusiastic connoisseur of all kinds of culture from opera to The Golden Girls, he was intelligent, kind, funny, learned, sensitive – you name it, he had it. Like many central Europeans I’ve known, he had an integrity and honour that saw straight through pretension and dishonesty, and respected talent and hard work. I didn’t realise at the time that the world wasn’t full of Woyteks – I thought every ballet company had one. It was only when he died, far too young, in 1995, that I realised how fortunate I had been to work with him so closely.