Zoë Anderson - The Royal Ballet: 75 Years

PREVIOUS PAGE Ninette de Valois, founder of The Royal Ballet, in 1949: Gordon Anthony Collection, The Theatre Museum, V&A Images

ABOVE The Academy of Choreographic Art, advertisement from the Dancing Times: by courtesy of Dancing Times, January 1928

The Royal Ballets seventy-fifth anniversary falls on 5 May 2006. The Company hasnt always counted its birthdays correctly: its founder, Ninette de Valois, once held a coming-of-age celebration in the wrong year. What cant be miscounted is how much de Valois achieved, how quickly. She built a company from scratch, taking it to world-conquering fame in less than two decades. Her methods have shaped not just British ballet but companies across the world: directly, through the troupes founded or led by Royal Ballet dancers, and indirectly through the image of the Company.

From very early on, The Royal Ballet was a repertory ballet company. It took works from the past, from other traditions, while creating its own new choreography. De Valoiss model helped to shape ballet in the twentieth century and beyond. She and her successors created a repertory that is one of the richest in the world, including classic stagings of ballets from the nineteenth century and the Diaghilev era. Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan were the Companys own defining choreographers, spending most of their creative lives with The Royal Ballet. Dancing these works, the Company developed its own distinctive accent, with clear musicality and a strong sense of drama.

Maintaining a tradition can be as hard as founding it. The Royal Ballets toughest moments have come in the last twenty-five years. Its standards and identity have been threatened. This history concerns survival as well as growth, decline and recovery as well as influence. It was written at a time of optimism and excitement. Under Monica Mason, the Company has been rediscovering a neglected past; as I wrote, ballets I had been researching were brought back to the theatre. A new generation of dancers has responded to their challenges of technique, style and authority.

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Ninette de Valois was a formidable, charming and contradictory woman: far-sighted, ruthless and selfless. She was a disciplinarian who adored rebels, an Irishwoman who founded a pillar of the British establishment. She built a highly organised system, and she loved upsetting apple carts. After visiting Russia, she came straight back to her own school and taught her teachers new steps and methods, re-examining her own basic principles. She was always ready to change her mind.

Her company and her school had several name changes before settling down as The Royal Ballet, but de Valois never put her own name above the title. It is the belief of the present Director, she said sternly in 1932, that if the ballet at Sadlers Wells does not survive many a Director, then it will have failed utterly in the eyes of the first dancer to hold that post.

She was superbly pragmatic. John Tooley, who worked with her at Covent Garden from the 1950s, remembers how clearly she would set out her plans, all leading firmly in a chosen direction. Then something would happen which caused her to deviate. She would say, I cant miss that opportunity. I know its not quite in the direction we talked about, but its taking us forward. She was so much like that. Throughout her career, de Valois would turn her chances to account. Circumstances thrust a lot on you, she wrote serenely, and when they arise you simply meet their demands.

At first, de Valois was the ballerina of her own company, but she regularly put herself second cast after visiting dancers. Having In 1959, she planned one last ballet, The Lady of Shalott, to music by Arthur Bliss. It never happened. She decided that Kenneth MacMillan, already singled out as The Royal Ballets next major choreographer, should do a new ballet that season, and handed over her own rehearsal time.

Plenty of dancers and teachers were terrified of her. Monica Mason remembers de Valoiss visits to The Royal Ballet School in the late 1950s. The whole atmosphere was rather like nurses and matrons used to be when the surgeon was coming round everybody was spruced up and on their best behaviour, on their mettle People seemed scared to death. In rehearsals, de Valois could be hasty, impatient, furious. Her rages were quick, and quickly over. She wouldnt let you gloat over it, said Pamela May, who remembered the storms of her classes. During the war, de Valois was nicknamed Madam; she cheerfully accepted the name, and would sign letters to members of the Company with it.