Born in Nottingham in 1958, Kevin Richmond was the eldest of three boys. His interest in theatre began at primary school where he was encouraged to participate in drama classes. At the age of ten he was recruited as a child actor to appear in a number of productions, including Waiting for Godot with Peter O’Toole and in the 1972 Harold Becker film The Ragman’s Daughter. Initially, Richmond wasn’t keen to learn to dance but was convinced by his teachers that it may help his acting career.

Richmond’s first professional dance job was with an education project called Dance for Everyone when Richmond was just 17. He joined London Festival Ballet in 1977 under the directorship of Beryl Grey and remained with the company, now English National Ballet, for 22 years. He worked with five directors during this time and among his most memorable experiences was working with the choreographer Christopher Bruce on Swansong. Bruce created the ballet on Richmond, Matz Skoog and Koen Onzia in 1987 and this work and its cast were celebrated worldwide. Other important roles included the title role in Christopher Hampson’s Scrooge, Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and Dr Coppélius in Coppélia.

After retiring from the stage, Richmond completed the Professional Dancer’s Teaching Diploma at the Royal Academy of Dance and taught at London Studio Centre, Basler Ballett, Cathy Sharp Dance Ensemble and latterly, at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künst in Zürich where he taught the BA in Contemporary Dance course. He also taught as a guest teacher with many companies including Rambert. He became ill with cancer in 2018 and died the following year.

The photograph shows Kevin Richmond in The Nutcracker; Kevin Richmond; Peter Schaufuss production; Designs by David Walker; English National Ballet; 1986; at the London Coliseum; London, UK; Photo by Bill Cooper licensed by Areanpal

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Checkmate is one of the only two ballets by Ninette de Valois to survive in the repertoire. It makes allegorical use of a chess game to represent a battle between love and death. Arthur Bliss, the composer, and Edward McKnight Kauffer, the designer, worked with de Valois’ ideas in a way that made perfect sense of the ensuing battle, and testified to her commitment to Serge Diaghilev’s ideas on the importance of music and design in ballet. The action of the chess pieces is foreshadowed in a prologue in which the skeletal hand of death plays chess with the figure of love and suggests that what we are about to see is in some way pre-determined. The chess pieces from pawn and knight to King and Queen make their moves as if guided by the hand of fate. The Black Queen powers her way across the board, dominating all around her. After the thunderous chaos and brutal murder of her would-be lover the Red Knight, the climatic finale sees the Red King goaded out of his inertia. His feeble resistance prompts the Queen to administer the coup de grace: ‘checkmate indeed’. The ballet was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, Paris in 1937, with June Brae as the Black Queen, Harold Turner as the Red Knight, and Robert Helpmann and Pamela May as the Red King and Queen.

The photograph shows Sadler’s Wells Ballet in Checkmate at the Royal Opera House, 1947. Love (Jean Bedells) and Death (Franklin White) deliberate over a game of chess in the Prologue to Ninette de Valois’ ballet Credit: Frank Sharman/Royal Opera House/ArenaPAL

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Born in Kent in 1937, Jill Tookey arrived at what was to be her dancing destiny by an unusual route. She had enjoyed ballet as a child but was swallowed up by the fashion industry of the 1960s, becoming fashion editor for both Woman and Beauty and Honey magazines. By the 1980s, and as mother of four children, she had begun writing childrens’ books. Pedro the Parrot, published by Thames and Hudson, was to be the springboard for an extraordinary adventure. To set Pedro dancing, music was found and also a choreographer. From there Tookey never looked back. She was alert to the huge interest in dancing and performance in the young and how, with the right build up, they could channel their excitement into something truly worthwhile.

By 1988 Tookey had founded the National Youth Ballet of Great Britain (NYB) and she remained its artistic director until she died in 2016. She was always able to see the bigger picture as well as the details, with many ballets specially created for NYB and many young choreographers and dancers encouraged. As a result of her inspired and energetic leadership, literally thousands of children have had opportunities to enjoy the magical world of the theatre, with a number going on to dance professionally. Jill Tookey was appointed a CBE in 2016, but died that same year, and, sadly, was unable to collect her award. She was represented at the investiture by her ten-year-old granddaughter, who had danced with NYB for four years.

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Patricia Thorburn was born in Peebles, Scotland, and was a student of Mrs Bell Hardy in Edinburgh. In 1937, she auditioned and then studied at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School and made her debut with the Carl Rosa Opera in 1938. In 1939 and 1940 she served with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) but joined the Anglo Polish Ballet in 1940 and remained with the company until 1942. Following this, she appeared in a number of London shows, and married John Arnold in 1945 before joining the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1946 to boost the numbers in their extraordinary production of The Sleeping Beauty.

Thorburn then danced as a member of the Agnes de Mille Ballet in the stage musical London Town. She retired from the company in 1947. Using her ballet training as a basis, she went to study with Sigurd Leeder at his School of Dance at Dartington Hall, Devon, to expand her horizons. She pioneered a Pure Movement course to help actors move more naturally on stage and screen and, working under her married name of Patricia Arnold, started to teach movement and historical dance at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) in 1955, where she became head of Movement from 1963 until 1972. She also taught at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Thorburn taught well beyond the age of 75, and even after retirement was often asked back to teach masterclasses.

The photograph shows Patricia Thorburn with fellow classmates from Sadler's Wells Ballet School with Nicholas Segeyev in the centre in 1937 / 1938. Photo courtesy of Patricia Thorburn.

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Irina Baronova was a Russian-born ballerina and actress, known as one of the “Baby ballerinas” of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. She was born in Petrograd in 1919. Her father, Mikhail Baronov, was a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy, and in 1920 he and his family had to flee the country following the Russian Revolution. They crossed the border into Romania disguised as peasants and eventually settled in Bucharest. They had no money in a foreign country where they did not know or speak the language. Baronov eventually found a job at a factory, and the family spent the following years living in the city slums.

At the age of seven, Baronova began taking her first ballet classes when her mother (who was a ballet enthusiast) found her a teacher, Madame Majaiska, a former corps de ballet member of the Imperial Russian Ballet. She was also a refugee from Russia and so conducted Baronova’s classes in the kitchen of her one-bedroom house, using the kitchen table as a barre. To provide Irina with professional training, the family moved to Paris when she was ten years old, where she was taught by Olga Preobrajenska and Mathilde Kschessinska. In 1930, at the age of 11, Baronova made her debut at the Paris Opéra. The catalyst for her career came in 1932, just before her 13th birthday, when George Balanchine engaged her for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, along with the equally youthful Tamara Toumanova and Tatiana Riabouchinska. The English critic Arnold Haskell dubbed this illustrious trio the “Baby Ballerinas”.

Baronova was 14 when she was given her first principal role, as Odette in Act II of Swan Lake, in which she was partnered by Anton Dolin. At the age of 17, she eloped with an older Russian man, German (Jerry) Sevastianov, in order to get married. Their marriage came two years later, in 1938, with a ceremony in Sydney, Australia. Baronova then joined Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre) in the United States of America, subsequently divorcing Sevastianov. In 1946, in the United Kingdon, she met the theatrical agent Cecil Tennant who asked her to marry him, which she did, retiring from her career in ballet at the age of 27.

Between 1940 and 1951, Baronova appeared in several films, including Ealing Studio’s Train of Events (1949). Much later she worked as ballet mistress on the 1980 Hollywood film Nijinsky. During her marriage to Tennant, she gave birth to three children: Victoria, Irina and Robert. In 1967, Tennant was killed in a car accident, and Baronova subsequently moved to Switzerland. She then resumed her marriage with her first husband, Sevastianov, who died in 1974. Baronova then began teaching master classes in the UK and the USA. In 1986 she staged Mikhail Fokine’s Les Sylphides for The Australian Ballet, and in 1992 returned to Russia to help the Maryinsky Theatre with an archival project. In 1996 she received a Vaslav Nijinsky Medal in Poland and an honorary doctorate from the North Carolina School of the Arts. In 2000, she went to live in Australia with her daughter, Irina. In 2005 she appeared in a documentary on the Ballet Russe, and published her autobiography Irina: Ballet, Life and Love. She died in her sleep in Byron Bay, Australia, on June 28, 2008, at the age of 89.

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Rowena Jackson was born in Invercargill, New Zealand, in 1926. She originally studied ballet with Rosetta Powell and Stan Lawson and for her academic studies attended the Epsom Girls’ Grammar School in Auckland. In 1941, Rowena won the very first Royal Academy of Dancing Scholarship to be awarded in New Zealand. She travelled to London and joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School in 1946 and won the Adeline Genée Gold Medal in 1947, the same year she joined the Sadler’s Wells (later Royal) Ballet at Covent Garden.

Rowena Jackson b. 1926 d. 2024; Dancer, teacher and director

By 1954 Rowena had been promoted to the rank of principal dancer and performed most of the ballerina roles in the repertoire at that time. She was especially noted for her interpretation of Swanhilda in Coppélia and was also famous for her ability to pirouette, both alone and supported. There is proof in film of her ability to perform fast and brilliant turns with a repetition of single and double fouettés for the whole of Odile’s 32 fouettés in the third act of Swan Lake, something that was seldom attempted in those days. Before she left New Zealand for England, Rowena had set a World Record of 121 consecutive fouettés without a break.

Early in 1958 Rowena married fellow Royal Ballet principal, Philip Chatfield. That same year they danced together in The Royal Ballet’s Giselle. They both retired in 1959 and moved to New Zealand. In 1961 Rowena was awarded an MBE. In 1972, she and Philip became directors of the National School of Ballet in Wellington. They eventually moved to Australia but continued to teach until well into their eighties. The couple had two children. Rowena died in 2024.

Philip Chatfield b. 1927 d. 2021; Dancer, teacher and director

Philip Chatfield was born in Eastleigh, Hampshire, in 1927. He first studied at the Elfin School of Dancing before getting a scholarship to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. He joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1943 and danced in a wide range of ballets. In 1944 he joined the Armed Forces and returned from service to re-join the Sadler’s Wells (now Royal) Ballet at Covent Garden in 1946. He travelled extensively with the company and was on the famous tour to the United States of America in 1949. He became a principal in 1953, married Rowena Jackson, a ballerina with the company in 1958, and retired in 1959 to New Zealand. In 1972 he and Rowena became joint directors of the National School of Ballet in Wellington, and they later went on to direct the Royal New Zealand Ballet. They retired again, this time to Australia where they made their home. Both Philip and Rowena continued to teach and coach for many years. Philip died in 2021

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Anne Heaton was born in Rawalpindi, India, in 1930. She studied with Janet Cranmore in Birmingham from 1937 until 1943, and then with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. Her debut was with the Sadler’s Wells Opera in 1945 in a production of The Bartered Bride, and she became a soloist with Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet (SWTB) in 1946. That year, Heaton created roles in two ballets by Andrée Howard, Assembly Ball and Mardi Gras, and also in Celia Franca’s Khadra. In 1947, she created a role in Frederick Ashton’s Valses Nobles et sentimentales. She transferred to Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Covent Garden in 1948, where she specialised in romantic roles, for example, in Les Sylphides and Giselle. She performed again with SWTB when it was renamed The Royal Ballet Touring Company, creating the roles of the Woman in Kenneth MacMillan’s The Burrow in 1958 and the Wife in The Invitation in 1960. A foot injury caused her to resign from The Royal Ballet in 1959, but she continued to dance intermittently until 1962. Following her retirement from the stage, Heaton taught at the Arts Educational School and, from time to time, she staged ballets, including Giselle in Tehran in 1971. Having married Royal Ballet principal dancer John Field, who later became director of The Royal Ballet Touring Company, she co-directed the British Ballet Organization with him from 1984 until 1991. Field died in 1991 and Heaton in 2020.

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Darcey Bussell was born in London in 1969. After initial vocational training at the Arts Educational School, she joined The Royal Ballet Lower School at the age of 13. In 1987 she graduated from The Royal Ballet Upper School and joined the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet that same year, but it was whilst still at the school that her talent had been noticed by the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, who decided to create on her the leading role of Princes Rose in his new version of The Prince of the Pagodas. Bussell joined The Royal Ballet in 1988 and was promoted to the rank of principal dancer in 1989 on the opening night of MacMillan’s new ballet.

During her distinguished career with The Royal Ballet, Bussell became one of the most famous British dancers of her time, and indeed of any time. She was particularly noted for her combination of a tall, athletic physique with a lovely soft lyricism. During her dancing career she performed in as many as 80 different ballets, including the majority of the classical roles, and had 17 new roles created on her. She stayed with The Royal Ballet until her formal retirement from the stage in 2007 (in a performance of MacMillan’s Song of the Earth), but she had also appeared as a guest artist with many major companies abroad, including New York City Ballet, the Ballet of La Scala, Milan, the Kirov Ballet, the Hamburg Ballet and The Australian Ballet.

Even while dancing professionally, Bussell had begun to work in television and other media, and this side of her career developed at a fast pace on her retirement from ballet. As well as writing, modelling and presenting – both for television and for the Royal Opera House relays – she became a household name as a judge on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing (2009 to 2019). Since 2012, Bussell has been the President of the Royal Academy of Dance. Also in 2012, she danced the Spirit of the Flame at the Closing Ceremony of the London Olympic Games, leading a troupe of 200 dancers. She supports many educational and charitable causes, both artistic and in other fields. She has received many honours, including a gold medal from the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 2009. Darcey Bussell was appointed an OBE for her services to dance in 1995, a CBE in 2006 and was made a DBE in 2018.

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Handsome and dashing, clever and full of life and good humour, Henry Danton was born into an army family in Bedford in 1919. He was educated as a King’s cadet at Wellington College. At first, Danton joined the army, but when on sick leave, following a back injury, he was introduced by a friend to the ballet teaching of Judith Espinosa. Almost overnight a new life unfolded for him. Although an avid ice skater, ballet had not been contemplated, but was “in his bones”, so to speak. After only 18 months of training, Danton joined the short-lived Allied Ballet, and then Mona Inglesby’s International Ballet. He joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1944. Here he began studying with Vera Volkova in her West Street Studio, and his lifelong passion and interest in Russian ballet training began. Volkova helped him to understand and fill in the gaps in his training. He was one of the original six dancers in Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations at Covent Garden in 1946. From here he danced with various companies, including Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées, and toured the United States of America with Roland Petit’s Ballets de Paris. The USA became his home. He taught and choreographed extensively, both there and internationally, and was teaching at The Dance Studio with the Ballet Theatre of Scranton, Pennsylvania, until shortly before his death in 2022.

The photograph shows Henry with Julia Farron and Gillian Lynne rehearsing a studio revival of Miracle in the Gorbals at White Lodge in 2011  photo courtesy of Marius Arnold Clarke

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former Royal Ballet principal dancer Bruce Sansom. The interview is introduced by Alastair Macaulay.

Jean Bedells was born in Bristol in 1924 as Jean McBain. She was the daughter of Phyllis Bedells, the great British ballerina, teacher and, later, a founding member and examiner for the Royal Academy of Dance. Jean Bedells first studied ballet with her mother and then trained at the Vic-Wells Ballet School for a year in 1936 before joining the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1937, making her debut as Clara in The Nutcracker. She had leave of absence from the company to dance as the Herald of Spring in Hiawatha at the Royal Albert Hall in 1937, 1938 and 1939. When she rejoined the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1938 she danced in Les Patineurs and The Haunted Ballroom, as Rose and Silver Fairies in The Sleeping Princess [The Sleeping Beauty], as Bathilde in Giselle, and in The Quest and, later, as one of the Three Fates in Adam Zero. She also appeared in a number of early films made of the company, notably as the Fairy Silver in The Sleeping Princess (1939), a Red Pawn in Checkmate (1939) and, later, a character role in a film of The Nutcracker (1958).

In 1946, Jean Bedells became ballet mistress for Sadler’s Wells Ballet when the company moved into the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. (The Vic-Wells Ballet was re-named Sadler’s Wells Ballet in the early 1940s.) She became a teacher after her retirement from the company, often teaching at The Royal Ballet School, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. Her granddaughter, Anne Bedells, was a member of London Festival Ballet. Jean Bedells died in 2014.

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In conversation with Patricia Linton, founder and director of Voices of British Ballet, Dianne explains how, at the age of 14, she danced in a performance in her native Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in which Markova and Dolin were appearing as guest artists. When she was 16, Dianne came to England with her mother. Dolin remembered her and asked her to join London Festival Ballet (LFB), with whom she worked for 18 years. Dianne was soon dancing solos and was coached in the role of The Nutcracker’s Sugar Plum Fairy by Markova herself. With LFB Dianne toured the world, including long tours of North America where the company had their own train. A highlight was performing in Monte Carlo in 1956 for the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier; another was Igor Stravinsky conducting Petrushka in Chicago and disagreeing with Dolin over tempi. She also recalls Charlie Chaplin pursuing Nathalie Krassovska in Paris. The interview is introduced by Deborah Weiss.

Born in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1934, Dianne Richards studied under Majorie Sterman. She joined London Festival Ballet in 1951, becoming a soloist in 1955 and a principal in 1959. In a very full career with the company, she toured the world and worked with many famous dancers, including Alicia Markova, John Gilpin, Anton Dolin, Erik Bruhn, Serge Lifar, Alexandra Danilova, Tamara Karsavina, Irina Baronova and Tamara Toumanova. She also appeared as a guest artist with American Ballet Theatre from 1963 to 1964. Richards danced with Galina Samsova and Andre Prokovsky’s New London Ballet in 1972 and then with Scottish Theatre Ballet until 1974, when, at the age of 40, she retired from the stage. She then went to live in South Africa, and in her retirement taught from time to time, including at a newly opened academy in Hong Kong and, at the invitation of Robert de Warren, for Northern Ballet Theatre in England.

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Richard Alston was born in October 1948 in Sussex. He is a British choreographer as well as having been artistic director for several dance companies. His education began at Eton College, followed by two years at Croydon School of Art. His passion for ballet was first sparked after attending performances by the Bolshoi Ballet and The Royal Ballet Touring Company, and also by Merce Cunningham and the Martha Graham Dance Company, which excited an interest in modern dance. As a result, he started attending classes with the Rambert School of Ballet, and in 1968 he became one of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre’s original students. After only three months there, he created his first work, Transit. In his third year at the School he organised a group of students to tour schools, colleges and universities demonstrating the Graham technique. After choreographing for London Contemporary Dance Theatre, he created an independent dance company, Strider, in 1972.

In 1975, Alston travelled to New York to study primarily with Merce Cunningham at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio. He returned to Europe two years later, working as an independent choreographer and teacher. In 1980, he was appointed resident choreographer for Ballet Rambert. He founded Second Stride with Siobhan Davies and Ian Spink in 1982, and in 1986 was appointed artistic director of Ballet Rambert, a post he held until 1992. To reflect the changing nature of the company and its work, in 1987 Ballet Rambert changed its name to become Rambert Dance Company. During his years with Rambert, Alston created 25 works for the company, as well as pieces for the Royal Danish Ballet and The Royal Ballet.

After working in France and at the Aldeburgh Festival, in 1994 Alston became artistic director of The Place and he also formed Richard Alston Dance Company. A steady stream of over 50 dance works created by Alston over the next decades was interspersed with collaborations with the London Sinfonietta and Harrison Birtwistle in 1996, and several television productions, including The Rite of Spring, commissioned by the BBC for their Masterworks series in 2002. The Richard Alston Dance Company celebrated its tenth year with its first appearance in New York in 2004. In 2006 the company made its first full tour of North America, followed by further tours in 2009 and 2010. Alston created a new ballet, En Pointe, A Rugged Flourish, for New York Theatre Ballet in 2011. In March 2020, the Richard Alston Dance Company was wound up after a quarter of a century of critical acclaim., giving its last performance at Sadler’s Wells.

 Richard Alston received the De Valois Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance at the Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards in 2009. He was appointed a CBE for services to dance in 2001, and was knighted in 2019.

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The interview is introduced by Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp.

Edward Watson was born in South London in 1976, and trained at The Royal Ballet School, first at the Lower School at White Lodge, and then at the Upper School in Barons Court. He graduated into The Royal Ballet in 1994 and was promoted to the rank of principal dancer in 2005. Watson’s pure classical technique, combined with a fine dramatic flair and sensitivity served him well in the works of Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and Ninette de Valois herself, choreographers at the heart of the British tradition. He has himself been a major force in the continuation of that tradition.

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A dancer of rare beauty, Violetta Prokhorova was born in 1923. She trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow and joined the Bolshoi Ballet in 1942, following her graduation performance, for which she was coached by Galina Ulanova. When Moscow was evacuated and the Bolshoi was scattered, she danced as a ballerina with the State Theatre of Tashkent. In 1944 she re-joined the Bolshoi in Kuibyshev, on the Volga, where she fell in love with a young Englishman, Harold Elvin. The Bolshoi returned to Moscow in early 1945. She danced with the Stanislavsky Ballet for a year, then married Elvin and obtained permission from Joseph Stalin to leave Russia.

Once in London Violetta started training with Vera Volkova, where she was seen by Ninette de Valois and immediately offered a place in the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. She adored and was true to her Russian training, but with her intelligence and sensitivity she was able to fit in beautifully with the British repertoire. From the Black Queen in de Valois’ Checkmate, through all the classical ballerina roles to Roland Petit’s Ballabile in 1950, Violetta Elvin as she was now known, danced with exquisite vivacity, a hint of exoticism and always impeccable port de bras. Frederick Ashton created several roles for her, notably the Summer Fairy in Cinderella (1948), Lykanion in Daphnis and Chlöe (1951), and one of the seven ballerinas in Birthday Offering (1956). For a decade Violetta Elvin was a unique and irreplaceable member of the developing Sadler’s Wells Ballet. She went to live in Italy in 1956, and although she guested with several companies, including La Scala, Milan (where she performed alongside soprano Maria Callas) in 1952 and 1953, and briefly directed the Ballet of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 1985, she retired from ballet when her heart called her elsewhere.

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The archivist, historian and critic David Vaughan was born in London in 1924. He studied at Oxford University and only began dance training after that, in 1947. In 1950 he won a scholarship to study at the School of American Ballet, where he met Merce Cunningham, who was teaching there. Vaughan began studying with Cunningham from the mid 1950s. Later, in 1959, when Cunningham opened his own studio, Vaughan began performing various tasks for Cunningham and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, including co-ordinating the company’s six-month tour of Europe (with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg) in 1964. Vaughan became the company’s official archivist in 1976, a post he held until 2012, when the company was disbanded following Cunningham’s death.

In addition to writing and working for and with Cunningham, Vaughan was active in the theatre, film and dance worlds. He acted in off-Broadway productions, devised the choreography for Stanley Kubrick’s film Killer Kiss, and worked on the scripts for films about Cunningham and Cage, and about the choreographer Antony Tudor. Vaughan also appeared in several dance productions, including The Royal Ballet’s revival of Frederick Ashton’s A Wedding Bouquet. In 1988 he wrote an influential op-ed piece in The New York Times, criticising traditional ballet companies for not offering dancers of colour enough opportunities to perform.

David Vaughan was a prolific and well-regarded writer on ballet and dance. His books included The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden (1976), Frederick Ashton and His Ballets (1977, revised edition 1999) and Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (1996). He contributed frequently to the Dancing Times magazine, and with Mary Clarke he also edited and contributed to The Encyclopaedia of Ballet and Dance (1980). In 2015 David Vaughan received a Dance Magazine award. He died in New York City in 2017. 

Photograph courtesy of The Merce Cunningham Foundation

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Ernest Tomlinson was a British composer, well known for his contributions to light music and for founding The Library of Light Orchestral Music (which prevented the loss of 50,000 works released from the BBC’s archive and other collections). He wrote the music for the ballet Aladdin for Northern Ballet Theatre in 1974.

Tomlinson was born in 1924, in Rawtenstall, Lancashire. His parents were musical, and he sang as a chorister at Manchester Cathedral. After a grammar school education, he studied at Manchester University and the Royal Manchester School of Music, with a break for war service in the RAF. He moved to London after graduation in 1947, working first for music publishers. In 1955, after some of his compositions had been performed by the BBC, he formed his own orchestra – the Ernest Tomlinson Light Orchestra – and set out on a highly successful freelance career as a prolific composer, conductor and director of choirs and orchestras. He was particularly concerned to counter the notion of a strict division between art music and popular music. His own Sinfonia 62 was written for jazz band and symphony orchestra, while his Symphony 65 was performed at festivals in London and Munich and in the Soviet Union in 1966, where it was the first symphonic jazz to be heard there. In 1975, Tomlinson won his second Ivor Novello Award for his ballet, Aladdin. Among many other professional appointments, he was the chairman of the Light Music Society from 1966 until 2009. Ernest Tomlinson was appointed an MBE for his services to music in 2012.

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This interview was recorded in Sydney, Australia, in 2006 and is introduced by Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp.

Patrick Harding-Irmer was born in Munich in 1945, where his Australian mother had been working in dance and choreography. After World War Two, she and he returned to Australia. In 1964 he represented Australia in the World Surfing Championships, and then began to study arts at Sydney University. At the age of 24 he began to take dance classes and to dance commercially. In 1972, inspired by a performance by Nederlands Dans Theater on tour in Australia, he travelled to Europe and began studying at London Contemporary Dance School, specialising in Martha Graham technique. That same year he joined the X Group of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre (LCDT), which included five dancers who toured the UK and abroad, demonstrating and teaching Graham technique. In 1973, after nine months with the X Group, Harding-Irmer joined the main company of LCDT. In 1985 he was voted Best Contemporary Dancer in Europe. He returned to Australia in 1990, and has subsequently taught, and also worked with Australian Dance Artists, a group of mature performers dancing their own creations in different settings.

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In the interview Haydée explains how she was aware of both John Cranko and Kenneth MacMillan as a student at the Sadler’s Wells (now Royal) Ballet School, without suspecting her later close involvement with both men. In working with them, Cranko came to appreciate her melding of a Russian and a British approach to dancing; MacMillan was demanding and uncompromising, but she always strove to fulfil his requirements. She speaks revealingly about working in Stuttgart with Cranko on Onegin and with MacMillan on Song of the Earth and suggests that in those days and in those works, dancers took things at a speed and with risks that today’s dancers, for all their qualities, do not attempt to emulate. The interview is introduced by Dame Monica Mason.

Marcia Haydée is a Brazilian-born ballerina, choreographer and company director. She was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, and after studying in Brazil, came to the Sadler’s Wells (now Royal) Ballet School in London in 1954, joining the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in Monaco in 1957. Haydée joined the Stuttgart Ballet in 1961 and was named prima ballerina the following year by the company’s director and choreographer, John Cranko. Their relationship – her dancing, his choreography – was to become the foundation of Stuttgart Ballet’s international reputation in works such as Onegin, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, among many others. She also worked closely with

Kenneth MacMillan on works such as Las Hermanas, Miss Julie and, above all, his Song of the Earth and Requiem. In 1976, she became director of the Stuttgart Ballet, a position she held until 1996. During her dancing career she performed as a guest artist for notable ballet companies throughout the world. From 1992 until 1996 Haydée directed the Ballet de Santiago de Chile, and again from 2003 until 2004. Since retiring from performing she has pursued a career as a choreographer, teacher and coach, and she also stages many ballets.

The episode photograph shows John Cranko in rehearsal with Marcia Haydée and Bernd Berg, 1962.
Photo: Hannes Kilian, courtesy Stuttgart Ballet

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The interview is introduced by Jennifer Jackson.

Deborah MacMillan is the custodian of the ballets choreographed by her late husband, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, supervising productions of his works all over the world. Deborah Williams, as she then was, was born in Queensland, Australia, in 1944, and educated in Sydney. She studied paining and sculpture at the National Art School before moving to London in 1970, marrying Kenneth in 1974. She has designed ballets for both stage and television, as well as making numerous contributions to Royal Ballet productions, including the production realisation for the major revival of Anastasia in 1996, production and setting for a condensed version of Isadora in 2009 and costume designer for a revival of Triad in 2001. In 1984, Deborah returned to painting full-time and her work is represented in private collections both in the UK and the USA.

From 1993 until 1996, Deborah was a member of the Royal Opera House Board, and in 1996 was chair of The Friends of Covent Garden. She has served as a member of the Arts Council of England from 1996 until 1998, when she chaired the dance panel. She has also been a trustee of American Ballet Theatre and a member of the National Committee of Houston Ballet. She became Lady MacMillan when her husband was knighted for his services to dance in 1983

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The interview was recorded in 2003, and is introduced by Monica Mason who spoke to Natalie Steed before Romayne's death in July 2025.

Romayne Grigorova was born in Sandwich, Kent, in 1927. She studied under Vera Volkova, Ninette de Valois, George Goncharov and Ailne Philips. Her first appearance on the professional stage was in 1942. In 1943, after training at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School for a further year, she danced in ballets with the Sadler’s Wells Opera in this country and, in 1945, on tour in Germany under ENSA. She joined Ballet Rambert in 1946 and then danced with the Anglo-Polish and Metropolitan Ballets until 1947, when the latter folded.

Grigorova then worked in the commercial theatre until 1951, including performing in three pantomimes, before joining Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, where she remained until 1955. She was ballet mistress for the stage musical Can-Can in 1955, and for the St Gallen Ballet in 1956. In 1957 she became ballet mistress for the Opera Ballet at the Royal Opera House, for whom she choreographed many ballets. She retired from this post in 1992 but continued to teach on a freelance basis. She performed small character roles with The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, many of which had been created for her, such as Lady Montague in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet and The Housekeeper in Peter Wright’s The Nutcracker. Romayne Grigorova was appointed an MBE for her services to dance in 2017. She died in July 2025.

Photo by Donald Southern courtesy of The Royal Ballet

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Cassa Pancho was born in London in 1978, to Trinidadian and British parents. Her original ambition was to become a ballerina. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dance and in 1999 gained her degree from Durham University.

In 2001, at the age of 21, she founded Ballet Black in order to promote diversity in ballet and to increase the number of Black and Asian dancers in mainstream ballet companies.

She has built a distinct and unique repertoire for her company from a wide range of distinguished choreographers. Ballet Black tours extensively, both in the UK and abroad, with regular London seasons at venues such as the Barbican Theatre and the Linbury Theatre of the Royal Ballet and Opera. Cassa realised from the start the importance of building for the future, and in 2002 set up the Ballet Black Junior School in Shepherd’s Bush, as well as an associate programme for younger pupils. She oversees the programme for young dancers, and teaches regularly herself.

In 2009 Cassa Pancho graduated from the National Theatre Leadership programme. Also in 2009 Ballet Black won the Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for Outstanding Company, and the award for the Best Independent Company in 2012. She was appointed an MBE in 2013 for services to the Arts and was given the Freedom of the City of London in 2018. She is a Patron of Central School of Ballet and a Vice President of the London Ballet Circle.

Photo: Ballet Black rehearsals Cassa Pancho [Artistic Director]; at the Fonteyn Studio, Royal Opera House, London, UK; 19 November 2006; Credit: Bill Cooper / ArenaPAL

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The singer Yvonne Minton was born in Sydney, Australia in 1938. Having studied and performed in Australia, she came to London in 1961 to pursue her studies and career. By 1966, having become a regular member of the company of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, she sang in Gustav Mahler’s Song of the Earth for The Royal Ballet. She created the role of Thea in Michael Tippett’s opera The Knot Garden in 1970. She appeared in a variety of roles in most of the major opera houses in Europe, including Bayreuth, Salzburg and Paris, and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She made concert appearances with many of the best orchestras in the world and was particularly noted for her work with Georg Solti, with whom she made many recordings. In 1980, after a decade or more of prestigious international work, she was appointed CBE for services to music.

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Thea Musgrave is one of the United Kingdom’s most important and prolific contemporary composers, pursuing her own idiom and musical sensibility throughout a long and distinguished career. She was born in Barnton, in Edinburgh, and went to school in Shropshire. After study at the University of Edinburgh, from 1950 until 1954 she studied in Paris, working under the direction of the redoubtable and influential Nadia Boulanger. She attended the Tanglewood Festival (in Massachusetts) in 1958, studying under Aaron Copeland.

In the late 1950s and 1960s she established herself in London as a notable figure in British musical life. In 1970 she was a guest professor at the University of California (Santa Barbara). In 1972 she married the American musician Peter Mark and has lived in the United States of America ever since, where she has held many notable positions, including a distinguished professorship at City University, New York, from 1987 until 2002.

Musgrave’s style has been described as a synthesis of expression and abstraction, noted for its drama and complexity, often with a strong romantic undercurrent. Her many works include several operas, including ones devoted to Mary Queen of Scots, the abolitionist and social activist Harriet Tubman and the statesman Simón Bolívar, as well as many concerti and orchestral works, often inspired by poetic and pictorial themes. As well as working in America, she has made frequent visits to the United Kingdom and Europe, including taking part in the BBC’s ‘total immersion’ weekend devoted to her works in London in 2014. She composed the scores for two ballets, Beauty and the Beast in 1969 and Orfeo in 1975. Thea Musgrave has received many honours, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and many honorary degrees. She was awarded a CBE for services to music in 2002.

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Pamela (Doris) May was born in San Fernando, Trinidad in 1917, where her father was an oil engineer. The family returned to England in 1921. She first studied ballet with Freda Grant, and later in Paris with Olga Preobrajenska, Lubov Egorova and Mathilde Kschessinska. She joined the Vic-Wells Ballet School in 1933 and made her debut with the Vic-Wells Ballet in the pas de trois from Swan Lake in 1934.

May became a principal with company and danced the whole gamut of the repertoire, including creating many roles, until she retired from dancing ballerina roles in 1952. She then became a leading mime and character artist and stayed with what became known as The Royal Ballet in this capacity until 1982. All this happened alongside her teaching at The Royal Ballet School from 1954 until 1977. Pamela May was appointed OBE for services to dance in 1977. She died in 2005.

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Mary Clarke was the dance historian and writer par excellence. Her two books on the birth of British ballet in the 20th Century - The Sadler’s Wells Ballet: A History and Appreciation (London, 1955) and Dancers of Mercury: The Story of Ballet Rambert (London, 1962) - remain the starting point for all future historians of ballet in the UK.

Mary Clarke was born in London in 1923. After her schooling at Mary Datchelor School, she worked as a typist at Reuter’s Press Agency. She was a youthful enthusiast for ballet and all things theatrical, and her career as a ballet critic and journalist began in 1943 with her first published article (prophetically for Dancing Times) and with her appointment in the same year as London correspondent for the American Dance Magazine. After the end of the war Clarke wrote for the London-based Ballet Today magazine. From the mid-1950s until 1970 she was also the London correspondent for Dance News, another American publication, which was then run by the distinguished critic and writer Anatole Chujoy. In 1954 Clarke became the assistant editor of Dancing Times, first under Philip Richardson and then for Arthur Franks. On Franks’ sudden death in 1963, Clarke became editor of Dancing Times, a post she held until her retirement in 2010. For over half a century she chronicled the changing trends in ballet and dance worldwide and their effects with impeccable judgement and an encyclopaedic knowledge.

Clarke was dance critic for The Guardian newspaper from 1977 to 1994 and associate editor (with Arnold L Haskell) for many years of the Ballet Annual. She co-authored a range of books with the ballet critic and writer, Clement Crisp, notably Ballet: An Illustrated History (London, 1973) and The Encyclopaedia of Dance and Ballet (London, 1977) with David Vaughan. Her quiet demeanour and straightforward style belied deep thought and high ambition for the art. Her contributions to A Dictionary of Modern Ballet (London, 1959) are awe-inspiring in their clarity and humanity, qualities rare in a critic. She was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award of the Royal Academy of Dance in 1990, Poland’s Nijinsky Medal in 1996, and she was made a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog in 1992. Mary Clarke died in 2015.

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Leo Kersley was born in poverty in Hertfordshire in 1920. His family having moved to London, he studied dance under a number of teachers, including Marie Rambert at the Mercury Theatre in 1934, dancing professionally from time to time. He was a soloist in Ballet Rambert from 1936 to 1939, and in 1939 worked for the Ballet Trois Arts.

On the outbreak of World War Two in 1939, he registered as a conscientious objector and was briefly imprisoned. On his release, during 1940 and 1941 he combined his work in a hospital with dancing for Rambert in the evenings alongside his first wife, Celia Franca. He was a member of Sadler’s Wells Ballet from 1941-1942, and then the International Ballet. He was a member of the Anglo-Polish Ballet from 1942-1943. From 1945 until 1951 Kersley performed with Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet. 

In 1952, Kersley went to teach in Denver, Colorado, and in 1953 to Rotterdam in The Netherlands. Whilst there he danced with a number of companies but returned to England in 1959 to set up his own school in Harlow, which he ran until his second wife, Janet Sinclair. With Sinclair, who died in 1999, he published the well-regarded Dictionary of Ballet Terms in 1952.   

Photo

Anne Heaton (as A Serving maid), Leo Kersley (as A Shepherd) in THE GODS GO A'BEGGING; Sadler's Wells Opera Ballet; at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London UK 1946;

Credit : Frank Sharman / Royal Opera House / ArenaPAL.com

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Lucette Aldous was born in New Zealand in 1939, but lived in Sydney, Australia, from the age of three months. After studying in Sydney, she won a scholarship to study at The Royal Ballet School in 1955. She joined Ballet Rambert in 1957, being promoted to ballerina in 1958. She went to Festival Ballet in 1963, dancing with John Gilpin, and then in 1967, at the behest of John Field, to The Royal Ballet.

Aldous returned to Australia in 1970 and joined The Australian Ballet. When there she was invited to work with the Kirov Ballet, one of the first Australian dancers to be so honoured. Acclaimed in many ballerina roles of all parts of the repertoire, her partnerships with Rudolf Nureyev in The Nutcracker for The Royal Ballet and in Don Quixote for The Australian Ballet were noteworthy. She retired from dancing in 1976, subsequently teaching in Perth, Western Australia. In 2018 Lucette Aldous was made a Companion of the Order of Australia. She died in 2021.

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Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp, a key figure in UK arts and culture, was born in Croydon in 1960, with a Nigerian father and an English mother. He attended the Perse School, Cambridge, and the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, before training at the London Contemporary Dance School, graduating in 1981. When the LCDS began offering degrees he returned to study whilst a member of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and gained a first-class degree in 1987.

He performed professionally as a dancer for 25 years, first with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre (from 1981 until 1994) and then with Arc Dance Company (from 1994 to 2005). He was co-director of Artyfartyarts, a multidisciplinary arts group, and he has choreographed over 45 dances. He was chief executive of The Place from 2007 until 2016, and director of The Africa Centre, London from 2018 to 2020. He has worked with The Royal Ballet School’s Dance Partnership and Access Programme as a choreographer, teacher, director and advisor, and taught for many years at The Royal Ballet School’s Summer School at White Lodge. Among many other roles in the arts, he has served on the board of the Royal Opera House, and as a trustee of Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures Company and the Chineke! Foundation and Orchestra. Kenneth Olumuyima Tharp was appointed an OBE in 2003 and a CBE in 2017, both for services to dance.

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Keith Money was born in New Zealand in 1927 and educated there. He received a Fine Art degree from the Elem School of Fine Art before setting off for the country of his English forbears. Gifted in four disciplines, writing, photography, and painting in oil and watercolour, he has written, painted and travelled extensively.

Initially a contributor and illustrator for a variety of equestrian publications, Money also wrote for national newspapers and journals. He then authored books of his own and published collections of his own extraordinary photographs, as well as painting in oils and watercolour. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s he had both solo exhibitions and was included in many others. His work has given lasting pleasure. The nub of it all is his wonderful eye, whatever his subject, whether it is horses, dancers or skies; and it is this that will hold true for posterity.

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In this episode he explains to Patricia Linton that his early enthusiasm was for the visual arts, and that it was only from about the age of 19 that he turned seriously to music. After a degree at Oxford University, he attended the Royal College of Music and then went to Paris for revelatory study with the legendary Nadia Boulanger. While there he went to Boris Kochno’s ballet class, saw Yvette Chauviré dance (which greatly inspired him), and was given sage advice on writing for the ballet by Roland Petit. After that, in 1951 he conducted for Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russe, at the end of their existence. Colin Davis, a contemporary as a student, was co-conductor, and the ballet master was Serge Grigoriev, whose musical understanding turned out to be somewhat idiosyncratic. The episode is introduced by Stephen Johnson.

Joseph Horowitz, the British composer and conductor, was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1926. His father was the co-founder of Phaidon Press, which he founded in 1923. In 1938, the family emigrated from Austria, to escape the Nazi threat, and to seek a safer life in England. Horovitz read music and modern languages at New College, in Oxford, while simultaneously giving piano recitals for army camps during the war. This progressed to studying composition at the Royal College of Music in London under Gordon Jacob, where he won the Farrar prize. He then went to Paris to continue his studies under Nadia Boulanger.

In 1950, Horovitz became the music director of the Bristol Old Vic. During the Festival of Britain in 1951 he conducted ballet and concerts at the Festival Amphitheatre in London. He then conducted for Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russe. During the 1950s, a number of his compositions were broadcast on the BBC, and in 1961 he became Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music where he was later awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music.

As well as the Commonwealth Medal in 1959, Jospeh Horowitz won many awards for his music, both in this country and abroad. He died in 2022.

Image: © Wolfgang Jud

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Donald MacLeary was a dancer noted for his finesse and natural romanticism, and for his legendary partnering skills. He had an association with The Royal Ballet for 48 years. Born in Glasgow in 1937, he studied ballet with Sheila Ross from 1950. He then went to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School and joined Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet in 1954. In 1959, when Svetlana Beriosova asked for him as her regular partner, he moved to The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, becoming its youngest principal dancer at the time.

MacLeary created roles for John Cranko, including in Brandenburg 4 and 6 in 1964, and for Kenneth MacMillan, including in The Burrow (1958), Symphony (1963) and Elite Syncopations (1974). After his retirement from dancing in 1975 he was appointed ballet master for The Royal Ballet from 1976 until 1979. He later appeared as a guest artist for a number of companies, including Scottish Ballet, and was a répétiteur at The Royal Ballet from 1981 (for principal dancers from 1984) until his retirement in 2002. Donald MacLeary was appointed an OBE for services to dance in 2004.

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Barbara Fewster was born in 1928. She studied dancing at the Wessex School in Bournemouth before joining the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School in 1942. By 1943, at the height of World War Two, she was performing and touring the country with the Sadler’s Wells Opera Ballet. In 1946 she became a founder member of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, a company that became a hot bed of talent for the future of British ballet and a springboard for many and varied careers. There were extensive tours, both at home and abroad, where Fewster was at first a dancer, and then assistant ballet mistress from 1947. When Peggy Van Praagh left the company in 1951, Fewster became the ballet mistress.

Against all the odds of a depressed post-war Britain, ballet was vibrant. The emergence of a swathe of talented choreographers, together with a remarkably varied existing repertoire, helped to build a bright future. On leaving the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet in 1954, Fewster toured the United States of America as ballet mistress with the Old Vic Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, before joining the staff of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School, which was now based with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Barons Court in West London. She became deputy principal to Ursula Moreton in 1967 and succeeding her as principal in 1968. Fewster joined the Grand Council of both the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) and the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD). She was made an Honorary Fellow of the Cecchetti Society by its founder, Cyril Beaumont, in the late 1960s.

Barbara Fewster was an indefatigable traveller and was always inspired by her experiences of teaching and adjudicating worldwide. She was at the heart of an historic cultural exchange with China in the early 1980s, involving an exchange of students and teachers. Fewster was also the driving force of a video for the Cecchetti Society in 1988, to promote and improve good practice in the teaching and understanding of pointework. She has frequently mounted ballets for professional companies, notably Coppélia for the Turkish Ballet in 1993 and a revival of La Fête étrange by Andrée Howard, a ballet close to her heart, for The Royal Ballet in 2003. There is a scholarship in Fewster’s name as part of the Cecchetti Class Ballet Vocational Awards.

image: Barbara Fewster, Ballet Principal of Royal Ballet School (1968-1988) helping a student prepare for a school performance, circa 1960's; Credit: Royal Ballet School / ArenaPAL

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Anita Landa must have been vivacious from birth! Her dancing life has been refreshingly varied. Born in Las Arenas in Spain in 1929, she moved to the UK just before World War Two, but the Spanish part of her character and her early life was to prove an important catalyst and influence on her future. After four years studying a variety of dance styles at the Ginner-Mawer School, Landa spent some time at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School whilst simultaneously continuing her Spanish dancing studies with Elsa Brunelleschi. Her next and fortuitous move was to the Cone-Ripman School. From here she succeeded in an audition for the newly formed Markova-Dolin Ballet in 1949. The company soon took root and became known in 1950 as Festival Ballet.

The company’s very distinct international outlook suited Landa. She revelled in the life, absorbing much from the galaxy of star dancers and the extensive repertoire. She became a principal and danced until 1960 when, married to fellow dancer, Michael Hogan and expecting their first of three children, she retired. However, after eight years she returned to the ballet world. Her broad dance background and natural intelligence and sparkle made her an ideal choice for the intricate role of ballet mistress. After working with Northern Ballet Theatre and on various Nureyev Festivals, she joined the staff of the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet in 1979. She remained with the company as ballet mistress and character dancer until 1995, including the company’s move to Birmingham in 1990, when Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet became Birmingham Royal Ballet. A wealth of work and activity and acclaim was achieved over these 16 years, until Anita handed the baton over to Marion Tait. She continued to be involved in ballet related activities, including being a member of the National Council for Dance Education and Training for several years. Hugely knowledgeable and exuberant, she is a bonus at any gathering.

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Pineapple Poll, was the first major success on the London stage for both its choreographer, John Cranko and its arranger and music director Charles Mackerras. Mackerras suggested to Cranko the story from W.S. Gilberts Bab Ballad, The Bumboat Woman's Story. Set for six couples and lead characters of Poll, Jasper, the pot-boy who loves her Belleye, Captain of the HMS Hot Cross Bun Blanche and her aunt, Mrs. Dimple, it represented the largest forces used by the choreographer to date. The original cast featured Elaine Fyfield Poll, David Blair as Captain Belleye and David Poole as Jasper. Sets and costumes were by Obsert Lancaster.

It enjoyed huge success throughout the 1960s and 70s, but is now rarely performed. It still exists in name, at least in the repertoire of the Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Joining Gerald Dowler around the table are the conductor, Barry Wordsworth, who has long been associated with the Royal Opera House Orchestra, the Royal Ballet Sinfonia as well as many orchestras worldwide; Nigel Simeone, a writer and musicologist; Reid Anderson who trained at the Royal Ballet School before joining Stuttgart Ballet in 1969, where he became a principal dancer and then later Ballet Master, and returned, after a stint directing the National Ballet of Canada, in 1996 as Company Director, where he remained for over 20 years; and Brenda Last who joined the Royal Ballet in 1963 from Western Theatre Ballet. She became a principal in 1965 and danced an enormous range of roles including the role of Poll in Pineapple Poll.

This episode was recorded in 2019.

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The episode is introduced by Alastar Macauley in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Born in London in 1922, Julia Farron first studied dancing at the Cone School and in 1931 was the first scholarship pupil to join the Vic-Wells Ballet School. Her stage debut was in pantomime at Drury Lane in 1934 and two years later she joined the Vic-Wells Ballet, as its youngest member.

Over the next 30 years her fine talent, intelligence and theatrical power helped lay the foundations for the sort of company Ninette de Valois was attempting to forge. From ‘the classics’ as staged by Nicholas Sergeyev, at the start of her career, which she was on the spot to absorb, through to her final role in 1965, as Lady Capulet in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, Julia Farron danced and created roles for many of the great choreographers of the 20th Century. From the works of de Valois herself, to Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, John Cranko, Léonide Massine and Georges Balanchine, her range was legendary, and thankfully for the generations of students to follow, so were her powers of recall, both practical and theatrical.

Her Lady Capulet - a masterpiece of theatrical expertise - was a wonderful culmination to Farron’s career and a fitting tribute from MacMillan to a pioneer of British ballet. Her stage career was followed by a teaching position at The Royal Ballet School from 1964 until 1982, when she was appointed Assistant Director of the Royal Academy of Dance. In 1983 she became Director and retired in 1989 as an Honorary Fellow. In 1994 the Royal Academy of Dance awarded her the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award.

In her later years Julia Farron was a keen supporter of The Royal Ballet School’s White Lodge Museum and Resource Centre. In 2012 she was appointed OBE for services to dance.

Episode photograph: A Mirror for Witches; Julia Farron as Hannah. World Premiere; March 4, 1952 ; Sadler's Wells Ballet at Covent Garden, London ; Music: Dennis ApIvor ; Choreography: Andrée Howard ; Designer : Norman Adams Credit: Roger Wood / Royal Opera House / ArenaPAL.com

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Rowena Fayre was born in 1921. While attending Highfield School in Hertfordshire, she won a scholarship to Sadler’s Wells School. While there she won the student of the year prize in 1939, and studied in Paris with Olga Preobrajenska (whom she found ferocious) and also with Marie Rambert. She danced various roles with Vic- Wells Ballet, notably in Checkmate in 1937, in an Old Vic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1938 and in the Sleeping Princess in 1939. She also worked briefly with Mona Inglesby at Eton College (to mark the uncovering of some old frescoes in the chapel). With the advent of war, she joined the WRENS, and left dancing altogether.

The episode is introduced by Patricia Linton.

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Peter Wright was born in London in 1926. He was originally a pupil of Kurt Jooss, the German dancer and choreographer whose work combined Expressionist modern dance movements with classical ballet. He later studied with more purely classical ballet teachers, such as Vera Volkova and Peggy van Praagh. He experienced the workings and aesthetic of many varied companies and built up a rare knowledge of effective productions, theatrically and technically. Peter joined the Ballet Jooss for a year in 1945, Metropolitan Ballet in 1947 and St James’ Ballet in 1948. He was a soloist with Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet from 1949-51, before returning to Ballet Jooss for one more year. In 1952 he returned to Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, becoming assistant ballet master there in 1955. This was followed by two years of teaching at the Royal Ballet School, at Barons’ Court in London. After assisting Peggy van Praagh at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1958 he went to Stuttgart Ballet in Germany as assistant ballet master. It was here that Peter began to hone his production skills. He produced and directed Giselle for Stuttgart, Cologne and for the Royal Ballet Touring Company. Many subsequent productions particularly Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Coppélia were to follow, for ballet companies all over the world. He also choreographed for The Royal Ballet and Western Theatre Ballet. Direction and production were to be his forte and after enterprising work for BBC TV in the 1960s, he re-joined The Royal Ballet as Associate Director in 1970. By 1974 he was Artistic Director of Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet and in 1990 he was the inspiration and instigator of this company’s move to Birmingham to become The Birmingham Royal Ballet. He has been the recipient of many honours and awards, including a CBE in 1985, a KBE in 1993 and on his retirement in 1999, Director Laureate of Birmingham Royal Ballet. In 2016, he published his autobiography Wrights and Wrongs: My Life in Dance.

Darcey Bussell and Peter Wright are in conversation with Natalie Steed

The episode photograph show Sir Peter Wright standing on stage at The Royal Opera House, London on 5 July, 2006 Photo credit: Credit: Bill Cooper/ArenaPAL

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The interview is introduced by Anthony Russell Roberts in conversation with Natalie Steed was recorded before Anthony Russell Roberts death in 2024.

Lilian Hochhauser was born in London in 1927 of Russian immigrant parents, and brought up in the East End according to orthodox Jewish principles. She began to work for the charismatic Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, who was responsible for rescuing many Jewish children from the Holocaust. Also working for Schonfield was Victor Hochhauser, who was to become her husband a few months after their first meeting, and with whom she had four children.

At Schonfeld’s request Victor promoted a concert with the great pianist Solomon Cutner, to raise money for charity. It was a huge success. From 1945 on the Hochhausers together put on innumerable concerts and eventually ballet performances, 1460 at the Royal Albert Hall alone. To begin with they concentrated on music and worked with many of the most famous musicians in this country, such as Myra Hess, Adrian Boult, Malcolm Sargent and Ida Haendel. In 1953 Igor Oistrakh, the son of the great David Oistrakh, was performing in London, as a result of which the Hochhausers started negotiations with the Russian authorities to see if they could bring David over. This duly happened in 1954, David Oistrakh being the first of a chain of great Russian musicians to be brought over by the Hochhausers: Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, and Mstislav Rostropovich, among many others. Richter and Rostropovich in particular became close friends of the Hochhausers, so much so that when Rostropovich defected from the USSR in 1974, he stayed with the Hochhausers for a year. This led to a breaking off of relationships with the Russians until the fall of the Soviet Union. During this time they turned to China for events.

The Hochhausers’ involvement in ballet started early in their career as promoters. In the 1950s they promoted what they called ‘ballet for the masses’ at the now defunct Empress Hall in London. Among those who worked for them in this were the young Svetlana Beriosova, Léonide Massine, Alexandra Danilova and Frederic Franklin, but it was in 1960 that they began working with the Russians, bringing over a group of dancers from the Bolshoi in Moscow, followed in 1961 by the whole Kirov Ballet Company, the first of many such tours, which resumed after Perestroika, and continue well into the 21st century.

Victor Hochhauser died, at the age of 95, in 2019, but the work had not stopped, and it continues with Lilian, who was awarded CBE in the New Year’s Honours List for that year. ‘As long as I can keep going, and enjoy it, I will’, which sums up her attitude for almost a century.

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Here she tells Alastair Macaulay about her initial inspiration in her native Canada, and about how she came to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School at the age of 14. She talks about problems she had with her body and in training, but also about her passionate conviction as to the importance of drama and mime in ballet. This was reinforced when she saw Galina Ulanova with the Bolshoi Ballet in London in 1956. She speaks of the help she received from Winifred Edwards when she was injured, and of the impact Rudolf Nureyev made on her, and later of the importance for her of working with Stanley Williams in New York.

The interview is introduced by Alastair Macaulay in conversation with Natalie Steed.

During the mid 20th Century British ballet had a piece of good fortune. In 1953 in Toronto, Lynn Seymour was auditioned by Frederick Ashton for a place at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School in London, to which she came in 1954.

By 1956 she had joined the Sadler's Wells Opera Ballet, and The Royal Ballet Touring Company a year later where, in 1958, she created the role of the Adolescent in Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet The Burrow. This was the start of a long association, with Seymour as MacMillan’s perfect muse. Fiercely intelligent and observant, she was never afraid to sum up situations and react accordingly, a rarity in an age of deference.

At a time when it was possible to dance the great classical heroines in quick succession, Seymour was able to absorb and understand what was needed to carry a three-act ballet, something that was going to stand her in good stead in the coming years. By the end of 1959 she had danced Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, Aurora in Sleeping Beauty and Giselle, as a fully-fledged ballerina at Covent Garden.

The next 12 months were defining for both Seymour and British ballet. In 1960 MacMillan choreographed both The Invitation and Le Baiser de la Fée on her and Ashton his ballet The Two Pigeons. Her Juliet in MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965, was testament to her unique ability to completely capture the very essence of a role and transpose the mood or idea or argument to something completely believable and absorbing, yet still theatrical and balletic.

From 1966 to 1969, Seymour went with MacMillan to dance the the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, where he was Director. She then returned to The Royal Ballet for another eight extraordinary years, where she created the lead in MacMillan’s Anastasia (1971), Ashton’s Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan (1975) and Natalia Petrovna in his A Month in the Country (1976) and then with David Wall as Crown Prince Rudolf, she created the role of Mary Vetsera in MacMillan’s Mayerling.

She was a guest artist with many companies, both in Great Britain and abroad and worked with most of the significant choreographers of the age. She also choreographed for various companies and was Artistic Director of both the Bavarian State Ballet (1978-1980) and the Greek National Ballet (2006-2007). Lynn Seymour was uncompromising, innovative, daring and inimitable – a great dancer in any age. She was appointed CBE in 1976. Lynn Seymour died in 2023.

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The intrview is introduced by the philosopher Anthony O'Hear in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Jock McFadyen was born in Glasgow in 1950. His family moved to Stoke-on-Trent when he was fifteen. He went to art school before being thrown out when he was seventeen, but eventually went to the Chelsea School of Art in 1973. After graduating with a BA in 1976 and an MA in 1977, he quickly established a reputation for his gritty pictures of working class life in the inner cities. Deborah MacMillan saw some of his work in an exhibition in Cork Street, as a result of which McFadyen was engaged to work on the designs of her husband, Kenneth MacMillan’s last ballet, The Judas Tree in 1991. Partly as a result of his work on this set, representing London’s Docklands, McFadyen began to work on evocative urban and later rural landscapes. McFadyen was elected to the RA in 2012, and his work is in many major public galleries both in Britain and overseas.

Photo: Jock McFadyen with his painting Great Junction Street, 1998; Credit: © Ian Georgeson Photography

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The interview is introduced by Patricia Linton in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Pauline Clayden was born in London in 1922, studying at the Cone Ballet School before her debut with the Covent Garden Opera in 1939. Later that year she joined Anthony Tudor’s London Ballet and stayed with them when they merged with Ballet Rambert. In 1942 she joined Sadler’s Wells Ballet at the height of their extraordinary commitment to ameliorating the ravages of wartime Britain. She was a firm favourite of Ashton’s, and not just because she was so able artistically and temperamentally to successfully take on the roles he had created for Fonteyn. She was a master at understanding the style and underlying pulse and meaning of many different choreographers and approaches. She was a key member of the company for the ENSA organised tours of Belgium and Paris in early 1945 and also of Germany at the end of that year.

In February 1946 when the Sadler’s Wells Ballet re-opened the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, she was back on the stage where she had started in 1939. Her tutu for the Fairy of the Song Birds, which she danced in the Prologue of The Sleeping Beauty on that memorable night, is now part of the Royal Opera House Collections. Her roles included Una in The Quest, Ophelia in Hamlet, Chief Child of Light in Dante Sonata, Flower Girl in Nocturne, Waltz in Les Sylphides, Princess Florine in The Sleeping Beauty, the Suicide in Miracle in the Gorbals, roles in The Fairy Queen, La Boutique fantasque, Les Sirènes and dozens of others, an amazing testament to her professionalism and versatility. When she retired in 1956, in order to have a family, she received a letter from Ninette de Valois acknowledging her gratitude for all that she had contributed to the company.

During her career with the Sadler’s Well Ballet, Pauline Clayden compiled meticulous and perfectly written notebooks in which she recorded the details of every performance in which she danced, including cast changes due to injury or illness which did not make it into the programme. These notebooks are gold dust and are deposited in the Archives of the Royal Opera House.

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James MacMillan was born in 1959. Since the premiere of his The Confession of Isobel Gowdie in 1990, he has established himself as one of the world’s most successful composers, as well as an orchestral and choral conductor on the international stage. His music is filled with influences from his Scottish heritage, from his social conscience, from Celtic folk music, and above all from his Catholic faith. His works include four symphonies, a number of concerti (including three for piano), a number of cantatas and two Passions (St. John and St. Luke). Two of his compositions Tryst and Shambards (from his second piano concerto) have been choreographed in ballets by Christopher Wheeldon for the Royal Ballet in 2002 and New York City Ballet in 2004, respectively. James MacMillan was appointed CBE in 2004 and knighted in 2015. 

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The episode is introduced by Adam Cooper, in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Gillian Lynne was born in Bromley, Kent in 1926. She showed an early talent for dancing, and while at school she formed a friendship with Beryl Groom, who was to become Beryl Grey, and also to have a distinguished career in ballet and dance. When her mother died in a car accident when Gillian was 13, she threw herself into dance, partly in order to cope with the tragedy.

In 1944, while Gillian Lynne was dancing with Molly Lake’s company at the People’s Palace, Ninette de Valois noticed her talent and invited her to join the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. In the seven years she was there, she became admired as a fine dramatic ballerina. She was particularly noted for her performances as the Black Queen in de Valois’ Checkmate, the Lilac Fairy in Sleeping Beauty and as the Queen of the Wilis in Giselle.

Gillian Lynne left the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1951, and began her successful career in the commercial theatre by appearing in balletic pas de deux in variety shows at the London Palladium. She then appeared as the star dancer in other West End productions, such as Can Can (in which she was Claudine). She also began to work in television and films, including acting in The Master of Ballantrae, opposite Errol Flynn.

It is perhaps as a director and choreographer that Gillian Lynne is best known, where her list of credits is immense. She worked at the Royal Opera House, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, English National Opera, Northern Ballet and the Australian Ballet, as well directing over 60 productions in the West End and on Broadway. As producer, director, choreographer or performer she worked on 11 feature films and hundreds of television productions, where her work included The Muppet Show and A Simple Man, for which she won a BAFTA for her direction and choreography in 1987. Internationally and in the popular mind, she is perhaps most famous for her choreography for the musicals Cats, The Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of Love.

Gillian Lynne won numerous awards for her work, including the Olivier Award in 1981 for the Outstanding Achievement of the Year in Musicals for Cats, The Royal Academy of Dance’s Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award in 2001 and a Special Award at the 2013 Olivier Awards. She was a Vice President of the Royal Academy of Dance. In 2018 the New London Theatre was renamed the Gillian Lynne Theatre in her honour. She was appointed CBE in 1997 and DBE in 2014 for services to dance and musical theatre. Gillian Lynne died in 2108.

Episode photo: Gillian Lynne as the Black Queen in Ninette de Valois’ 1937 ballet, Checkmate, a role she danced over a dozen times between 1950 and 1951. This is a studio portrait, June 23, 1950

Music by Arthur Bliss, choreograpy by Ninette de Valois, designs by Edward McKnight Kauffer.  

Photo by Roger Wood (c) Royal Opera House / ArenaPAL

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The interview is introduced by Kenneth Tharp who danced with Siobhan Davies.

Siobhan (Sue) Davies was born in London in 1950. Originally studying at art school, she started taking dance classes with the Contemporary Art Group in 1967. In 1969 she became a member of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and began choreographing in the 1970s. She became the Associate Choreographer of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1974, and its Resident Choreographer in 1983. Important early works were Sphinx (1977) and Plain Song (1981).

In 1981 Davies started working with her own group, Siobhan Davies and Dancers. In Siobhan Davies and Dancers joined up with a group founded by Richard Alston and Ian Spink to form Second Stride, which was influential in the 1980s and toured the USA. Davies left LCDT in 1987, winning a Fulbright Arts Fellowship to spend a year studying in America, the first choreographer to do so. On her return in 1988, she founded her own company, Siobhan Davies Dance, and also became the Resident Choreographer of Rambert Dance Company, a position she held until 1992. Important works created in the 1990s included Make-Make (1992), Wanting to Tell Stories (1993), Wild Translations (1995) and Bank (1997).

In the early 2000s Davies began moving away from pieces for performance in traditional theatres to site specific works, in such venues as art galleries, studios, and even on occasion an aircraft hangar. In 2007 she abandoned touring productions altogether and disbanded the Siobhan Davies Dance company in favour of working with the Siobhan Davies Studios, which had opened in 2006 in Lambeth, South London. This is a multi-media complex enabling the exploration of relationships between dance and movement and the visual arts, film, video, craft, poetry and sound. In 2012, in collaboration with the film maker David Hinton, Davies created All This Can Happen, a film composed entirely of archive photographs and film, which was shown in international film festivals around the world.

Siobhan Davies was appointed DBE for services to dance in 2020.

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The interview is introduced by Gerland Dowler in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Widely regarded as the doyen of British ballet criticism, Crisp was an imposing figure in the ballet world, both in person and in print, and was so for nearly half a century. His dazzling knowledge of dance (and other arts), authoritative style and occasional waspish barb made him a voice to be reckoned with. His passion for ballet began at the age of 12. He was educated at Bordeaux and Oxford Universities, and after spells in business and teaching, he became the ballet critic of the Spectator in 1966, followed in 1970 by several decades on the Financial Times. He was the Librarian and Archivist at The Royal Academy of Dance from 1968-1986, and Archivist until 2001. He wrote many books on ballet and its history and related arts, frequently co-authored with Mary Clarke. In 1992 he received the Royal Academy of Dance’s Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award, and was also made a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog, Denmark. He was awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to ballet. He died in 2022.

Episode photo: L-R: John Field, Clement Crisp and Leslie Edwards in conversation at The Royal Opera House, London in 1975.

© G.B.L. Wilson/Royal Academy of Dance/ArenaPAL.com

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This episode is introduced by Barry Wordsworth in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Dudley Simpson was born in Melbourne in 1922 and showed an early musical talent. At the age of 13 he won a piano competition for a radio station, and became its official accompanist. While excelling at improvisation, he also studied musical theory, including orchestration and composition. His studies were interrupted by five years military service in the Australian army, after which he started working for the Borovansky Ballet (the fore-runner of The Australian Ballet), first as a pianist and then as assistant conductor and, in 1957, as its musical director.

As a result of working in Australia with Margot Fonteyn and a group of ballet dancers from the UK, Simpson decided to go to London. He worked first as a ballet pianist, but in 1959 began to conduct the Royal Opera House Orchestra in ballet performances, becoming its principal conductor from 1960 to 1963. This involved a considerable amount of touring in Europe and the Middle East, with Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev leading the company. In 1963, Simpson arranged Lizst’s B minor sonata for Frederick Ashton’s ballet Marguerite and Armand.

By 1964, he had already started working for television. Simpson began the work for which he is best known, the incidental music for Doctor Who. This involved composing and directing the music for 62 stories over nearly 300 episodes. Simpson’s involvement with Doctor Who continued until 1980. During this period he worked on many other television series, including The Brothers, Blake’s 7, The Tomorrow People and Tales of the Unexpected. He also composed symphonic music and music for two ballets, A Winter Play for Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet and Ballet/Class for the The Royal Ballet School. Simpson retired in 1987 and returned to Australia, where he died in 2017, aged 95.

Episode photograph:  ROYAL BALLET SCHOOL AT ALDEBURGH, Jill Montgomery, Dudley Simpson, Avril Bergen, Susan Turnham, July 1961, (c) Royal Academy of Dance / ArenaPAL.com

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Beryl Grey is in conversation with Frank Freeman, who sadly died in 2011, about her early training, first with Madeleine Sharp and then with Phyllis Bedells before going to the Sadler’s Wells School at the age of 10 in 1937. She joined the Sadler’s Wells Company when she was 14, and started performing leading ballerina roles almost straight away. She talks about this, and about touring during the war, before concluding with an account of the Company’s historic opening performance of Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden in 1946.

Beryl Grey was born 1927 in Highgate, London and died in 2022. She began her ballet training at the age of four. At the age of 10, having passed all the Royal Academy of Dance examinations it was possible for her to take, she entered the Sadler’s Wells School. When she was 14, she joined the Sadler’s Wells Company, and almost immediately won leading roles. She danced a full Swan Lake on her fifteenth birthday and Giselle in 1944.

In 1957, she resigned from the Royal Ballet, and embarked on a new international career as a guest ballerina, including appearances with the Royal Ballet and (London) Festival Ballet. In 1957-8 she was the first English dancer to be honoured as a guest artist in Leningrad, at the Bolshoi in Moscow and in Tiflis [Tbilisi] . In 1964 she became the first Western guest artist to feature with the Peking Ballet and the Shanghai Company.

From 1968 - 1979 Beryl Grey was the Artistic Director of London Festival Ballet. She was President of English National Ballet, President of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing and Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Dance. Her many honours include five honorary doctorates and the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award of the Royal Academy of Dance (in 1997). In 2016 she received the De Valois Award for Outstanding Achievement at the Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards. She was appointed C.B.E. in 1973, D.B.E. in 1988 and in 2017 was made a Companion of Honour (C.H) for services to dance.

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At 92, Brenda Hamlyn-Bencini describes events and people from the 1940s, as if it was yesterday. She certainly does not dispel any myths about ‘Mim’ [Marie] Rambert’s powerful personality. Brenda talks candidly of her days at Cone Ripman School during the war, and of taking classes with Rambert herself in London, whom, for all her harshness, she admired. She joined Ballet Rambert and speaks of the devastation she witnessed on an ENSA tour of Germany straight after the war. Brenda also speaks of working with Walter Gore and Frank Staff. Hamyln-Bencini is remembered as a wonderful teacher and lifelong advocate and devotee of the Cecchetti method. 

The interview is introduced by the dance historian and curator Jane Pritchard.

Brenda Hamlyn was born in London in 1925. She trained at the Cone Ripman School from 1934-41. She started taking classes with Marie Rambert in London, as a result of which she began working for Lunch Time Ballet in 1941. A short period with the Ballet Guild was followed by full membership of Ballet Rambert from 1943-8. During this time she toured extensively with Rambert, including an ENSA tour to Germany immediately after the war, and a tour to Australia and New Zealand in 1947-8. In 1948 she joined the Empire Ballet in Leicester Square, and began taking classes with [Vera] Volkova and [Stanislas]Idizikowski. In 1951 she went to Milan, and began dancing throughout Italy and other parts of Europe, including Salzburg and Cologne. 

In 1963 Brenda Hamlyn opened her own Scuola de Danza Hamlyn in Florence, qualifying shortly after as a Cecchetti teacher. She has since become internationally renowned as an expert on and practitioner in the Cecchetti Method. In 1987 she became a Cecchetti examiner and in 1989 President of the Cecchetti Society of Italy. On stepping down from directorship of her own school after 23 years, she continued to teach and lecture in many countries on the Cecchetti Method until well into the 1990s. In 1996 she won the Enrico Cecchetti Medal and, in 1998, the Premio Cecchetti.  

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The interview is introduced by Voices of British Ballet founder and dancer, Patricia Linton, in conversation with Natalie Steed.

David Wall’s career in dance began with ballroom dancing classes, followed by ballet classes with Mrs Durnsford in Windsor. Training with the Royal Ballet School began when he was 9 years old, and he joined the Royal Ballet Touring Company in 1963. He was appointed Principal at the age of 20, the youngest in the history of the Company, having already partnered Margot Fonteyn in Les Sylphides at the age of 19 and going on to perform Swan Lake with her the following year.

He joined the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in 1970, where he continued to partner Fonteyn frequently, as well as Doreen Wells, Lynn Seymour, Natalia Makarova and all the principal ballerinas of the time. His male colleagues included Rudolf Nureyev and Sir Anthony Dowell, whose brilliance in no way overshadowed his own.

While in the Royal Ballet, Wall worked with many choreographers, including Dame Ninette de Valois (Rake’s Progress), Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor. He is often remembered for his work in some of the heavily dramatic ballets of Kenneth MacMillan: Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Lescaut in Manon and Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling, the last two roles having been created on him, but he also excelled in lighter pieces, such as La Fille mal gardée, The Two Pigeons and Coppélia, aside from achieving great acclaim in the classics such as Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and Giselle.

Wall retired from dancing at the top of his career in 1984. He was then Assistant Director and Director for the Royal Academy of Dance until 1991. In 1995 he began to work as Ballet Master for English National Ballet until 2011, though he continued to coach both there and for the Royal Ballet. Wall was married to the ballerina Alfreda Thorogood and they had two children. He was appointed CBE in 1985, and died in 2013.

A charismatic presence on stage, in whatever type of role, tragic, noble, sinister, light-hearted, he was always technically impeccable, as well as acutely sensitive to the essence of a work. He was thus able in his later years to pass on his insights to the next generation of dancers.

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The dance writer, and former dancer, Deborah Weiss is joined in the studio for a special Voices of British Ballet round table discussion. Anita Landa, Pamela Hart, Joyce Lyndon and David Long, are all former dancers with Festival Ballet, and talk about the early days and legacy of one of the most important companies in the history of British ballet.

Festival Ballet was founded by the impresario Julian Braunsweg. He persuaded Dame Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin to lead the company, which started with a concert tour in 1949.

Taking its name from the forthcoming Festival of Britain, the company was originally named Festival Ballet and then, in 1969, London Festival Ballet. In 1989, it changed its name once again, to English National Ballet.

The discussion focuses on the Braunsweg years, 1949 until he was ousted in 1965. Julian Braunsweg left a memoir of the time, his so-called Ballet Scandals.

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The interview is introduced by Natalie Steed and Jane Pritchard, Curator of Dance at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Born on Christmas Day in 1927, Noel Bronley (born Brown) started ballet classes in order to strengthen her body and correct a curvature of the spine. Loving dancing, she quickly became determined to have a life in ballet and trained at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School, although, as a security, her father insisted that she did a Pitman’s course in shorthand and typing. She joined Mona Inglesby’s International Ballet in 1946, when it had been running for 5 years. Having joined, and, at Inglesby’s insistence, having adopted the name Bronley (after Bronislava Nijinska), Noel immersed herself in touring and performing in what at the time was a bigger company than the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. This was her life until 1953, when, having failed to secure an Arts Council grant, International Ballet was forced to fold, despite having brought ballet to millions over its existence and up to then having had no public funding. Since 1953 Noel has played a big role in keeping memories of the company alive and ex-members in touch through re-unions. Belated recognition of International Ballet came when a plaque was placed in the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank in 2012.

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The interview is introduced by Anthony O'Hear in conversation with Natalie Steed.

John Craxton was born in London in 1922 into a well-known musical family. His father, Harold Craxton, was a composer and, for over 40 years, a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music. Janet Craxton, John’s sister, was a distinguished oboeist. At the age of 17, John Craxton went to Paris to study art, being too young for the Chelsea School of Art. When war started, he continued his studies in various London colleges. He mounted solo exhibitions in 1942 and 1944 and in 1943 toured Pembrokeshire with his contemporary Graham Sutherland, by whom he was clearly influenced. Other influences around this time were the Romantic painter Samuel Palmer (1805 – 1881) and his close friend Lucian Freud.

After the war Craxton began to travel widely, but it was Greece, and Crete specifically, that particularly attracted him and where he spent increasing amounts of time. From around 1970 until his death in 2009, he shared his life between a home in Crete and London.

Craxton was attracted to the light and colour of Greece, and to what he saw as an arcadian life, both human and natural. His art became suffused with the textures, personalities and the floral and geological forms of Greece, all rendered with striking clarity and colour. As time went on, his often very large canvases showed a tendency to semi-abstraction, but an abstraction always rooted in the flowers, trees, landscapes and pastoral life of Greece, and at times showing the influence of Byzantine iconography.

His designs for the ballet Daphnis and Chlöe in 1951 are at the start of his Grecian odyssey, and show clearly the direction his art was taking, away from England and Wales, and into an imagined Hellenic paradise.

Over the years Craxton gained increasing recognition, both in Britain and in his adopted Greece. He had major retrospectives at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967 and, two years after his death, at Tate Britain in 2011. John Craxton was elected Royal Academician in 1993.

The photograph of John Craxton is by W. Suschitzky, Copyright the Estate of W. Suschitzky

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The interview is introduced by Anthony Russell-Roberts, the former Administrative Director of the Royal Ballet who died in January 2024, in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Born in Rochester ,1924, John Tooley was educated at Repton and Magdalene College, Cambridge. For much of this time he had ambitions of becoming a professional singer. Although he judged he was not talented enough to make a career in singing, his interest in music remained, and he planned on becoming a musical administrator. To prepare himself for such a role, he spent a few years working in management at the Ford Motor Company.

In 1952, he was appointed Secretary to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His long association with the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden began in 1955, when he became Assistant to the General Administrator. Five years later, in 1960, he was given the position of Assistant General Administrator, working alongside the General Administrator, Sir David Webster, until 1970, when Webster’s health became uncertain. Tooley was then promoted to being General Administrator. He held that post for 10 years until 1980, when it was re-named General Director. It was as General Director that Tooley retired from the Royal Opera House in 1988.

During his long career, Tooley served at various times as a trustee or board member of various musical companies and organisations. These included the Walton Trust, the Britten Estate, the Southbank Centre and Welsh National Opera. John Tooley was knighted in 1979. He died in 2020.

Episode photo credit: © Clive Barda/ArenaPAL.com

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The interview is introduced by the dance writer Alastair Macaulay in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Violette Verdy, originally Nelly Armande Guillerm, was born in Brittany, France, in 1933. In 1942 her mother took her to Paris to acquire the best ballet training available, studying under Carlotta Zambelli, Rousanne Sarkissian and Viktor Gsovsky. By 1945 she was in the corps de ballet for Roland Petit and then part of his Ballets des Champs-Elysees. In 1949 she starred in Ludwig Berger’s film Dream Ballerina (released in 1950), when she changed her name to Violette Verdy. In 1953 she made her first trip to America, again with Petit and his Les Ballets de Paris. The following year, as well as dancing with London Festival Ballet, she danced at La Scala, Milan, in two ballets by Alfred Rodrigues and also in Coppélia and Giselle with Ballet Rambert. 

The next phase of her life began when Nora Kaye asked her to join American Ballet Theatre in 1957. Verdy went on to join Balanchine at New York City Ballet in 1958. While she continued to dance with many companies in many countries, it was with Balanchine and Robbins that her brilliance shone brightest, and where many leading roles were created on her. Her two decades in New York secured her place in ballet history. 

Violette Verdy retired from dancing in 1977. She became the first female Artistic Director of the Paris Opéra until 1980. Her directorial skills honed, she went on to Boston Ballet, where she stayed until 1984 and then became Distinguished Professor of Music (Ballet) at Jacobs School of Music in Indiana University. In her later years she undertook guest teaching residences with many of the leading ballet companies in the world, including the Bolshoi, where she was the first foreign teacher to work there since the 1917 revolution. She was given many honours and awards, not least the Légion D’Honneur. She could dance, act, choreograph, direct, teach and, most of all, inspire. But all her answers were in the music and the multiple layers of meaning that imbued her dancing began and ended with that. Violette Verdy died in Bloomington, Indiana in 2016.

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Sibley talks about her early aspirations, working with Sir Frederick Ashton and her career-defining partnership with Sir Anthony Dowell.

The episode is introduced by the dance critic and writer Alastair Macaulay in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Antoinette Sibley was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1939. She trained at the Arts Educational School in Chiswick before joining the Sadler’s Wells School in 1949 and the Royal Ballet Company in 1956. In 1959 she was coached by Tamara Karsavina, the great Russian Ballerina from the Imperial Russian Ballet and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. Later that year she danced Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. In 1960, she became a principal dancer and in 1961 danced Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. 1964 saw a pivotal moment in her career: the creation of the role of Titania in Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, alongside Sir Anthony Dowell’s Oberon. This was the start of one of the great partnerships in the history of the Royal Ballet, indeed of ballet, and one which lasted for nearly a quarter of a century.

Her professional stage career ran from the late 1950s until her late forties in 1988, with a few years of retirement in the early 1980s. During her career with the Royal Ballet, Sibley danced many principal roles in the classical and in the dramatic repertoires. She created major roles for Frederick Ashton, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, Michael Corder and other choreographers. She danced with Mikhail Baryshnikov in the Hollywood film The Turning Point (1978). As President of the Royal Academy of Dance from 1991 to 2012 and as a coach at the Royal Ballet, her involvement in British Ballet continued into the 21st century.

She was appointed CBE for services to dance in 1973, and DBE in 1996.

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Together, they set out what the ballet scene was in London at the beginning of the 1920s, the impact of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on that scene and explore why Marie Rambert and Dame Ninette de Valois focused, at first, on training.

The Sleeping Princess, Serge Diaghilev’s 1921 production of Marius Petipa’s ballet was described by critics at the time as a “gorgeous calamity”. Our guests examine its impact on the appetite for dance in Great Britain in succeeding years and set out what happened to ballet in Britain after Digahilev’s death in 1929.

The contributions of Marie Rambert, Ninette de Valois, Lilian Baylis, Alicia Markova and Constant Lambert are assessed and our guests consider what this new British ballet might have looked like in terms of technique as well as discussing de Valois' work as a choreographer of ballets such as Checkmate and The Rake’s Progress.

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Christopher Wheeldon talks in 2003 with his former classmate and Royal Ballet First Soloist Jane Burn. Christopher speaks about his early years in dance with candour and charm, mentioning Anatole Grigoriev, his teacher at White Lodge, and his early forays into choreography with the inspirational Norman Morrice.

Christopher Wheeldon was born in 1973 in Yeovil, Somerset. He started training as a dancer from the age of 8. From 1984-1991 he attended the Royal Ballet School, winning the gold medal at the Prix de Lausanne in 1991. That same year he joined the Royal Ballet. In 1993 he joined the New York City Ballet, becoming a soloist in 1998.

He began choreographing for the New York City Ballet in 1997, retiring from dancing in 2000 to concentrate on choreography. In 2001, Wheeldon became the New York City Ballet’s first resident choreographer and first resident artist. From 2006-10 he also ran his own company, the Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company.

Aside from his work in New York and also in London, Wheeldon has established himself as a choreographer worldwide, including works for the San Francisco Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada. In 2011 he choreographed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Royal Ballet’s first full-length commission for 20 years, followed in 2014 by The Winter’s Tale. Other commissions include Strapless (2016) and Like Water for Chocolate (2022).  In 2014 he directed and choreographed a musical version of An American in Paris, first performed in Paris, then in New York and London.

He was awarded an OBE in 2016 for services to dance. 

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It begins with Wendy Toye’s memory of chatting to Sergei Diaghilev at the age of 9, giving her opinion of L’Après-Midi d’un faune, and the pace never stops. She tells Patricia Linton of her love for dancing of all sorts. From the age of 5 she performed in Hiawatha at the Royal Albert Hall. At 14 she became a member of the Vic-Wells Ballet, while dancing commercially as well. She speaks of touring in Denmark, with Adeleine Genée leading the company, and being singled out by the Prince of Wales. Her career, in the 1930s and subsequently, involved films, shows, cabaret and television, as well as ballet, opera and choreography. At the age of 90 she reflects on how she worked in so many fields, not, as she says, peaking in any of them, but having enjoyed all of it and all of them.

Wendy Toye was born in Clapton in 1917, and very early showed considerable balletic and theatrical talent. As a child she was often appearing on the stage, as well as taking serious ballet lessons from Tamara Karsavina, among others. She won the European Charleston Championship at the age of 9. In 1931, she joined the Vic-Wells Ballet Company, though continuing to work in cabaret. She then worked for the Markova-Dolin Company from 1934-5, and choreographed the ballet Aucassin and Nicolette for them. In 1937, partly as a result of an appendix operation, she ceased to dance in ballet, and embarked on her long, distinguished and industrious career in the commercial theatre, films and television, as actress, dancer, choreographer and director (which, in her later years, included directing a number of operas, particularly for Sadler’s Wells/English National Opera). Wendy Toye was appointed CBE in 1992 for services to the arts. She died in Hillingdon in 2010.

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The interview is introduced by the dancer and founder of Voices of British Ballet, Patricia Linton, in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Mark Morris was born in Seattle in 1956. Having been excited by both flamenco and his sister’s ballet classes, he himself began studying Spanish dance at the age of 9. In 1970 he joined a dance ensemble specialising in Balkan dance, which was the beginning of a lifetime’s passionate immersion in dance and music of all sorts. He went to New York in 1976, during the era of Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp and Lucinda Childs, to pursue his study of dance. He began working with a group of like-minded modern dancers, who shared Morris’ focus on beauty, genuine musicality and community. From 1980 on Morris began choreographing in earnest and his group was henceforth known as the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG). From the start his work was recognized for its musicality, and its deep understanding of the medium of dance. Hallmarks of the Morris style were the recognizable ordinary body-types of the Company dancers and its up-front treatment of contentious issues, both political and sexual.

From 1980 until 1988, the growth of Morris’s reputation as a choreographer and dancer resulted in an engagement as resident company at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, following the departure of Maurice Béjart. While there he created two of his most famous works: L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (based on poetry by Milton and music by Handel) and The Hard Nut (a revelatory version of The Nutcracker). The company remained there until 1991. From 1990 until 1995, with Mikhail Baryshnikov, he founded and ran the White Oak Dance Project. In 2001 Morris and MMDG moved into a permanent headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, which included a community centre and a school. As well as working with his own company, Morris has created works for many international ballet companies and for opera productions in San Francisco, Washington, Boston, London and New York, among other places. His own works for the MMDG, around 150 of them, are notable for their range of musical styles and genres, from Bach and Vivaldi through modern composers to jazz and the Beatles, the repertoire also includes music from Balkan and Asian traditions, as well as collaborations with folk performers and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project.

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Monica Ratcliffe, one of Voices of British Ballet’s earliest voices, talks about her years at Dame Ninette de Valois’ Academy of Choreographic Art in Roland Gardens, London, before the forming of the Vic-Wells Ballet, as well as her encounters with Lilian Baylis, Lydia Lopokova, Olga Spessivtseva and many more.

Monica was born in 1911 in Letchworth Garden City. The family were living in London at the start of the First World War, but moved to Berkhamsted, where Monica went to Berkhamsted High School with her sister. She picked up the rudiments of dance at school, but was inspired to train after watching Anna Pavlova dancing in a window at Selfridges. She joined Ninette de Valois’ Academy of Choreographic Art soon after it had opened in 1926. She loved her time with de Valois, especially when they were at the Old Vic. By 1932 her lack of enthusiasm for pointework had limited her performing repertoire, and she retired in 1933.

Episode photo: Monica Ratcliffe amongst her peers, L-R: Iris James, Beatrice Appleyard, Ninette de Valois, Sheila McCarthy, Freda Bamford, Joy Newton, Monica Ratcliffe (kneeling). Dances from the opera Carmen, choreographed by Ninette de Valois and first performed at the Old Vic in January 1931 © Royal Ballet School/ArenaPal

After the Second World War she became editor-in-chief for her second husband, Arnold Beck, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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