Voices of British Ballet

In this extract, poor Henry Danton always seems to be running behind his talent – that is until he met the wonderful ballet teacher, Vera Volkova. However, before this and often against the odds, he managed to do quite a few things. From his early training with Judith Espinosa, he went on to work with Allied Ballet, International Ballet and, finally, Sadler’s Wells Ballet, and all this in the space of a few years. Candid and clear, something eventually went right as Henry continued to teach ballet into his 100th year. In this interview, recorded in 2004, Henry Danton talks to Patricia Linton, founder and director of Voices of British Ballet. The interview is introduced by Alastair Macaulay.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

Jean Bedells talks about the 1930s as if it was yesterday. Full of detail and feats of memory, we are given an idea of the sense of foreboding that descended when their artistic home, Sadler’s Wells, was taken over as a refugee centre at the start of World War Two. In this interview, which was recorded in 2005, Jean Bedells talks to 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.

Dianne Richards talks about skipping her dancing life, especially the start of London Festival (now English National) Ballet. Names from the world of Serge Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, such as Alexandra Danilova, as well as Tamara Toumanova, Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, weave through her very special company story and still cast a shimmering magic spell whenever mentioned.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.

The distinguished choreographer and director Richard Alston explains to Alastair Macaulay, how, as a teenager, he was entranced by watching ballet. After studying fine art, he began working on the Martha Graham technique with what became the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. He eventually found this too restricting and embraced the freer, less floor fixated approach of contemporary dance associated with Merce Cunningham. Alston goes on to discuss how his own choreography began, and how it developed in line with this expansion of his aesthetic. He speaks about his dealings with Cunningham and with the composer John Cage and also about his long and immensely fruitful creative partnership with Sue (Siobhan) Davies. The interview is also introduced by Alastair Macaulay.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.

This episode is introduced by Dame Monica Mason. Violetta Elvin was one of Frederick Ashton’s favourite ballerinas. She was born Violetta Prokhorova in Russia. Here, in this interview with Patricia Linton, founder and director of Voices of British Ballet, Violetta traces her evacuation to Tashkent at the start of World War II and how she returned, via Kuibyshev, to Moscow to join the Bolshoi Ballet. Despite being warned by the authorities not to talk to foreigners, she married the British diplomat Harold Elvin and managed to come to London in 1946. Only weeks after her arrival she joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Covent Garden and danced the “Blue Bird” pas de deux on the second night of their opening production of The Sleeping Beauty. The interview is introduced by Monica Mason.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.

David Vaughan – unparalleled writer on the choreography of Frederick Ashton – catches moments and movements from The Royal Ballet’s history. In this interview for Voices of British Ballet, which was recorded in New York, he talks to his friend and fellow dance writer Alastair Macaulay. The episode is also introduced by Alastair Macaulay.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

In this no-nonsense, down-to-earth account of writing music for Northern Ballet Theatre’s production of Aladdin, choreographed by Laverne Meyer in 1974, composer Ernest Tomlinson talks to Patricia Linton, founder and director of Voices of British Ballet. The interview is introduced by Stephen Johnson.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.

Here is Patrick Harding-Irmer proving that it is never too late to start dancing. He says, in this interview with Patricia Linton, founder and director of Voices of British Ballet, he only began to take dance classes at the age of 24 but was soon working in dance commercially. In 1972, inspired by a visit to Australia by Nederlands Dans Theater, he came to Europe, where he fell under the spell of the Martha Graham technique and the teaching of Robert Cohan at London Contemporary Dance Theatre (LCDT). After nine months performing with the X Group, he joined the main LCDT, going on the be voted Best Contemporary Dancer in Europe in 1985. 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.