Yes, yes, Ninette - Ninette de Valois celebrates her 100th birthday - Column

Dance Magazine, August, 1998 by Clive Barnes

Ninette de Valois was one hundred years old on June 6. What can one say? Certainly she has won the dance longevity stakes. So far as I know, no major dancer, dance teacher, or choreographer has ever lived into a three-digit age. Marius Petipa, for example, was a mere stripling of ninety-two when he succumbed. If life expectancy is gradually extending, as it seems to be doing, a one-hundred-year-old dance figure may soon no longer be unique. For the time being, however, this century benchmark is the latest achievement of a woman who has already left an indelible mark on twentieth-century dance. It is, of course, far from being the most notable, nor is it at all untypical. De Valois always showed the quality of endurance: She kept going.

Looking back at the century that she has almost outlasted, it is clear that although her enormous contribution has been as a leader, her leadership role fell within a fairly consistent pattern of twentieth-century dance. Maurice Bejart has famously dubbed this "the century of dance," which seems only a little less tree now than it was some twenty years ago when he made that quite bold remark. Yet let us, for argument's sake, accept it, for dance has expanded enormously during the past one hundred years.

That expansion has taken two forms. First there has been the huge growth, starting in the United States at the beginning of the century, of nonclassical theatrical dance--call it modern dance, expressionist dance, whatever. Second--and this expansion has been geographic rather than artistic-there has been the development of dance, particularly classical dance, in places where it either scarcely existed or had, by the end of the nineteenth century, fallen into serious disrepair, even disrepute. In 1898, there was a vigorous dance culture in Imperial Russia and, to a lesser extent, Denmark, and there were still fairly good dancers being trained in Italy and France, although the state of dance culture, as such, was nevertheless in severe decline.

This is where Edris Stannus (a.k.a. Dame Ninette de Valois, O.M., C.H., D.B.E., Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, D.Mus., D.Lit.), born in the Irish village of Baltiboys, near Blessingham, County Wicklow, Ireland, came in. She was a part--a wonderful part--of the new nationalism that, for a time, was to dominate world dance. The training of the young lady destined to play this key role in dance history was strangely erratic. Her family--her father was in the British Army--moved to England in 1905. When she was eleven she was sent, four times a week, to a Mrs. Wordsworth to learn what was then called "fancy dancing." Two years later she began more serious training at the Lila Field Academy. Soon she was dancing in small shows (sometimes giving an imitation of Pavlova!) and, of course, in that curious English hybrid of Christmas entertainment, the pantomime.

She started studying extensively with Edouard Espinosa, and by 1916 she was already teaching others to dance, with her career proceeding along all the genteel but limited ways open to a young lady dancer in the England of her day. But in the spring of 1919 she was taken along to a class given by Enrico Cecchetti, the Italian maestro of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The rest was history--not only de Valois's personal history, but of ballet itself.

The young Ninette in 1921 joined a small troupe headed by Leonide Massine and Lydia Lopokova. (She was, by the way, given her stage name not by Diaghilev, as legend has it, but by her mother.) In 1923 she received an invitation to go to Paris and join the Diaghilev Ballet, itself. She had already appeared with many of the dancers. Among the newcomers were Anton Dolin and Serge Lifar; Balanchine and Danilova joined a year later.

Diaghilev was the great catalyst of twentieth-century ballet. And de Valois, like Balanchine and, for that matter, Massine and Lifar, was one of the pioneers who followed in his wake and virtually created the growth pattern that dance was to follow after his death in 1929. Simple brevity can easily lead to simplistic analysis, but fundamentally this pattern eventually took dance away from the internationalism of the touring Ballets Russes and all its later offshoots into a new form of nationalism, particularly in Britain and the U.S., and later in Germany, Australia, and Canada.

De Valois, aided, abetted, and occasionally forestalled by the Diaghilev disciple, if not protegee, Marie Rambert, founded British Ballet. The true roots of the present Royal Ballet were laid down in 1931, five years after the more shadowy beginnings, traditionally dated from Frederick Ashton's first ballet, A Tragedy of Fashion, for Ballet Rambert. Rambert played a significant role as a discoverer and encourager of talent, but it was de Valois who eventually made the lasting, institutional contribution. Looking back, one might say that the establishment of some kind of national ballet in Britain was inevitable, an historical imperative that de Valois happened to fulfill. Perhaps---but the manner of that fulfillment was uniquely hers, and in it one can see her real contribution, her legacy.