On golden points: Angela Leigh watches as the National Ballet celebrates 50 years

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Summer, 2002 by Stuart Herzog

A BITTER SNOWSTORM WAS SWIRLING AROUND THE EATON AUDITORIUM IN TORONTO THAT MEMORABLE November evening in 1951. Inside, a packed house was eagerly waiting to witness the fledgling National Ballet Company's first performance. As the 25 young dancers rose up on points to the music of Chopin's Les Syiphides, a Canadian cultural icon was born. The rest, as they say, is history.

For a Canadian artistic company to have survived for fifty years is a rare achievement. For that company to take its place among the best in the world is even more remarkable. This year, The National Ballet of Canada celebrated its Golden Anniversary with a special season in Toronto plus a tour of five western Canadian cities.

One guest of honour at the sold-out September 25 performance in Victoria remembers that first evening, that first performance as she experienced it from the other side of the footlights. Now a Victoria-based professional interior designer and fabric artist, Angela Leigh was one of the young dancers chosen by founding artistic director Celia Franca to launch the National on its arduous path of golden points.

Leigh was six when she first took up ballet in London, England with noted teacher Lydia Kyasht, a Russian ballerina formerly with the Kirov; by twelve she was studying at The Sadler's Wells (later to become the Royal Ballet) under ballet's grande dame Ninette de Valois. In 1949, she married Clayton Leigh and moved to Orillia, Ontario. She was running her own ballet school in 1951 when she heard that English ballet dancer Celia Franca had been invited to Canada to set up and train a national ballet company. The idea of a world-class ballet company in Canada caught Leigh's imagination.

"I just knew -- it sort of came out of me -- that I wanted to join the Company, even though it didn't exist at the time" Leigh recalls. She began traveling down from Orillia to Toronto each Sunday to take classes with Franca at the Boris Volkoff Dance Studio.

Now in her mature years, Leigh still holds her slim dancer's body in perfect posture as we speak, sitting in the simple yet elegant drawing room of the James Bay heritage house she bought and renovated after moving from Toronto in 1994. Around us, framed examples of her colourful applique fabric art adorn the walls. Her bright and challenging gaze reflects the inner discipline of arduous years of classical ballet training, her mind clear and sharp behind the owlish eyeglasses. Here is a woman who has lived a rich and full life, but who has not given up her creativity.

Under Celia Franca's demanding artistic direction, the early years of the National Ballet Company definitely were not easy. "It was very intense, very serious, and much was expected and demanded in terms of standard and professionalism," Leigh relates. Franca was determined to build a truly national company that would take its art out to Canadians. That meant touring -- not an easy task back in the '50s.

"It was very tight. We were very close, like a family, and I think if you didn't have a sense of humour you might never have lasted two minutes. You had to darn well develop one quickly to get through the touring schedules," she laughs.

The company would be on buses all day, starting at seven in the morning. "We'd be let off in some town and we'd be lucky if we got to an hotel before we had to go to class then rehearse, get our makeup on and then perform -- and then we'd eat, after the show. We'd be on the bus the next day by seven a.m., even though we wouldn't have been in bed until one or two in the morning.

"We went everywhere. In our very first year we went from one end of Canada to the other and into the United States. We were striking new ground. In places like Kapuskasing we danced in their hockey rink, the audience sitting under rugs with their thermoses, because they'd been used to coming to hockey games. A special stage was built over the ice and we'd be freezing to death in our light costumes. There isn't too much heating in a hockey rink!" she laughs. "But this is the kind of pioneering we had to do. A male dancer fell off the stage in Kapuskasing, because it was off the ground. I actually fell into an orchestra pit in Philadelphia and danced that night, bruises and all."

Celia Franca would always be on the tour, doing everything: dancing, teaching, public relations, even some choreography. "She was amazing, an incredible energy," Leigh recalls. "Celia wanted to implant the true classical ballet in this country and achieve the highest standards. She imposed very strict discipline, so we all came up the hard way."

In the beginning, the company would be training, rehearsing and performing for seven months, then there would be a break of four to five months during which they each had to keep the body in shape and earn enough to live until the next season. "Our first pay cheque was $25 a week," relates Leigh. "There was no Canada Council at the time and all the funding for the Company came through private donations."

Leigh started out in the Company's corps de ballet before becoming a soloist and then a principal dancer in productions including The Nutcracker, Swan Lake and other full-length classical ballets. After fifteen years with the Company, a broken foot she didn't allow time to heal properly forced her out of front-line roles. Director Betty Oliphant asked her to teach at the National Ballet School and later at the Company, which she did while also teaching at Canada's first academic dance program at York University.