‘PIONEER’ NURTURED MONTREAL DANCE SCENE
She played a role in creation of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens
Dorothy Rossetti, who died on Sept. 16 at age 96, extended an influence on Montreal dance much beyond the St-Denis St. dancewear store that bears her name.
For more than 60 years, thousands of amateur and professional dancers bought her shoes and tights, but Rossetti also gave vital encouragement to young hopefuls, brought in a local dance-shoe industry, asserted a female presence in a male-dominated business world, and indirectly helped create Les Grands Ballets Canadiens.
“She was extremely important for the dance community, especially for ballet,” observed Eddy Toussaint, who launched his significant choreographic career in the 1970s. “She encouraged many people and was so understanding toward new companies. She’d smilingly wait to be paid for months until company grants arrived.”
Toussaint and his colleagues, Eva von Gencsy and Conrad Peterson, often talked with Rossetti at her store about forming a new company. In 1972, with Geneviève Salbaing, he and von Gencsy founded Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal.
It was Rossetti who informed Ludmilla Chiriaeff that Yolande Leduc’s Ottawa ballet school needed a teacher. Chiriaeff began commuting from Montreal. Eventually eight Leduc students moved to Montreal to form the nucleus of Les Ballets Chiriaeff, the precursor of Les Grands Ballets.
“I was 15 when I came to Montreal in 1953,” recalled one of those eight Ottawa transplants, Sheila Lawrence, who still teaches ballet in Westmount. “Dorothy had a really tiny store downtown but she did very well. She was very helpful to all of us young dancers who didn’t know where to get things.”
Rossetti was born Dorothy Botsford on April 6, 1920, in Lethbridge, Alta. As a girl, Dorothy spent summers at various Canadian Pacific Hotels managed by her uncle, including one in San Francisco, where she took ballet classes.
“Sounds glamorous, but as an adult, she said they were terribly lonely summers,” recalled Sean Winston, who has worked at Rossetti de Montréal with his sister, Fiona, since 1979, virtually running the store for the past 20 years.
While still a teen, she married Edward Rossetti and became a mother. Edward never followed when she and her child moved to Montreal where, from 1946 to 1949, she worked at the theatrical supply store, Johnny Brown, whose catalogue she’d received in Lethbridge.
“(Choreographer) Brian Macdonald inspired her to get her own store,” Winston said. “She opened on University St. in 1951, but after a fire, moved to Mansfield St.”
Montreal in the 1950s was a time,
noted Winston, when “women had no business in business. A supplier would talk with her for an hour and then say, ‘Everything seems in order, Mrs. Rossetti, and as soon as you call your husband to confirm this, we’ll get this off to you.’ “
Rossetti later married Frederick Clark, but continued to handle her own business affairs. She was astute enough that around 1955, the big New York dancewear manufacturer Capezio offered to buy her store.
“She agreed on condition that Capezio open a shoe factory in Canada,” Winston said. “They opened one in St-Léonard. It later became Angelo Luzio (another point shoemaker).”
Rossetti eventually opened Capezio stores in Toronto and Ottawa. There were frequent buying trips to Capezio headquarters in New York, where she became involved in the Capezio Dance Award, which each year since 1953 has honoured a distinguished dance figure at a glittering ceremony.
Rossetti herself was a glamorous figure who counted the Montreal Gazette’s former fashion editor, Iona Monahan, among her good friends.
“Dorothy was dressed haute couture all the time,” Winston said. “People used to come by just to see what she was wearing.”
For dancers, the store was like home, recalled Véronique Landory, a founding dancer of Les Grands Ballets whose own ballet school in Longueuil closed this year after 30 years.
“She was like a member of the family and very generous. I was teaching and needed some rosin,” Landory recalled, referring to what is put on soles to prevent dancers from falling on slippery floors. “She came with a huge bag — there’s still a lot left and this was 30 years ago! Rosin was very expensive but she said, ‘Oh no, take this, take this!’ “
Rossetti was generous, too, about providing point shoes to visiting Russian companies of the Soviet era, and often took shoes to dancers in Cuba, where she lived for six months of the year in her later years.
After suffering a stroke last year, Rossetti weakened and eventually contracted pneumonia. She’s survived by her daughter, Joan Rossetti of Boston, and her daughter’s children.
“There are pioneers who are less visible but who have a great influence,” Toussaint said. “Madam Rossetti was one of those.”