Our dancers are on pointe when it comes to talent
As Ballet Ireland hits the Edinburgh Festival, founder Anne Maher on why our stars have to head overseas
LIKE many little girls Anne Maher loved everything pink and frilly. ‘I liked being a pink fairy from the age of about four,’ the Dubliner explains.
‘So I was a pink fairy quite often. Seeing how much I loved it, my mum decided to send me to ballet.’
At that stage neither Anne nor her mum could have guessed that this was the start of a flourishing career. ‘I tried Irish dancing for a while but you couldn’t use your arms, you had to keep them strictly by your sides and I wanted to wave around and float around the room,’ she says.
But, in a gradual progression, ballet soon became ingrained in Anne’s life.
‘When you start dancing first you are four or five and you go once a week for an hour. But if you show talent, your teacher will invite you to do another class and then by the time you are 11 or 12 you are doing maybe four or five hours a week or a little bit more.
‘I can remember when I was 11 or 12 my class was a little bit later and so my teacher realised I was arriving straight from school and hanging about the dressing room with nothing to do. She brought me in to help with the little ones so I was in the studio being involved. I might not have been doing things at a very high level but I was stretching and stretching my feet and working for maybe an additional two or three hours each day.
‘It’s a gradual process and before you know it, you are involved. That commitment has happened and you don’t notice you have made a huge commitment to it as it has just become so much part of your life and so important. You don’t think about it.
‘Later on, you get to the point eventually where you have to drive yourself physically as well to get to a higher level but it seems to happen naturally. It helps when you have great teachers who are encouraging and supportive.’
ANNE left Ireland at the age of 17 to pursue her ballet dreams and had an enviable international career, gaining a scholarship from Princess Grace to study at L’Acadamie de Danse Classique in Monte Carlo under Marika Besobrasova. Following her training in Monaco, Anne travelled the world as a principal ballerina.
But she admits she had to leave home if she wanted to become a professional as there was no other choice — and it remains the same today,
‘There are no professional schools in Ireland and while we have many good teachers who put in long and extra hours with their students, that final last two or three years you need to be in a professional school where you are working from 10am until 5pm in order to become a fully rounded, accomplished professional dancer,’ Anne says.
She returned home at the age of 35 and has since been at the helm of Ballet Ireland.
‘I was lucky enough to have an international career,’ she says. ‘I lived and worked abroad for 15 years. We have a very limited knowledge of the wider scale of ballets that are out there because we don’t get to see so much here.
‘By and large a lot of the work that comes to Ireland to appear in theatres here tends to be Russian Swan Lake or Nutcracker which is a very limited diet. You can imagine if we weren’t able to see the variety of music artists that arrive in this country and if all we had was one or two music genres it would be so limiting.
‘There are a number of fabulous Irish dancers who have trained abroad and worked across Europe in many companies and nobody here ever hears about them, even though they have amazing careers and do incredible work.
So when I returned to Ireland I wanted to obviously give back some of the things I have learned myself and to get up on that box to be able to say, we can do this too. We can make incredible work to be involved.’
BALLET Ireland presents a balance of very traditional work like Nutcracker and Swan Lake alongside new material. ‘We also produce and commission new work because, like any art form, as in painting or sculpture or opera, we are making new work and pushing the art form forwards,’ Anne says. ‘We forget these ballets we know are over 100 years old. We cannot just present the dusty works of the past.
‘It is important that wonderful works like that are retained and presented — they offer an opportunity for artists to measure themselves against artists of the past.
‘But equally we have to make new work and push the art form forward.’
Pushing forward is what Ballet Ireland does — tonight the company will be bringing its version of Giselle to the Edinburgh Festival this week thanks to the support of Culture Ireland.
It is one of eight Irish shows heading to the Edinburgh Festival this year as part of Culture Ireland GB18, a year of promoting Irish arts in Britain.
‘I want to showcase Irish ballet abroad on the international stage and to share what we are doing here in Ireland and show how great the work being produced in Ireland is,’ Anne says.
‘The Edinburgh Festival is a wonderful shop window for us because producers from all over the world come to see work in Edinburgh and inevitably they then invite various companies to present work at their festival.
‘We would be hopeful that this will present opportunities for us to travel further afield do that people in far flung places can get to appreciate and see what we do.
‘We couldn’t do it without the help of Culture Ireland but it is also a wonderful opportunity for them to be able to flag the great work being created here on an international scale.’