The world of ballet comes to Wicklow
DAVID MEDCALF SAT IN ON A PLANNING SESSION AS THE FINAL TOUCHES WERE PUT TO PREPARATION FOR THE NEW NINETTE DE VALOIS FESTIVAL OF DANCE IN BLESSINGTON. THEEVENTISSETTOREMIND EVERYONE OF A CULTURAL COLOSSUS
RENOWNED centres of ballet are few in number. The cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg vie with each other for primacy in the Russian sphere of dance. New York with its Lincoln Center is worth a mention, of course, while Paris and London are serious cosmopolitan contenders for honours nearer to home. Now perhaps the time has come to add Blessington to the list…
In a meeting room at the public library over the local branch of Dunnes Stores, three respectably aged men are engaged in earnest conversation. Michael Doyle, Vincent McCabe and Jim Corley are not discussing Wicklow’s prospects against Dublin in the football championship or the relative merits of Audi as compared with Lexus.
Though they have never pulled on a leotard in earnest, their topic of enthusiastic conversation is ballet and how to wake up Blessington to this most demanding, yet rewarding, art form. The trio and their colleagues are planning to put Blessington on the cultural map with the Ninette de Valois Festival of Dance next month, running (doubtless on tippy-toes) from June 29 to July 1. Though other forms of dance are on the programme, it is ballet which has prompted the initiative, with the Tramway Theatre set to become County Wicklow’s own Bolshoi.
The inspiration for the festival was Blessington’s own giant of ballet – a woman christened Edris Stannus, though that was not the name by which she is remembered. She adopted the Ninette handle early in a career that brought her great renown on stages and in ballet troupes around the world but most particularly in Britain, where she founded the Royal Ballet. Dancer, choreographer and teacher, she is remembered in the UK as a colossus, a Dame, her memory immortalised in a bronze statue outside the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden.
Local historian Jim Corley is adamant that the girl from Baltyboys House preserved a fondness for Ireland throughout a life that extended across three centuries. Edris-cum-Ninette was born in 1898 and she drew her final breath in the new millennium, finally expiring not so very long ago in 2001. The man from Blessington History Circle confirms that she was daughter of local lady Elizabeth Graydon Smith who married a military man called Thomas Stannus.
The family departed for England with their young family: ‘She was seven when they left and went to Deal in Kent,’ reports Jim. ‘It broke her heart because she loved Baltyboys and Ireland all her life.’ Though Ninette went on to command a world-wide reputation, she came back repeatedly to her native country and was in constant touch Ireland’s great cultural leader WB Yeats. It was Yeats, creator of his own poetic ‘Swan Lake’ when he wrote ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, who brought her back to establish the Abbey School of Ballet in 1927.
She maintained a regular, hands-on interest in the school into the mid-1930s and was back in Ireland during the 1950s for an appearance at the Gate Theatre. On that trip she also ventured out of Dublin city and over the county boarder to take a sentimental look around the house where she was born. It is part of the de Valois legend that Ninette’s first dance was an Irish jig, taught to her by a tenant on the Graydon Smith estate who was called Kate Finnegan. Introverted as a child, the young girl discovered that the jig was useful as a party piece, delighting and amusing the adults who applauded her efforts in the drawing rooms and parlours of the moneyed classes.
Elizabeth Stannus was clearly a very cultured individual, an accomplished singer of opera and a leading authority on cut glass, no less. No doubt it was she who brought her daughter to see her first ballet at the age of six in a Dublin theatre. Ninette’s father was a professional soldier, an officer in the British Army who served in the Boer War and who eventually died in battle at Messines in 1917.
WITH him gone, Elizabeth supported herself and her family by running a glass making factory and she did not stand in her daughter’s way when Ninette decided to tour England as a young woman with a dance company. It was by no means certain at the outset that her restless passion for the dance would produce a ballerina, as the company did whatever was necessary to please an audience in low brow venues such as Blackpool.
However, as it turned out, she soon rose above the music halls to triumph as an exponent of high flown ballet which was then being championed beyond the boundaries of Russia by Diaghilev. The photographs of the star show a woman who evolved from a young beauty to become a commanding lady with impeccable posture and a commanding presence.
The story of how a Stannus became a Valois might be no more than an interesting but often