Waking Hours

Alan Foley (50) is the founder and artistic director of Cork City Ballet. He is also a former ballet dancer. He lives in Carrigaline, Cork, with his partner, Peter, and Peter’s son, Josh (12)

The King of Cork ballet

Idon’t do early mornings. I’m a night person. It comes with years of having been a dancer, where your daily deadline is the performance at 8pm. I get up at 9am. My other half, Peter, is here in the house. He has nothing to do with ballet, and if he did, I couldn’t cope with it. Once I leave the studio, I like to talk to people who couldn’t care less about ballet. It’s very refreshing.

Each day is different. Sometimes we are in production for Cork City Ballet. I founded the company 25 years ago, and I’ve been the artistic director since its inception. We’ve just finished The Nutcracker, and we have a documentary,

Breaking Pointe, about the company, which is taking on a life of its own. It will be shown in New York and Los Angeles over the next few months.

I was a professional ballet dancer for many years, but I retired at the age of 39. I stopped because I had two major heart surgeries. Otherwise, I’d have kept going. I’m also the principal of my own private ballet school — the Alan Foley Academy of Dance.

When I head into the company, there are about 30 dancers from all over the world, along with the ballet mistress, Patricia Crosbie. Yury Demakov, from the Bolshoi Ballet, is the choreographer.

Cork City Ballet isn’t funded by the Arts Council, but we get some support from Cork City Council and other sponsors. It’s always a battle to get funding for ballet, because some people think it’s elitist. But it’s only dancing. It’s not brain surgery or nuclear physics.

When I decided to become a ballet teacher and start up ballet schools, I opened them in the country, in places like Skibbereen, Bantry, and Carrigaline, where I live. I grew up in Fountainstown, which is only 17 miles from Cork city, but when I was a kid, it felt like the countryside. I remember thinking, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to bring ballet to children who otherwise wouldn’t have these opportunities’.

One day I’m working with big stars from the Kirov and Bolshoi and New York City Ballet, and the next thing, I’m teaching snotty-nosed, three-year-old children, whose daddy has dropped them in and gone back out to milk the cows. I love that.

My life in dance began when I won a local disco-dancing competition in Fountainstown. I was eight, and I was dancing to the song Come On And Jump To

The Beat. When I was 12, I applied to the Royal Ballet in London and asked them if they had any courses in disco dancing. You can imagine the response I got back!

After that, I went to the teacher Joan Denise Moriarty. She was a former ballet dancer, and the head of Irish National Ballet. She frightened the life out of me. She said that to become a ballet dancer, you had to study art and music and drama. I thought, ‘Are you for real?’ A year later, I went back and I said, ‘I’ll stay, if you promise me that you’ll never put me in tights.’ She said, ‘Of course, dear.’ Three months later, she had me out in the Opera House in tights.

I became hooked on the whole ballet thing. The movie Flashdance came out, and I watched the TV series Fame.

But primarily I loved ballet because of Joan Denise Moriarty. I remember watching her coaching us for my first ballet, Giselle. She transported me to another world of beauty and lightness and magic. I was young, and I had yet to understand how difficult it was. But the dancer’s job is to make it look easy.

In Breaking Pointe, I wanted to show people that it’s possible to carve out a career as a ballet dancer in Ireland. You

“I asked the Royal Ballet if they had any courses in disco dancing. Imagine their response”

need to be creative, because it’s not going to be a job in the Royal Ballet where you are set up for life. But I did it, and many others have done it, too, like my dancing partner of 10 years, Monica Loughman. Even though the film was my idea, I didn’t want it to be the Alan show. It’s about Cork City Ballet, and I wanted the company to shine.

In 1989, I went to Russia to study in St Petersburg. It was the Mecca of ballet, where Rudolf Nureyev had trained. We thought we were fabulous, but when we saw the other students, we realised that we were in the ha’penny place.

For breakfast in the morning, we had frankfurter and cabbage, and if we didn’t eat that, they’d make a quiche out of it for lunch. I was 11-and-a-half stone going there, and nine-and-a-half stone when I came back. Let me tell you, I should go back now. When I stopped dancing, I discovered the couch, food and television.

Wherever I go in the world, I see my former students performing in musicals on Broadway, or in ballet companies. They all say the same thing — that I was a tough teacher, but a fair one.

If there is no performance, I finish work at 6pm and head home to my partner, Peter, and his 12-year old son, my stepson, Josh. He is with us most of the time.

In the evenings, we sit down and have dinner together. Josh will tell us about his day at school. We watch some television, and make sure that the homework is done. Then it’s time to hit the sack and start the whole day again.

The odd time, I get a mad notion to do something. I get this spurt of energy. The muscle memory is incredible. I just get this urge to do a pirouette, a jump or an arabesque. And it just happens. And I think, ‘You’re not too bad. You can still pull something out of the bag.’