Wife Corrects Her Husband’s “Faults”

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31628, 14 March 1968, Page 2

Wife Corrects Her Husband’s “Faults”

Taking orders from his wife is part of a day’s work to Jon Trimmer, a principal dancer in the New Zealand Ballet. He is married to the company’s ballet mistress, Jacqui Oswald.

Dancers cannot afford to develop technical defects, such as a drooping leg or a sagging arm, and Jon Trimmer acknowledges that his wife is very good at correcting dancers’ faults.

The teacher-pupil situation in class seldom leads to o argument at home and they have been married for four years.

The full company is required to attend daily classes, which are taken alternately by Miss Oswald and the ballet master, Desmond Kelly, who is also a principal dancer.

Miss Oswald dances in the corps de ballet in performances and has a solo role in “Judgment of Paris” In the present season. Danish Seminar

Jon and Jacqui Trimmer will leave for Copenhagen on May 1 for a seminar at the Royal Danish Ballet, where they will attend classes held by teachers from the Bolshoi Ballet, an American ballet, and the Royal Danish Ballet

“After the school we may do some dancing In Denmark,” Jon Trimmer said yesterday. “When we return to the New Zealand Ballet we hope we shall be able to give more to the company as dancer and teacher.” In Denmark they have several friends, including Kirsten Ralov. Miss Ralov was a guest star with the New Zealand Ballet in 1962 and is a sister of Poul Gnatt, founder of the ballet and its first artistic director. This will be Jon Trimmer’s third overseas tour and his wife's second. In 1959 he won a bursary to study at the Royal Ballet School in London, and toured with the Sadlers’ Wells Ballet before returning to the New Zealand Ballet in 1962. In 1965 he and his wife joined the Australian Ballet on its world tour, when Jon danced the leading male roles in performances of “Giselle,” “Raymonda” and “Lady and the Fool” in Australia and Honolulu. He was also a soloist in the company’s seasons in Paris, Copenhagen and Berlin. Nearing Peak Now rising to the peak of his career, Jon Trimmer is at a stage where overseas experience is most valuable to him as an artist and to the contribution he can make later to the New Zealand Ballet. “I want to dance for as long as I can, but when I feel I am coming towards the end of it I would like to do choreography," he said. Teaching, he will leav* to his wife.

The New Zealand Ballet, which opens its festival season at the Theatre Royal this evening, has four married couples in the company. Two other principal dancers Rhodesian - born Desmond Kelly and Denise Le Comte; a

New Zealander, are husband and wife. So are Harold Collins, a soloist from Australia, and Marlene Collins, the company’s tour manager, as well as two Australian members of the corps de ballet, Robin Thomson and Roma Egan.