DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH BALLET

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22655, 4 June 1948, Page 6

DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH BALLET

Madame Marie Rambert, head of the famous Rambert Ballet School, of London, and director of the company which is to open in Wellington on Saturday, represents m her manner and speech the very essence of the ballet. Fler experience as a dancer goes back to the days of Diaghileff and Nijinsky. As a director her experience began away back in 1919 when she established her first school of ballet in the Mercury Theatre, London. She found she possessed also a certain aptitude to teach, and she produced her first ballet —only one of 20 minutes —in A. P. Herbert’s revue, “Riverside Nights,” at the Lyric, H ammersmith.

The choreography in that ballet, she said in an interview in Wellington, was by Frederick Ashton, now of European reputation, to music composed by Eugene Goosens, now of Sydney. That ballet was a springboard from which she could claim that much of the success attaching to the renaissance of the ballet in England had sprung. Today there was a splendid English ballet, developed gradually but persistently, and with much hard work, until at present, though perhaps founded originally on the Russian ideas, it had national characteristics.