8. Ninette de Valois and the transformation of early-twentieth-century British ballet*

Laura Quinton

At the end of Ninette de Valois’s ballet Checkmate (1937) a woman in a chequered leotard thrusts a sword through the chest of a feeble old man. As he collapses, the ruthless Black Queen removes the Red King’s crown from his head and raises it triumphantly in the air.

Danced by the Vic-Wells Ballet, the company founded by de Valois in Islington in 1931, Checkmate premiered at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris.¹ An allegory of death’s triumph over love, the ballet had quick, angular choreography abounding with dramatic tension, striking geometric designs by the American artist Edward McKnight Kauffer and an expressive score by the British composer Arthur Bliss. A work of modernist synthesis, Checkmate bolstered de Valois’s position as a choreographer and director at the forefront of British dance. The ballet’s closing image of a lone woman in power, moreover, alludes to an underexplored, abiding feature of her professional project.² As a dancer, teacher, choreographer, writer and founder-director of the company that became the Royal Ballet, Ninette de Valois (1898–2001) played a formative role in ballet’s transformation into a national high art in Britain during the twentieth century. Chronicling her early work, this chapter considers how she moved through and shaped Britain’s changing ballet landscape before the Second World War. De Valois’s experiences are indicative of women’s evolving roles within this profession, but her rise to its peak was exceptional.

When she became a professional ballet dancer in the 1910s, de Valois entered a feminized, low-status field. In the second half of the 1920s, after dancing with the Ballets Russes, the Russian touring company founded by the impresario Serge Diaghilev in 1909, she moulded herself into a formidable teacher and choreographer, training a new middle-class tier of female ballet students and joining a small cohort of serious women choreographers working in London. In 1931, she became one of the few women in Britain to manage and direct her own ballet company. Having ascended the ranks of a female-dominated field, however, she swiftly proceeded to bring men into her company, appointing them to influential leadership posts and altering the gender hierarchy of British ballet.

While there is considerable scholarship highlighting women’s entrances into male-dominated fields in Britain during the First World War and after the landmark Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, de Valois’s company reflects an unorthodox trend: the once all-female Vic-Wells Ballet started, in this moment, to embrace men in its ranks.³ On the face of it, this reconfiguration affirms a social phenomenon articulated by historian Joan Thirsk. According to Thirsk’s Law, throughout English history women have pioneered new cultural organizations, only to see them, once ‘firmly established … always fall under the control of men’.⁴ But even as de Valois promoted her male colleagues, she still dominated Britain’s ballet scene.

In the interwar period, de Valois established herself as her company’s pre-eminent leader and as a singular authority in British ballet more broadly. Rather than being inevitably sidelined by patriarchal forc206es, as Thirsk’s Law suggests, de Valois actively invited men into the Vic-Wells Ballet. She recognized that foregrounding male dancers in her choreography and strengthening her ties with male artists and patrons would allow her to achieve her larger goal of elevating, legitimizing and gaining respect for her company and for British ballet in general.⁵ Her apparent dependence on men did not entail a straightforward abdication of her own professional power. Drawing on her vast performing experience, class and family background and writing skills, from the mid-1920s de Valois styled herself as a ruthless, discerning thinker, teacher, choreographer and administrator. Talented, ambitious and persistent, she remained at the centre of her company, consolidating her power as the interwar period progressed. If de Valois’s decisions meant that other women eventually lost out on creative and administrative leadership opportunities in British ballet, her trajectory also reveals how one woman steered what would become one of the nation’s most elite cultural fields. Echoing the final image of Checkmate, the power of men in British ballet was precarious, subject to de Valois’s will.

When Ninette de Valois was born, at the tail end of the nineteenth century, ballet was a feminized, low-ranking occupation in Britain. Young, single, working-class women filled the large ensembles – the corps de ballet – that appeared in music halls and large-scale exhibitions: called ‘ballet girls’, they laboured for long hours in hazardous conditions, receiving minimal pay. Many subsidized their families, trudging home between rehearsals and performances to prepare meals and launder clothes for younger siblings and sickly parents. With limited training, these dancers were unlikely to advance beyond the corps de ballet.⁶

Reflecting contemporary entertainment trends, the popular venues where ballet girls performed were identified with pleasure and spectacle.⁷ By the 1890s, fantastical productions had become long-running attractions in 207variety programmes: marked by colourful costumes, extravagant sets, sparkling music and electric lighting displays, these acts covered patriotic, orientalist and supernatural themes. Often wearing revealing costumes, ballet girls processed across the stage, posed in decorative formations and performed simple movements in unison. Producers hired foreign (usually Italian) ballerinas to star in these shows, their sophisticated pointe work and vertiginous turns adding to the overall pyrotechnical wizardry. Notably, women choreographed many ballets that appeared at the Alhambra and the Empire, two of London’s most prominent music halls.

The relatively few men who danced on these stages never numbered among the corps de ballet. Mime and character artists and international virtuosos appeared on occasion, and porteurs materialized to lift female stars.⁸ More often, women dancers performed male parts, dressing as men (en travesti) and partnering other women.⁹ This division of labour led the British public to associate ballet with erotic female bodily display, a perception reinforced by prostitutes who lingered in music hall promenades.¹⁰ Although some social reformers defended ballet girls – one 1897 article called them ‘very much slandered and very little understood’ – others castigated them for becoming courtesans or accepting wealthy male benefactors.¹¹

As British ballet girls toiled on stage, de Valois was enjoying a privileged childhood. Born in 1898 to an Anglo-Irish military family, she spent her early years in a grand manor house in Blessington, Ireland. In 1905, however, her family abruptly moved to England: like other members of the landed gentry of the time, they could no longer afford their estate.¹² Living with her grandmother in Kent, de Valois, who loved dancing the Irish jig, began taking classes in so208cial dancing. These lessons, in which she curtseyed and skipped across the floor wearing ‘party frocks’ and ‘fine lace mittens’, were associated with Britain’s burgeoning physical culture movement.¹³ In the late nineteenth century, girls’ education programmes across Britain increasingly included graceful movement practices, which some policy-makers and physical culture advocates argued would improve the health of the nation’s future mothers and refine female posture and deportment.¹⁴ For de Valois, these lessons provided foundational movement training.

In 1907, de Valois’s mother took her to see the Danish ballerina Adeline Genée in The Belle of the Ball at the Empire Theatre. Trained in the exacting style and technique of August Bournonville and the Royal Danish Ballet, Genée had headlined the Empire’s ballets since arriving in London in 1897. For de Valois, Genée was like a ‘porcelain princess … aloof and dignified’ with ‘impeccable technique’, the epitome of classicism amid the music hall’s ‘smoke and noise’.¹⁵ Departing from the bravura of her foreign – mainly Italian – predecessors, Genée’s dancing stimulated de Valois’s interest in ballet. In this production she also saw Phyllis Bedells, a young British dancer with strong technique who, inspired by Genée, would become the Empire’s leading ballerina in 1913. Signalling changes in the British dance scene, both Genée and Bedells would encourage new admiration for ballet in British audiences more broadly.

Before turning eleven, de Valois moved to London, arriving at a critical moment for British dance. Classical dancers from Russia’s Imperial Theatres began to appear in the city. In 1908, the ballerina Lydia Kyasht replaced Genée as the star of the Empire – de Valois saw her in Round the World (1909).¹⁶ The dancer Adolph Bolm soon joined Kyasht, and in 1909 Tamara Karsavina appeared at the Coliseum. In 1910, Anna Pavlova danced with Mikhail Mordkin at the Palace Theatre and Olga Preobrajenska performed at the Hippodrome. Enormously popular, these dancers exposed London theatregoers and de Valois to the superior technical standards and artistic riches of Russian ballet.¹⁷

Following these performers, in June 1911 the Ballets Russes made its sensational London debut. Reviewing the company’s opening performance in Le Pavillon d’Armide (1907) at the Royal Opera House, one critic marvelled at its conception of ballet as ‘not merely a frivolous excuse for showing pretty girls’. Gone were ‘the glitter of spangles and glare of colour which offended the eyes in most ballets in London’; instead, audiences entered a world of compelling orchestral music, ‘graceful movement’ and opulent ‘spectacle’ exceeding ‘anything yet seen in this country’. The dancing of the company’s male star Vaslav Nijinsky even ‘border[ed] on the miraculous’.¹⁸

Inspired by German composer Richard Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total artwork’, the Ballets Russes fused movement, music and design in trailblazing productions. Male artists dominated its collaborative teams: Le Pavillon d’Armide, for instance, featured choreography by Michel Fokine, a score by Nikolai Tcherepnin and designs and a libretto by Alexandre Benois. The company’s sophisticated, sensual works filled the Opera House for six weeks that summer, presenting ballet as a serious, sumptuous high art on a par with opera. According to the British critic Arnold Haskell, the Ballets Russes changed Britons’ ‘entire attitude to ballet’.¹⁹ Over the following three years, performing for extended seasons at the Opera House and elsewhere in London, the company amassed an influential following among local aristocrats, socialites, intellectuals, aesthetes, artists and politicians. By 1914, its middle-class fan base was also growing.²⁰

While the art of the Ballets Russes entranced British audiences, de Valois among them, its male dancers shocked them. The company’s corps de ballet included men as well as women, and male stars headlined its productions. De Valois marvelled at these ‘men galore, whirling like dervishes, or hurling themselves above as war-like tartars’, and particularly at Nijinsky, who ‘showed Western Europe the heights that a male classical dancer could reach’.²¹ Like de Valois, British spectators understood these dancers, who were chiefly Russian and Polish, as powerful, exotic foreigners. In London, they became beautiful objects of audience desire – especially Nijinsky, who traversed gender conventions on stage in androg210ynous roles and whose own romantic relationship with Diaghilev was an open secret.²² The Ballets Russes thus spurred the female travesti dancer’s disappearance from British music halls. It also led the British public to associate high-art ballet with male same-sex desire and ‘effeminacy’ – a perception de Valois would grapple with when she later established the Vic-Wells Ballet.

Further stimulating the British dance scene, in 1912 the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova presented a historic London season with her own ballet company. Avid theatregoer and future photographer Cecil Beaton would compare Pavlova to a ‘floating miracle in white’, blending earthly and spiritual qualities with ‘the delicate precision and discipline of the ballet technique’.²³ Like Beaton, de Valois admired Pavlova’s ‘extraordinary sense of dedication’ as well as her ‘abandon … frailty … [and] ecstasy’.²⁴ Until 1914, Pavlova performed one-act ballets, divertissements, and classical, romantic, exotic and Grecian-styled solos and extracts in successive seasons, appearing not only in London but also in many regional music halls.²⁵ Amassing a vast following, she appealed especially to British audiences concerned with Edwardian social ideals of female propriety and respectability. Historian Lynn Garafola has argued that, off stage, Pavlova’s simple, tailored, feminine attire signalled ‘expressive containment’.²⁶ Scholar Carrie Gaiser Casey has shown how Pavlova consciously presented her art as ‘educating, idealizing, moralizing, and uplifting’, requiring a disciplined female body ‘far removed from the corporeality assigned to the ballet girl’.²⁷ A ‘household sensation’ by 1913, from 1912 Pavlova taught ballet to a small group of well-to-do British girls at the house she bought in London.²⁸211 Some of these dancers would eventually join her company.

Amid this activity, de Valois, who now continued her ‘fancy dancing’ lessons at an Edwardian School of Deportment in London, began studying ballet at a theatrical training school. Genée, Bedells and the visiting Russians inspired her and other young British women to envision careers in dance beyond the music hall and the corps de ballet. Though the image of the ballet girl lingered and a stage career remained an ‘unsuitable’ option for ‘well-bred girls’ in the eyes of many class-conscious Britons, de Valois’s father among them, her entrepreneurial mother, who believed that her daughter had potential and needed an independent income, pushed de Valois forward.²⁹ Adopting a regal French stage name that her mother selected (de Valois’s birth name was Edris Stannus), de Valois was by 1913 dancing for and touring with her training academy’s performing group, the Wonder Children. With this troupe, de Valois, like many child performers in this era, danced a version of Pavlova’s signature solo, The Dying Swan (1907). With an approach that would serve her throughout her career, de Valois based her interpretation on ‘laborious’ notes she took while watching Pavlova perform.³⁰

The outbreak of the First World War marked a temporary end to London visits by the Ballets Russes and other international dancers. Diaghilev’s troupe travelled to the United States and appeared in Italy, France and Spain, while Pavlova decamped with her company and spent the next five years touring North and South America. By 1915 the Alhambra and the Empire had ceased presenting in-house, large-scale ballets, sending weary ballet girls to search for work elsewhere. As London’s dance scene changed, de Valois, now a young professional, pursued work in popular entertainment, where patriotic and escapist fare flourished and soloist opportunities opened up for British women dancers. In December 1914 she became the star of the Grand Ballet in the annual pantomime at the Lyceum Theatre, a role she held until 1919. She later characterized this production, which featured clowns, animal impersonators and dames, as ‘strong in its homely tradition’ and Victorian conventions: the women of the waltzing corps de ballet were ‘buxom and heavily corseted’, the extravagant transformation scenes full of ‘miraculous lighting’, and the spectacular finales ‘always found one standing in a golden chariot, or reposing on a cloud, or lying in a seashell’. Alongside this engagement, de Valois performed in music halls and West End revues, greeted by whistles as she appeared between ‘tric212k cyclists, acrobats, [and] wire walkers’.³¹ In autumn 1918 she appeared with the Beecham Opera Company: crucially, for this engagement, she experimented with staging her own dances.

While performing across a variety of genres, de Valois pursued intense, self-directed training. She began studying with the esteemed Moscow-born ballet master Edouard Espinosa, then living in London. As she could afford only a few classes a week with him, she carefully ‘wrote all my lessons down, and executed them every day’ for hours.³² She later studied with Hilda Bewicke, a Scottish dancer who had performed with the Ballets Russes and with Pavlova’s company. According to Jane Pritchard, curator of dance for the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, while de Valois’s performing career in this period resembled that of other British women of her generation who studied at London’s main theatrical academies, her fastidious training set her apart.³³ To pay for her classes, de Valois began teaching ballet, travelling to Eastbourne to give thirty-minute private lessons for over seven consecutive hours.³⁴ Once the war ended, she sought further training with the Italian pedagogue Enrico Cecchetti, who opened a ballet studio in London in 1918 while working with the Ballets Russes.

In the summer of 1919, de Valois became première danseuse of the international opera seasons at the Royal Opera House. While her new featured role was a reward for her hard work during the war, she continued to juggle multiple additional engagements in revues and musical comedies. However, in October 1921, she took an important professional step and assembled her own modest touring group. This troupe, which included eight women and one male dancer, the Russian artist Serge Morosoff, played various music halls, performing light divertissements for which de Valois designed both the choreography and the costumes. Although one of her dancers described the group as ‘ahead of its time’, de Valois later downplayed its significance, calling it ‘mildly successful’ and noting that it lasted only six weeks.³⁵ Narrating her career later in life, she preferred to accentuate the founding of the Vic-Wells Ballet as the moment when she became a company director and manager. N213otably, her decision to include Morosoff in this group, rather than following the once popular tradition of employing a cross-dressing woman, underscored her belief that men needed a presence in ballet.

After this venture, de Valois joined a small company directed by the Ballets Russes stars Léonide Massine and Lydia Lopokova. She had met Lopokova in Cecchetti’s classes and later described the ballerina as a close friend who was ‘particularly kind and helpful to me’. Touring England and Scotland with this group, de Valois experienced an artistic awakening. Immersed in the creative principles of the Ballets Russes, for which Massine was a major choreographer, as well as the rigours of Russian training, she found the work to be ‘of an order undreamt of in any of my previous experiences’: the choreography and ‘disciplined routine of class and lengthy rehearsals … filled me with a sudden feeling of dedication that was an entirely new sensation’. Following this rewarding venture, in January 1923 she joined a new revue at the Opera House. Pitched as a modern ‘jazzaganza’, this poorly conceived show involved comedians, chorus girls and blackface. It also featured a ballet choreographed by Massine, with music by the French composer Darius Milhaud and designs by the British painter Duncan Grant. Reinforcing her interest in the Ballets Russes’s vision of art and Massine’s complex choreography, de Valois described a duet she performed in this segment of the production as ‘intensely’ challenging.³⁶

The Ballets Russes was a constant presence in London from the autumn of 1918 until the spring of 1922. By the time she joined the company in September 1923, de Valois had acquired ample experience performing in old and modern music hall productions, pursued serious training, gained experience as a teacher and even managed her own short-lived performing group. Working long days and performing in multiple productions simultaneously like other British women dancers in this period, she found she had ‘reached saturation point and a dangerous state of boredom’.³⁷ Collaborating with Massine and Lopokova had opened up possibilities unknown to her through her work in British entertainment, and she recognized that, to push her career and her art forward, she needed to leave Britain. On the recommendations of Cecchetti and Lopokova, she became one of a handful of British dancers in Diaghilev’s company.

If joining the Ballets Russes marked a peak in de Valois’s dancing career, it also fed new professional ambitions. She described the overall experience as ‘an up-grading of … sensibility and a fundamental change in outlook’: ‘through Diaghilev … I became aware of a new world’.³⁸ Travelling across Western Europe with the company for the following two years, she adjusted to the disciplined training routine of its dancers, absorbed the methods of its leading Russian choreographer, Bronislava Nijinska, and observed Diaghilev’s creative and managerial approach. The experience motivated her to develop a serious interest in choreography, to aspire to direct her own company and to devise a new artistic vision for British ballet.

Initially, de Valois found the atmosphere of the Ballets Russes ‘a little terrifying’. While many of her previous engagements required doing ‘the same thing every night for nine months or a year’, now, as the member of a repertory company that performed three or four different ballets on a programme, she needed to absorb a ‘tremendous’ workload and ‘various styles’.³⁹ She admired her Russian colleagues’ classical technique, rooted in the rigorous methods of the Imperial Ballet School, and found that they ‘lived intensely and worked very hard’. For de Valois, this disciplined new environment set a standard to emulate, and she decided that the world of British entertainment was, by contrast, ‘empty and unproductive … lonely and without purpose’.⁴⁰ Working for Diaghilev, she paid special attention to his company’s gendered make-up: Diaghilev’s ‘big repertoire’, she remarked, ‘was very much for the males’, and there were ‘about twelve more men in the company than … women’ when she joined.⁴¹ This dynamic was strikingly different from not only British music hall troupes but also the main ballet companies in Russia.

Bronislava Nijinska was the most significant artist whom de Valois came in contact with while dancing for the Ballets Russes. In 1921, Nijinska became one of Diaghilev’s choreographers – the only woman to assume this position in his company’s history. Having rejoined the company after working in post-revolutionary Russia, Nijinska taught technique classes and staged new ballets that de Valois found far from ‘orthodox’.⁴² Though grounded in the classical schooling of the Imperial Ballet, Nijinska’s classwork integrated her experimental choreographic theories. For de Valois, this sophisticated approach ‘open[ed] up my mind and strengthen[ed] my bod215y’, encouraging ‘new ways of thinking’ and stirring a ‘deep interest in choreography as opposed to mere execution’. De Valois also worked closely with Nijinska to learn soloist roles in her ballets Aurora’s Wedding (1921) and Les Biches (1924). For the latter, the choreographer used the young dancer to work out the choreography for her own role of ‘The Hostess’. Nijinska was ‘good to me’, de Valois later said, and her example ‘proved to be a very great influence on my future outlook’.⁴³

Of the many works de Valois performed with the Ballets Russes, she was most impressed by Nijinska’s austere, radical Les Noces (1923). This ballet, de Valois later claimed, was one of the ‘greatest’ ever produced.⁴⁴ She found the weighted choreography a ‘tremendous thrill’ and took extensive notes in order to learn its challenging rhythms.⁴⁵ If performing in this production influenced de Valois’s later choreographic style, it also further encouraged her to use note-taking and writing as important creative tools. Indeed, she found that her ‘detailed’ written study of Les Noces revealed ‘a clear picture of the geometrical beauty’ of the ballet’s ‘inner structure’ as well as the music’s relationship to the movement.⁴⁶ The notes de Valois made when choreographing her own ballets in the 1930s could be described in remarkably similar terms.

A merging of tradition and innovation was also present in Diaghilev’s larger artistic policy for the Ballets Russes. The company performed versions of nineteenth-century Russian works as well as new one-act ballets based on his vision of artistic integration. Initially, de Valois resented the older productions: she held Swan Lake, for instance, ‘in great contempt’, arguing ‘we did it pretty badly … it was dreadful’ and ‘terribly old-fashioned’. When she founded her own company in 1931, however, she would deliberately follow Diaghilev’s example, embracing both tradition and innovation. With the same terms she used to describe her plans for British ballet, she later declared that Diaghilev was about ‘evolution always’ – ‘the balance was very good’.⁴⁷ In fact, The Sleeping Beauty (1890) – a work Nijinska revived for the Ballets Russes in London in 1921 – would become a cornerstone of her company’s repertory.

As well as stimulating de Valois’s developing artis216tic vision, Diaghilev set an example for her as a company director. She found him to be ‘the most extraordinarily frightening man’ – daunting and domineering, but with a vast knowledge of art and ballet that enabled him to ‘light the path of the unknown and untried’.⁴⁸ She appreciated how, while he demanded hard work from his dancers, Diaghilev always ensured they were sufficiently paid. Observing him up close and immersing herself in the structure of his company, she discovered that she was able to see his organization ‘as a whole’, and she became accustomed to ‘the criticisms, the attitude, the spacing of rehearsal sheets’. Speaking about her subsequent administrative and creative achievements, she reflected, ‘I owe everything I know to that company.’⁴⁹ Absorbing the inner workings of the Ballets Russes, de Valois acquired rare knowledge that would inform her future work in Britain.

At the end of July 1925 de Valois left the Ballets Russes. Despite having grown tremendously as a dancer with the company, she was sick of touring and felt she ultimately ‘did not really belong’ among the Russians.⁵⁰ She was also ready for new challenges. Returning to London, de Valois found her mind ‘overflowing with schemes, ideas and plenty of frustration’.⁵¹ It was a turning point in her career. Inspired by Diaghilev’s example, she resolved to create a permanent repertory ballet company, staffed by British dancers and based in Britain, and to elevate the art’s standing nationally.⁵² Following Nijinska, in the coming years she also fashioned herself as a sharp, intellectual choreographer and a demanding teacher. Although other British dancers and dance-lovers had endeavoured to establish permanent companies in Britain in the past, de Valois’s efforts would eclipse those of her forerunners.⁵³

Setting to work, in February 1926 de Valois published her first article. Entitled ‘The future of the ballet’, the piece appeared in the Dancing Times, Britain’s most widely circulated dance publ217ication.⁵⁴ Outlining her creative philosophies and arguing in favour of modern and experimental ballets, the article established her as a leader in her field who could articulate her ideas to a serious reading public. It exhibited traits that would mark her future publications: an analytical, rational and impersonal tone, an extensive knowledge of ballet history and international dance forms and an assertive take on contemporary debates in her field. Writing would subsequently become a means by which de Valois not only communicated her opinions and policies but also advanced her personal authority: it was a significant skill, rare among British dancers, that became even more important as literacy rates and the mass media expanded in the interwar period. Publishing articles and books helped her to promote and validate her artistic project, to shape and determine her own legacy. To an extent, writing also enabled her to control the larger narrative of British ballet.

Seeing improved training as an important step in achieving her goals, de Valois opened a dance academy in Kensington in March 1926. Her own early training – which she characterized as ‘wasted years’ – filled her with ‘anxiety’ and a desire to give British dancers ‘some security and definite standards’.⁵⁵ She devised a wide-ranging curriculum for her students: ballet classes featured French, Italian and Russian methods, and her own lessons drew from the Swiss music educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s system of eurhythmics and incorporated ‘modern-classical movement’ inspired by Nijinska and Massine.⁵⁶ Her students also learned mime, British and Central European character dances, and dance composition. Alongside this technical training, de Valois promoted the study of theatre design and make-up, anatomy, history, drama, languages and literature, framing ballet as a rigorous form requiring broad cultural knowledge.⁵⁷ Initially, all of her students were young women.

De Valois’s school and her mission to position ballet as a serious artistic practice benefitted from an influx of affluent female practitioners. Training opportunities had grown in Britain since the late nineteenth century, when visiting artists who appeared on London stages taught short-term courses at local schools. By the mid-1920s, prominent foreign teachers such as Serafina Astafieva, Marie Rambert and Nikolai Legat had started training British students in the capital. The pre- and post-war performances of Pavlova, who from 1920 began appearing regularly in Britain again, and the Ballets Russes spurred the opening of dance schools across the country. The training methods, like the dance content, varied from studio to studio, and increasing218ly after the First World War organizations such as the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing and the Association of Operatic Dancing of Great Britain (renamed the Royal Academy of Dancing in 1935) worked to improve national standards of classical training, promoting codified syllabi and regular examinations for dance teachers and students.⁵⁸

Changing middle-class attitudes went alongside this expansion of training. Historian Karen Eliot notes that Pavlova especially attracted ‘well educated and socially well placed’ admirers, and it was largely she who ‘made it acceptable for girls from “good” families to study, teach, and perform ballet’.⁵⁹ By admitting large numbers of British women to her company, Pavlova helped to dispel a widely held notion that, unlike the Russians, ‘the English cannot dance’.⁶⁰ By the mid-1920s, middle-class parents willingly enrolled their daughters in ballet lessons: reflecting changing ideas about this career path, a 1926 Manchester Guardian article emphasized how a dancer’s success depended on her musicality, grace, discipline, and ‘high ideal[s]’, as well as her being ‘sufficiently well off to afford a moderate capital for the years of training’.⁶¹ As the stigmatized image of the nineteenth-century ballet girl gradually receded, de Valois welcomed a new, privileged tier of young girls to her school.

Underscoring the prominence of female leaders in this evolving interwar ballet field, in 1926 de Valois formed a vital professional partnership with the theatre manager Lilian Baylis. Having decided that the best home for a permanent ballet company would be one of Britain’s established repertory theatres, de Valois first brought her plans to Barry Jackson at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. When Jackson turned her down, she went to Baylis, the manager of London’s Old Vic. A suffragist whom de Valois described as being ‘possessed with the fervour of a Salvation Lass’, Baylis had inherited the Old Vic from her aunt, the social reformer Emma Cons. Practical, economically stringent and devout, Baylis was fiercely committed to her aunt’s vision of bringing high culture to working-class audiences by presenting Shakespeare and opera at low prices. Impressed by de Valois’s qualifications, Baylis initially hired her to give the Old Vic’s actors movement training, to stage dances for the theatre’s plays and operas and to choreograph short ballets as curtain-raisers. Although sp219ace and money were limited, de Valois recalled, Baylis ‘promised me, that as time went on and things got better, my more ambitious plans would receive her full consideration’.⁶² Baylis planned to acquire and revamp the dilapidated Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Islington: there, she suggested, de Valois might form her ballet company. Like de Valois, Baylis believed that dance should be placed alongside drama and opera as an esteemed art within British theatre.⁶³ In her published writings, de Valois’s repeated praise for Baylis underscores the significance of this meeting of female minds to the future of British ballet.

In the coming years, as she directed her school and worked at the Old Vic, de Valois joined other branches of the ongoing repertory theatre movement. From late 1926, she worked as a choreographer for theatre director Terence Gray’s expressionist productions at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, and from 1928 she staged movement for the Irish poet W. B. Yeats’s productions, including his Plays for Dancers, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.⁶⁴ Through this work, de Valois became acquainted with new experiments in lighting and avant garde stagecraft. She brought students from her school to perform in incidental dances and Greek choruses she staged for both theatres, giving her young dancers key performing opportunities. She also built important connections with male artists. Her work with W. B. Yeats, and his efforts to ‘uplift’ Irish theatre through the productions he programmed for the Abbey, emboldened her especially.⁶⁵

Throughout the late 1920s, de Valois crafted a ruthless professional persona which enhanced her growing authority. Theatre director Norman Marshall, who worked at the Cambridge Festival Theatre at the same time as de Valois, described his colleague as ‘desperately earnest’, with a ‘stubborn determination’ and an ‘abrupt and dictatorial manner … serious to the verge of pomposity’. During rehearsals, she invoked her family’s class and military background, shouting at performers in a clipped accent and directing them as if giving orders. Marshall speculated that de Valois’s ‘brusque, school-marmish manner’ and ‘scolding, goading, and exhorting’ may have masked personal insecurities. But her disciplinarian tactics paid off: she won his respect and, crucially, that of other influential men in British theatre.⁶⁶

Experimenting as a choreographer within these contexts, de Valois began creating audacious, intellectual wor220ks. According to Marshall, her choreography for the Festival Theatre’s 1926 Oresteia trilogy ‘reduced one’s memories of all other Greek Choruses … to a series of pretty posturings’. Her ballet Rout (1927), premiered by an all-female cast at the Festival Theatre, mixed spoken text with grounded, architectural and asymmetrical movements: Marshall called it ‘harsh, angry’ and ‘pretentious’, the dancers ‘deliberately and ruthlessly drained of individuality’.⁶⁷ At the Abbey, she devised poetic movement for productions which, in her words, absorbed bodies, emotions and individuals ‘into the whole’.⁶⁸ Expanding her creative range, she experimented with masks and drew from Japanese Noh theatre.

As she began to define herself as a writer, teacher and choreographer, de Valois continued to perform occasionally. She danced as a guest artist with the Ballets Russes, in London with the British dancer and former Ballets Russes star Anton Dolin, and in works she created for the Abbey. In 1928, she took part in another international season at the Royal Opera House. In her memoir, Come Dance with Me, de Valois explained that she ‘accepted these engagements as a means of making extra money so as to continue my hold on the repertory theatre’.⁶⁹ Her choice of the words ‘my hold’ here indicate that she was consciously carving out a singular place within this cultural scene.

When Baylis’s rehabilitated Sadler’s Wells Theatre opened in January 1931, de Valois finally established her company, the Vic-Wells Ballet, with a group of six female dancers. At Baylis’s request, de Valois relocated her school to the theatre. She proposed that Baylis, whose chronically low finances were exacerbated by the 1929 stock market crash, pay her dancers and the school’s new headteacher; de Valois, meanwhile, would direct, choreograph, teach, perform and supervise the day-to-day operations of her company for free until the following September. De Valois found that she was now ‘virtually self-sold to one institution for which, during nearly five years, I had worked with this one end in view’.⁷⁰ Though working without pay, she would dictate all facets of her company’s operations.

Baylis gave de Valois complete freedom to devise the Vic-Wells’s artistic policies. Rejecting the approach of London’s commercial theatre managers, who hired artists for the length of a single production and prioritized profitability, de Valois determined to provide her danc221ers with long-term, year-round employment and financial stability.⁷¹ Following Diaghilev’s example, her programmes would include modern as well as historic ballets, and they would prioritize British dancers and artistic collaborators. Baylis’s moral vision of art and Sadler’s Wells’s reputation as a ‘people’s theatre’ catering to broad audiences undoubtedly buoyed her efforts to raise ballet’s stature in Britain. Yet, given her past experiences, she also probably intuited that her enterprise would remain inferior if ballet continued to be seen as a feminized form.

Initially, the Vic-Wells Ballet performed fortnightly. Soon, it was appearing weekly: Baylis described these early performances as ‘uniformly successful’, noting how ‘it was ballet, to a tremendous extent, that put Sadler’s Wells on the map’.⁷² In May 1931, the company gave its first full evening of ballet in a programme in which de Valois danced alongside twenty-one female company members and four male guest artists. Two months later, the Vic-Wells Ballet premiered one of de Valois’s most significant choreographic works, Job (1931), at a performance sponsored by the Camargo Society in the West End.

An indication of how attitudes towards ballet and its status were changing in Britain, the Camargo Society began meeting in London in late 1929, following Diaghilev’s death in August and the subsequent collapse of the Ballets Russes that year.⁷³ Steered by an advisory committee of Diaghilev’s elite followers and prominent figures within the British dance world, including de Valois, the group determined to salvage the impresario’s collaborative model of ballet.⁷⁴ For its programmes, which began in October 1930 and were attended by a select subscriber audience, the society commissioned sophisticated new ballets by young and prominent British choreographers, visual artists, composers and writers. Its illustrious steering committee included the economist John Maynard Keynes, the dancer (and Keynes’s wife) Lydia Lopokova, the music critic Edwin Evans and the writer and musician M. Montagu-Nathan; Camargo Society subscribers included the painter Augustus John, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Bloomsbury writers Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf.

Before the Camargo Society disbanded in 1934, it promoted a great deal of female talent. In addition to de Val222ois, Penelope Spencer, Wendy Toye, Sara Patrick, Anny Boalth and Trudl Dubsky choreographed productions for the group. This cohort demonstrates that a number of women were working as professional choreographers in interwar Britain. Creative women also contributed to other aspects of the society’s work: the visual artists Vanessa Bell, Edna Ginesi and Gwen Raverat designed sets and costumes for some of its ballets, and one concert included musical interludes by the composer and suffragist Ethel Smyth – notably, playing music during intermissions was also a feature of many Diaghilev performances. Still, de Valois’s unparalleled performing experience, repertory theatre work and the fact that she had her own company gave her a unique stature within this group. De Valois sat on the society’s advisory committee, and by 1933 she had choreographed more ballets for this group than any other woman. Her Vic-Wells dancers also served as one of its main creative resources.

De Valois’s involvement with the Camargo Society allowed her to strengthen her ties with elite male ballet patrons, particularly Keynes, as well as the male artists the society engaged. Significantly, it brought her into closer contact with male dancers and choreographers. Along with members of the Vic-Wells Ballet, the society’s programmes featured dancers from the Ballet Club, a small group formed in 1930 by the Polish émigré and former Ballets Russes dancer Marie Rambert.⁷⁵ Based at the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, the Ballet Club was home to a talented group of choreographers, among them Frederick Ashton, Susan Salaman, Andrée Howard and Antony Tudor. At her school at the Mercury Theatre, Rambert nurtured a small, strong group of male dancers. As the only two female company directors in this period, both steering formidable groups vying for artistic and financial recognition, de Valois and Rambert were simultaneously collaborators and rivals. Many of Rambert’s artists, however, would leave their mentor and join the Vic-Wells Ballet; de Valois offered more money and creative opportunities. The influx of men into her company signalled de Valois’s continued advance to the forefront of British ballet.

As well as encapsulating de Valois’s interwar choreographic style and approach, Job underscored her growing interest in developing and foregrounding male dancers.⁷⁶ Based on the English artist William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826), the production grew out of a collaboration between de Valois, the physician and author Geoffrey Keynes (brother of J. M. Keynes), who wrote the ballet’s libretto, the engraver Gwen Raverat and the compose223r Ralph Vaughan Williams. (The project was initially offered to Diaghilev, but he chose not to pursue it.⁷⁷) The Camargo production starred Anton Dolin, a British dancer who joined the Ballets Russes in 1923, in the title role. A dramatic, pastoral ballet, Job chronicled the struggles and achievements of a single hero. Its success raised de Valois’s reputation among local dance critics, many of whom were men.⁷⁸ For the writer Cyril W. Beaumont, Job captured ‘the deeply religious feeling of Blake’s drawings’ and used levels, groupings and a large staircase to create architectural scenes of ‘super-natural power’.⁷⁹ Arnold Haskell, who viewed ballet in quite narrow terms, found that, although Job’s blend of expressionist, folk and classical movements meant that ‘one hesitated’ to call it a ballet, the work showed de Valois to be ‘neither smug nor cantankerous, but someone with a great deal to express and the necessary craft with which to express it’.⁸⁰ Job exemplified de Valois’s belief in artistic unity, a Diaghilevian principle that guided much of her choreography. It exhibited her ability to meld diverse movement forms and her interest in characterization, dramatic effect, inventive lighting and narrative. The ballet also showcased her close attention to detail and emotion in music and dance. Using a technique that became her standard approach to choreography, de Valois pre-planned the entire production, sketching out specific phrases, groupings, lighting and stage effects on paper and analysing the score numerically.⁸¹ While Job reflected the stylistic flexibility and adventurousness present not only in de Valois’s work but also in British ballet more generally in this period, it also indicates how spaces for British male dancers and artists were opening up in this field.

Back at Sadler’s Wells, de Valois cultivated a severe presence and a military-like culture while leading classes or rehearsing her company. Aiming to instil discipline akin to that of her Ballets Russes colleagues, she 224gave highly technical, bracingly fast classes and led exacting rehearsals. Margot Fonteyn, the future principal dancer of the Vic-Wells Ballet who joined the Sadler’s Wells ballet school in 1934, recalled how, perhaps emulating the behaviour of her own ballet teachers, de Valois would scream and slam a cane on the floor during technique classes. Finding her teacher ‘alarming’ and ‘volatile’, Fonteyn only later discovered that ‘it was a compliment to be shouted at all day long’.⁸² Recalling similar outbursts, the dancer Beryl Grey, who entered the school in 1937, claimed she was ‘more frightened of [de Valois] than the bombs’ during the Second World War.⁸³ In rehearsals, de Valois was said to ‘drill all the personality out of her cast, counting the music till mathematics had driven the atmosphere away’.⁸⁴ She insisted that her soloists appear in the corps de ballet, curbing her dancers’ expectations, egos and demands. However, tempering her approach with moments of generosity, de Valois succeeded in making dancers heed and respect her. She also inspired loyalty and devotion. Fonteyn called de Valois ‘a supreme leader’, adding, ‘we would one and all unhesitatingly defend and obey her commands. We would, metaphorically speaking, have died for her.’⁸⁵

Tightening her grip at Sadler’s Wells, de Valois welcomed men into her company. In late 1931, she invited the composer and conductor Constant Lambert to become one of its creative leaders, naming him music director. Lambert, who travelled in rarefied social and artistic circles, had previously conducted for the Camargo Society: his credentials included being one of the few British composers from whom Diaghilev had commissioned a score. De Valois respected Lambert’s intellect and taste; she later stated that his ‘first-class musical mind’ helped enhance the company’s orchestra, the dancers’ musicality and the musical arrangements of the new ballets.⁸⁶ With gratitude she replicated over the years when discussing her male colleagues, she later attributed much of her company’s success to Lambert, reminiscing, ‘he gave his life to us … a wonderful man, the core of English Ballet in my opinion’.⁸⁷

In 1932, de Valois offered six-week contracts to six male dancers, despite persistent prejudices against male dancing. Although by the mid-1920s the social status of female dancers had risen, ballet remained an unacceptable path for men. Frederick Ashton, the son of a diplomat and one of the few men to begin studying ballet in early 1920s London, described hiding his new passion from his parents: ‘my father was horrified … you can imagine the middle-class attitude. My mother would say: “He wants to go on the stage.” She could not bring herself to say “into the ballet.”’⁸⁸ In 1927 Arnold Haskell noted how, since Nijinsky’s pre-war Ballets Russes performances, a ‘popular fallacy that the classical male dancer must necessarily be an effeminate creature’ had taken hold in Britain.⁸⁹ By the mid- to late 1920s, the Ballets Russes had a growing and conspicuous gay male audience that reinforced this view.⁹⁰ In his numerous popular and influential writings throughout the interwar period, however, Haskell attempted to combat these associations, praising ballets that featured heterosexual relationships and contrasting the physical virility of male dancers to the grace of ballerinas. A ballet with an all-female cast, he claimed, was ‘insipid’, showing ‘no very great interest’.⁹¹ As her company advanced through the 1930s, de Valois, inspired by the Ballets Russes’s male-dominated model and intent on making the Vic-Wells Ballet a revered national institution, digested these assertions. In her book Invitation to the Ballet (1937), she disparaged the bygone era of female-dominated music hall ballet and argued that ‘as a profession ballet has never been [the ballerina’s] undisputed property’, airing her frustration at seeing ‘worthy British parents’ sending their male children to become ‘bank clerks’.⁹² In her effort to recruit male dancers, de Valois would endeavour to appeal to conventional social hierarchies as well as notions of ‘respectable’ middle-class masculinity and femininity.

As de Valois embraced male artists, she also pivoted away from her earlier creative experimentalism. Instead, she focused on building her company’s classical repertoire. In 1932 she invited Nicholas Sergeyev, the former chief rehearsal master of the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg, to re-stage several nineteenth-century works for her company. By 1939, Sergeyev had produced versions of Giselle (1841/1226884), Coppélia (1870), The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker (1892) and Swan Lake (1895), using the Stepanov scores he had taken from Russia, supplemented by his own memory and experiences. Along with offering a technical challenge to the Vic-Wells dancers, these ballets allowed de Valois to claim an exalted heritage for her company, linking it directly to a Tsarist forebear. Moreover, she used them as vehicles for male as well as female guest artists, whose appearances helped boost the company’s visibility and revenue.⁹³ These guests, many of whom were former Ballets Russes dancers, indicated the Vic-Wells’ indebtedness and ties to Diaghilev, a connection de Valois further fortified by adding former Ballets Russes productions to the Vic-Wells repertory, among them Les Sylphides (1909), Le Spectre de la rose (1911), and Carnaval (1910).

As the art and gendered make-up of her company changed, de Valois gained support from J. M. Keynes. In 1933, Keynes arranged for the Vic- Wells Ballet to perform at the Royal Opera House during the World Economic Conference. Dancing excerpts from Coppélia and Swan Lake, the company appeared alongside Lydia Lopokova and the English Ballets Russes star Alicia Markova. When the Camargo Society closed down in 1934, Keynes, in his capacity as the society’s treasurer, transferred many of its ballets, along with their scenery, costumes and music, to the Vic-Wells company. In Come Dance with Me, de Valois praised Keynes and Lopokova for assuming ‘the care of British Ballet’, recounting how she found their home in Gordon Square ‘a refuge from everyday life’ where she went ‘for advice in all my troubles’.⁹⁴ As scholar Helena Hammond notes, Keynes’s personal endorsement bestowed on the Vic-Wells Ballet the ‘precious cultural kudos and capital’ of the Bloomsbury group, bringing the company closer to the upper echelons of British culture and society.⁹⁵

As her school and company grew and coalesced artistically throughout the 1930s, de Valois did not completely sideline women. She wanted a home-grown prima ballerina to emerge from her system, and she began shaping Margot Fonteyn to fill that role. De Valois described Fonteyn as a disciplined, demure, ‘exceptionally tidy and beautifully placed’ dancer, evocative of Pavlova.⁹⁶ She embodied what de Valois viewed as ideal qualities for a ballerina – and for a middle-class British woman. Nurturing Fonteyn’s talent, de Valois opened up a limited space for one woman in her company, developing her as a227n exceptional dancer and allowing her to accrue significant visibility as an artistic celebrity.

Simultaneously, de Valois continued foregrounding male talent in her new ballets. In 1935 the company debuted one of her most successful works, The Rake’s Progress. Based on a series of paintings by William Hogarth, this production included a new score by the composer Gavin Gordon and designs by the visual artist Rex Whistler: here, as in many of her ballets, de Valois chose to collaborate exclusively with men. With sources drawn from folk, court dance, classical and expressionist forms, this moralizing, highly dramatic production followed its muscular hero’s journey into physical and psychological dissolution. The work later led the critic Joan Lawson to reflect that ‘it is often said that Ninette de Valois creates her best dances for men, and that her women’s dances are not the same quality’.⁹⁷ Certainly, unlike Nijinska or other women choreographing in interwar London, de Valois rarely created ballets which centred on women, delved into female psyches or expressed female perspectives.

In 1935, de Valois got married. Her husband, Arthur Connell, was a doctor: they met when, amid de Valois’s various health struggles over the years, he performed an operation on her.⁹⁸ The wedding was small, and de Valois reportedly kept it secret from her closest Sadler’s Wells colleagues.⁹⁹ Her decision might be explained by the fact that, in 1932, a marriage bar had been instituted in many professions, mandating that women leave the workforce once they married. But it was arguably at this point that de Valois began to assume yet another role. Pressing forward with her administrative and creative work, she now juggled her professional responsibilities with traditional wifely duties, making time in her overloaded schedule to respond to her husband’s patients’ phone calls, organize his appointments and cook for him and visitors to their home.¹⁰⁰

As the influence of men in her company mounted, de Valois appeared to retreat. In late 1935 she hired Frederick Ashton to work full-time at the Vic-Wells as its resident choreographer, providing him with a consistent salary and what historian Beth Genné describes as a rare ‘laboratory’ of dancers on whom he could ‘work out his ideas’.¹⁰¹ After beginning his ballet training in228 the early 1920s, Ashton studied with and choreographed for Marie Rambert. In 1928–9 he worked with Nijinska while performing for a Paris-based ballet company directed by Ida Rubinstein, a Russian dancer of enormous wealth. Back in London from 1929, he choreographed chic, witty ballets for the Ballet Club and the Camargo Society that invoked the fashionable world of the ‘Bright Young People’. Like many dancers of the period, Ashton worked across genres to make ends meet, choreographing for and dancing in musical comedies, revues and operas.

Quickly becoming the most celebrated British choreographer of his generation, Ashton staged his first work for the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1932. After his 1935 appointment, he created numerous ballets for de Valois, many of which revealed a romantic, lyrical and classical sensibility. Dancers remarked on the differences between de Valois’s and Ashton’s choreographic methods: while de Valois was ‘cold and reserved’ in rehearsal, communicating her excruciatingly detailed, pre-planned choreography with a ‘voice as sharp as the snip of scissors’, Ashton was playful, intuitive, ‘exposed and tender’.¹⁰² With the self-effacement typical of her writings about her company, in 1942 de Valois claimed that Ashton’s arrival at the Vic-Wells Ballet marked the moment when its ‘independent development, choreographically … really began’.¹⁰³ In Invitation to the Ballet, she implied that her decision to hire Ashton was guided by a desire for stylistic diversity and the need to detach the company’s artistic identity from the work of a single choreographer (herself).¹⁰⁴ Here, again, she followed Diaghilev’s model. De Valois continued to choreograph, but Ashton’s appointment alleviated her workload. In bringing him in, she consciously passed over her female peers and the male presence in the Vic-Wells Ballet continued to grow.

By the end of the decade, de Valois’s company was winning critical praise and inching closer to Britain’s cultural establishment and the state. It began touring regionally, expanding its national presence. In 1936 Keynes arranged for the company to perform at the opening of his new Arts Theatre in Cambridge: the company subsequently enjoyed an ongoing relationship with this theatre. That same year, the Vic-Wells Ballet became the second British dance company to perform for the BBC’s new television service. Until the service shut down in 1939 for the duration of the war, the company presented numerous ballets on BBC TV, many choreographed by Ashton.¹⁰⁵ In 1937, subsidized by the British Council, the Vic-Wells Ballet travelled to Paris to perform de Valois’s Checkmate at the International Exposition. In 1939, it presented Sergeyev’s staging of The Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House, a performance given in honour of French President Albert Lebrun’s visit to London.

As men rose within de Valois’s company, the director continued to enhance her stature as a singular figure in the British ballet world. Giving public lectures and publishing a growing list of books and articles, she established herself as an expert in the field. Her first book (Invitation to the Ballet) appeared in 1937: the text included reflections on her time with the Ballets Russes as well as incisive commentary on the economic position of ballet in Britain, its audiences and critics, dancers, training and history. It also precisely outlined the ideal structure of a repertory ballet company (copying the Vic-Wells model) and offered sharp assessments of international dancers and dance critics. In 1938, de Valois charted the history of her company in an extended introduction to a new, celebratory book, The Vic-Wells Ballet: Camera Studies. By 1939, Haskell had dubbed her ‘the outstanding figure in the world of ballet’.¹⁰⁶

De Valois’s career path and the trajectory of the Vic-Wells Ballet reveals how, by 1939, the status, nature and gendered make-up of ballet in Britain had shifted far from its late-Victorian iteration. With male artistic leaders and a strong classical repertoire, the Vic-Wells Ballet reached a near-national status, endorsed by British elites. The artistic experimentalism, hardship and open possibilities for female leadership that characterized de Valois’s experiences and the wider British ballet landscape between the First and Second World Wars gradually contracted as the Vic-Wells Ballet became a pre-eminent company, accumulating men, resources and prestige. With this transition from nascent institution to establishment came an apparent obligation to appeal to entrenched structures and tastes.

De Valois may have appeared to recede from centre stage as her company’s status rose.¹⁰⁷ Speaking about her choreography in 1939, Haskell maintained that ‘the success of her own works is not her main preoccupation’; other writers and colleagues noted that she gave herself ‘little credit’ when it came to her artistic achievements and enterprise.¹⁰⁸ The Vic-Wells dancer Margaret Dale, for instance, felt that de Valois ‘didn’t always safeguard her own reputation’: when selecting dancers for their new ballets, she always let Ashton take ‘the best’.¹⁰⁹ Fonteyn likewise commented that de Valois appeared ‘unable to comprehend … her own greatness’.¹¹⁰ Certainly, after the Second World War, de Valois vocally championed women as ballet’s ‘housekeepers’ and ‘pioneer workers’, invoking a regressive argument which positioned men as the inevitable rightful directors, choreographers and teachers of the art, taking ownership of the form after women performed the early grunt work.¹¹¹ Celebrating this passing of the torch, de Valois downplayed the fact that her own professional success and that of her company rested heavily on the support of her mother, Lopokova, Nijinska, Baylis and numerous women dancers.

Other cultural organizations which emerged in interwar Britain and were heavily staffed by women seem to have followed a similar trajectory. For instance, in the case of the feminist magazine Time and Tide, an influx of male contributors to the publication by the late 1930s was part of a concerted strategy by its female leaders to boost their magazine’s circulation and cultural reach.¹¹² As suggested by her celebration of men gaining control of British ballet, de Valois actively promoted male artists to validate and achieve her greater goals for her company and the art in Britain.

Still, de Valois’s apparent self-sacrifice was highly strategic. Norman Marshall recalled how, ‘devoid of any desire for personal glory’, de Valois would occasionally appear in front of the curtain at Sadler’s Wells to take a bow after one of her ballet premieres: ‘no speech, no showmanship’. She seemed, ‘superficially, just an ordinary young woman in a very plain evening dress, obviously tired and over-worked’. But, Marshall noted, all this was ‘according to plan – Ninette de Valois’s plan’, devised like ‘the advance of a good general’.¹¹³ Indeed, the Vic-Wells dancer Annabel Farjeon posited that de Valois’s inscrutable, ‘secretive nature’ was actually a concerted part of her mission to ‘separat[e] directors from [the] work force’. According to Farjeon, de Valois ‘needed solitary power, for her own satisfaction and for the management of the company’.¹¹⁴

After the Second World War, when her company became a state-subsidized organization and relocated to the Royal Opera House, de Valois virtually ceased to choreograph.¹¹⁵ Finally, in 1963 she gave up her post as artistic director of the Royal Ballet (as her company was renamed in 1956) in favour of Ashton. Yet she remained supreme. From 1945, numerous budding British dance companies and arts institutions solicited her advice. She continued managing her ballet school, moulding dancers and choreographers who fed into the Royal Ballet and dispersed to work elsewhere in Britain and abroad. She presided over the ousting of Ashton in 1970 and the anointing and eventual resignation of his successor, the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, as the Royal Ballet’s director.¹¹⁶ Furthermore, she developed an army of female ballet teachers and administrators whom she dispatched to shape major ballet institutions abroad: they included Celia Franca at the National Ballet of Canada, Peggy van Praagh at the Australian Ballet and Joy Newton, Beatrice Appleyard and Ailne Phillips at the Turkish State Ballet.

Sometimes, de Valois’s belief in her own personal influence betrayed itself. In 1963, for instance, she wrote: ‘I wanted a tradition and I set out to establish one.’¹¹⁷ She succeeded in her goal: ballet had been transformed from a pleasure-seeking late-nineteenth-century entertainment into an elite, national and male-influenced high art in mid-twentieth-century Britain, and de Valois remained at the centre of it all.