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ALL OPENING NIGHTS are special, but on this occasion there was a particular thrill in the air. This would be the premier performance by a spirited, though rather uneven, group of 29 performers – the fledgling Canadian National Ballet Company.
Celia Franca, the acclaimed ballerina and choreographer from England who had arrived a few months earlier to become its artistic director, was prepared for things to go wrong, and go wrong they did. The set designer, who had been asked to create a backdrop for Les Sylphides depicting a wooded glade in the moonlight, showed up with a snow-covered scene. When a very surprised Franca asked, "Why did you do that?" the designer innocently replied, "I wanted it to look Canadian."
There were other hurdles. The weather on that November evening in 1951 was foul, and the audience arrived grumbling in rain-soaked gowns and tuxedos. Backstage, the dancers had little idea how to apply theatrical makeup. And the stage at Toronto's Eaton Auditorium was too shallow to properly accommodate the choreography.
But the show did go on and was enthusiastically received by the audience, many of whose members had seen little ballet before. Fortunately, neither had the critics. The next day, the Toronto Telegram pronounced the music, scenery and costumes to be "perfect," the technique "faultless." Franca knew the performance had been far from perfect. But it was a beginning.
Within months, the company changed its name to the National Ballet of Canada. Today, half a century later, it has become an internationally recognized cultural institution. With more than 50 dancers and its own symphony orchestra, the National Ballet is the only Canadian company to stage the complete range of the full-length classical ballets, such as Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. In its 50-year history, it has performed 265 different ballets across Canada and around the world for audiences totalling more than 10 million people. "It's a wonderful company with a fantastic repertoire," says Karen Kain, a former star of the National Ballet who was one of the world's pre-eminent dancers throughout the 1970s and 1980s and is now the company's artistic associate, serving as an adviser to the artistic director, coaching dancers and helping to raise funds. Despite many opportunities to join other companies, Kain always chose to stay with the National Ballet. "The level of talent, the variety of repertoire, the rigorous enforcing of high standards – it's a company that gives its artists everything they need."
Says Celia Franca, who at 79 still teaches and coaches in her role as coartistic director of the School of Dance in Ottawa: "Quite simply, the National Ballet is one of the world's great ballet companies."
Even the toughest foreign critics have come to agree. The New York Times initially dismissed the company, saying it had "classroom competence but little theatrical magic." By the 1970s, however, it was comparing the National Ballet's production of The Sleeping Beauty to one performed by La Scala's ballet company in Milan, featuring the legendary Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, adding, "But the Canadians dance it better." In 1998, the Times acknowledged, "The troupe from Toronto comes to the fore on the international scene as a first-class creative organization."
The lavish sets, breathtaking costumes and spectacular choreography that regularly electrify audiences at Toronto's Hummingbird Centre serve to underscore just how far the company has come in 50 years. When it was established, professional ballet was largely unknown in this country. There was the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, which had been started in 1938 as the Winnipeg Ballet Club by two women from England and remained an amateur group until 1949. In most of Canada, however, ballet in those days was a Saturday-afternoon hobby taught in parish halls.
After the war, three Toronto socialites and ballet lovers – Pearl Whitehead, Sydney Mulqueen and Aileen Woods – came together to discuss starting a national company. They knew that to overcome any potential regional prejudices they needed to hire an artistic director from outside the country. In 1950, the three women sent an emissary to England's Royal Academy of Dancing to get a list of possible names. When he showed the list to Ninette de Valois, founder of London's Sadler's Wells Ballet (later to become the Royal Ballet), she immediately singled out one name – "Celia Franca," she declared. "If you can get her." Franca, de Valois had once said, is an "extremely fine artist and choreographer, has very strong artistic views and great integrity of purpose in her work."
Veronica Tennant as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, 1988.
Franca, who had been enjoying a career as one of England's finest dramatic ballerinas, was in great demand as a choreographer of works for the exciting new medium of television. Always up for a challenge, Franca agreed to visit Canada in the fall of 1950 to attend an annual ballet festival in Montreal featuring some of the country's best dancers. The performances were even more amateurish than Franca had expected. When asked for her evaluation, she replied, "I think you need me here."
Three months later, Franca was living in Toronto, earning her living largely from the T. Eaton Company, where she was listed as a file clerk. There was as yet no ballet company to pay her, so it had been arranged that she would be put on the retailer's payroll. In truth, very little office work went on, as Franca spent her time recruiting dancers for the new company, not always through auditions. Lois Smith was accepted based on a photo and the recommendation of her husband, David Adams, who had danced with Franca in England. Grant Strate, who had never studied ballet, got in on the basis of his choreographic skills. Earl Kraul didn't pass the audition but got in when another dancer dropped out. One young man made it because he would look good bare-chested for the Arabian Dance in The Nutcracker.
Based in Toronto, the dancers rehearsed wherever they could find space – mostly church and community halls. When spring came, they moved to St. Lawrence Hall, which they first had to help clean and reorganize – it had been used as a hostel for the homeless during the winter. To live up to its name as a national company, the troupe began touring the country in early 1952, with the dancers often being billeted in private homes.
Proper facilities for a ballet production didn't exist at most of the whistle stops, so the company simply made do. It often enlisted the local cigar store as a ticket seller – the same place that issued fishing licences and tickets to wrestling shows. High school boys would be hired to carry sets and costumes, while teenage girls were recruited as usherettes. Well-meaning volunteers would frequently wax stage floors before performances, not realizing that a slick stage would almost ensure that dancers would slip. Without dressing rooms, dancers often had to change in basements, once having to put newspapers down so they wouldn't be standing directly on the earthen floor. In one school auditorium in Fredericton, the stage had no place to hang a backdrop to cover the huge, immovable pipe organ. Enterprising students climbed onto the roof and somehow managed to cut holes in the ceiling, enabling a backdrop to be hung. Says Franca: "It meant that the show could go on without looking too bloody awful."
Money was a constant problem. The first year, the company almost broke even, finishing with a deficit of $24. But with steady increases in the number of dancers, the sophistication of productions and the touring schedule, deficits grew alarmingly. By 1957, with the birth that year of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, there were three professional ballet companies in the country, all vying for grants from the newly formed Canada Council. On one occasion, when the National Ballet's board of directors said there was no money for a tour, dancer Lois Smith emptied the money out of her own purse, then took up a collection among her fellow dancers. Another time, on a tour of Western Canada, the entire company would have been stranded if a philanthropist hadn't wired them the money to take the train home.
Despite its financial woes, the profile of the company continued to grow, here and abroad. When the director of Russia's Bolshoi Ballet came to teach a class, he was impressed by the level of proficiency, and the National Ballet's reputation began to spread. In 1964, it became only the second company in the world to stage Romeo and Juliet. It had been created by well-known South African choreographer John Cranko for the Stuttgart Ballet, and the National Ballet managed to secure the rights to it, a real coup in ballet circles. Victoria Bertram, who joined the National Ballet in 1963 and continues to dance with the company in character roles, says, "You knew you were a part of something that was going to be very exciting."
The excitement soared the next year when Rudolf Nureyev, the world's best-known male dancer, made a surprise trip to Toronto to visit principal dancer Erik Bruhn. When illness forced Bruhn to drop out of a scheduled performance, Nureyev replaced him, despite injuries to both ankles.
In 1972, Nureyev was under contract to an American agent and promoter, Sol Hurok, who was seeking an appropriate company to tour North America with the world-renowned dancer. Impressed with the National Ballet, Hurok offered it the opportunity. For the tour, Nureyev choreographed The Sleeping Beauty, in which he also starred. The highlight of the tour was a performance of the ballet at New York's Metropolitan Opera House.
Some say that Nureyev used the National Ballet to promote himself, but others say that he helped launch the company into the international spotlight. "Rudolf Nureyev was our ticket to the Met," Bertram says. "Maybe he used us, but we used him, too. At first people came to see him, but they ended up giving all of us screaming standing ovations every night."
Rex Harrington as Daphnis in Daphnis and Chloe, 1988.
In the summer of 1973, a very young Karen Kain and Frank Augustyn beat the top-ranking Soviet dancers to win first place in pas de deux at the 1973 International Ballet Competition in Moscow, and the entire ballet world was talking about "the Canadians." Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Kain and Augustyn were the undisputed queen and king of ballet in Canada. "They had a partnership and chemistry that was very, very rare, not just in our company but anywhere," says James Neufeld, author of Power to Rise: The Story of the National Ballet of Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1996). "They were terribly important because they were home-grown talent. They were ours. And however you define 'glamour' – they had it." The company also had a major star in Veronica Tennant. Moreover, in the 1980s, when few companies had more than a couple of excellent male dancers, the National Ballet had half a dozen, including Rex Harrington, Jeremy Ransom, Owen Montague, Serge Lavoie, Kevin Pugh and Gregory Osborne.
Whenever the National Ballet or any of its members danced in Europe or the United States, people noticed a very distinctive style. Most of the dancers were graduates of the National Ballet School, which had been founded in 1959 by Franca and Betty Oliphant, who led the school until her retirement in 1989. (Oliphant also served as associate artistic director of the National Ballet from 1969 to 1975.) "I don't like mannerisms and affectations, and I always produced dancers with a very pure technique," says Oliphant. "Whenever our dancers went abroad, people would be very impressed and ask, 'Where did you train?'"
Throughout the 1990s and into this century, the company has continued to ride high, but with dramatic changes. While there was only one artistic director, Franca, for most of the company's first 25 years, in its second quarter century, the position has been held by six different people, two of whom served jointly. In 1996, the company moved into the Walter Carsen Centre, spacious new quarters in Toronto on the shore of Lake Ontario, named after the local philanthropist who had provided substantial funding for the building.
The choreography has changed, too. The 2000-2001 season included a modern work – The Comforts of Solitude by Montreal choreographer Jean-Pierre Perreault – in which the dancers wore street clothes and hard shoes. And even classics like Swan Lake have been rechoreographed. But principal dancer Rex Harrington, who joined the company in 1983, says, "You can't ride on something for 30 years. You have to make dance relevant. We're competing now with musicals and other types of shows. We need change." While some members of the audience may take time to adjust, critics and dancers have almost unanimously hailed the National Ballet's new Swan Lake as brilliant.
Owen Montague and Karen Kain in La Ronde, 1988.
The uniformity of appearance that used to characterize the company has given way to a variety of looks, as dancers now come from many different countries and backgrounds. Whereas ballerinas were once always diminutive, the company's current rising star is Xiao Nan Yu, a dancer from Beijing who at 5'7" is unusually tall. "I would have definitely had a problem getting work 20 years ago," she says. "Back home in China I have friends who can't dance professionally because they're too tall."
In many performing arts organizations there's an inherent cutthroat competition among members, but everyone who joins the National Ballet is pleasantly surprised by what is often described as a mutually supportive atmosphere. Geon van der Wyst, a former dancer with the Australian Ballet Company who joined the National Ballet as a principal dancer in January, was used to ruthless competition. "I'd heard this was a company with a very positive environment, but it's exceeded my expectations," he says. "Whether you're a principal or a member of the corps de ballet, it doesn't matter – that support network is there. It leads to optimum levels of performance." He adds that the company has high standards not only of dance but of healthy living. "When I have lunch with the guys in the cafeteria, they all eat things like chicken and vegetables. Back home in Australia, lunch was most likely to be coffee and a cigarette."
It sounds like one big happy family, but make no mistake, morale is always shaky among perfectionists, says James Kudelka, who has been the company's artistic director for the past five years and was involved in an extremely unpleasant legal fight with a former principal dancer, Kimberly Glasco, who sued the company after her contract was not renewed. "This is a very, very high-strung, talented, temperamental group of people. But we are better now than we ever were."
Kudelka, who was born in Newmarket, Ont., and graduated from the National Ballet School, joined the company as a teen-ager in 1971, then left after 10 years to broaden his experience, working as a dancer and choreographer in Montreal and then as a choreographer in New York and San Francisco. Now internationally renowned, he has created 80 ballets, including The Four Seasons, The Firebird and the new versions of The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, which he did specifically for the National Ballet.
The theme for the company's 50th anniversary season, which begins this fall, is "Past, Present and Future," aiming to honour company alumni, volunteer supporters and the generations that lie ahead. There will be opportunities for former members and children to appear in productions. As well, there will be a brand-new full-length work by Kudelka entitled The Contract, which will combine the stories of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the Canadian-born evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. The company also plans to perform in the cities of Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria and Ottawa.
Kudelka would like to see the tour extended to Eastern Canada, but there aren't the funds. Last year, planned trips to Europe and China had to be cancelled because of the lack of funding. Salaries remain modest, and there's little job security, as dancers sign one-year contracts. "It's depressing," says Kudelka. "I wouldn't want to have an unlimited budget and guaranteed audiences, because of the risk of complacency. But I wish I could take the company more places and show more people what we're about."
TODAY, the national ballet's dedication to high-quality, exciting productions continues – and things still occasionally go wrong. During one performance of La Fille Mal Gardée, which featured a real horse, the shovel couldn't be found onstage when the horse decided to obey a call of nature, so one dancer used his bare hands for the cleanup deed, hastily disappearing offstage afterwards. Then there was the time that ballerina Martine Lamy fell backwards into the orchestra pit, only to hurry back onstage to finish the dance. Last year, Rex Harrington ripped his calf muscle during a performance and was seamlessly replaced by Aleksandar Antonijevic. And periodically, the temperamental automated mouse in The Nutcracker stops moving and has to be quietly kicked into the wings.
But to the audience, the illusion remains intact. For two hours we live inside the fairy tale, the tragic love story or the cycle of life. No matter what happens, the show – and indeed the National Ballet of Canada – will go on.
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Imperial's support of the National Ballet of Canada goes back almost a quarter century. Most of the support in the early years involved financial contributions for existing productions. But in 1980, to celebrate its 100th anniversary that year, Imperial commissioned and funded a new, original ballet entitled Newcomers. The work, in conjunction with Imperial's TV series of the same name, portrayed life during the days of the early immigrants who settled Canada.