This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Deirdre McMahon. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 6 June 1898, Ireland
Died: 8 March 2001
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Edris Stannus, Ninette Connell
De Valois, Dame Ninette (1898–2001), ballerina, choreographer, and founder of the Royal Ballet, was born Edris Stannus 6 June 1898, at Baltiboys, near Blessington, Co. Wicklow. She was the second daughter of Lieutenant-colonel T. R. A. Stannus and Lilith Stannus (née Graydon-Smith; d. 1961). She had one sister and two younger brothers. Her father was killed in action in June 1917 while serving with the Leinster regiment. Her great-grandmother was Elizabeth Smith whose Irish journals, 1840–1850, written at Baltiboys, are a valuable source for life in Ireland before and during the Great Famine. Lilith Stannus had inherited Baltiboys but the upkeep of the house proved too expensive and the family moved to Walmer in Kent when Edris was seven. However, as Graham Bowles noted in his introduction to her Selected poems (1998), ‘Ireland, its countryside and its people . . . remained intrinsic to her whole being.’ Baltiboys survived until 1940 when it was submerged by the new Poulaphouca reservoir at Blessington.
The stage was an unlikely career for someone from Edris’s gentry background. As a child in England she took dance lessons, and she saw performances by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes during its first seasons in London. When her mother decided that she should be trained properly, she went to the Lila Field Academy for Children, whose alumni included Noël Coward and Micheál MacLiammóir. Early in 1913, after changing her name to Ninette de Valois, she went on tour with a company of children from the school who were called ‘The Wonder Children’. The touring was gruelling but it helped to instil into de Valois an iron discipline and stamina which never left her.
In September 1923 she joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and for the next two years was part of a company which was at the forefront of theatrical dance, music, and design. She was particularly influenced by the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska and was fortunate to dance in Nijinska’s two greatest ballets, Les noces and Les biches, which were created during de Valois’ first year with the company. There was a strong affinity between them: they came from two countries, Poland and Ireland, with strong national cultural traditions; they worked in a sphere dominated by men; both were interested in folk dance and in exploring how classical technique could be applied in non-classical ways. It took de Valois some time to appreciate the influence of the Russian classical tradition, which would later become a cornerstone of her work. She gained immeasurably from her years with Diaghilev but when formulating plans for her own company she was determined that in one respect she would not follow his example: she wanted a permanent company with its own base, not a touring one. The very idea of an English ballet struck many people as ludicrous. Ballet, to Diaghilev’s English public in the 1920s, meant the Russian ballet in all its glamour and it was to take decades for that prejudice to weaken.
In 1926 de Valois approached Lilian Baylis, the director of the Old Vic, with a proposal to establish the nucleus of a ballet company under the auspices of her theatre. Baylis and de Valois were alike in important essentials: they had the vision and patience to wait for long-term plans to come to fruition and developed considerable mutual respect. While Baylis could not accommodate de Valois’s plans, she offered her work coaching actors in movement and choreographing dances for plays. De Valois was grateful for the opportunity to work at the Vic but was paid very little so later in 1926 she became resident choreographer at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge, run by her cousin Terence Gray (1895–1987), which staged experimental drama. The Oresteia, in October 1926, was one of Gray’s most successful productions and de Valois’ movement for the chorus attracted particular praise. In 1927 she worked on two plays by W. B. Yeats at Cambridge, ‘On Baile’s strand’ and ‘The player queen’. Yeats saw her work and invited her to come to Dublin to set up a small ballet school at the Abbey Theatre and to help him restage his ‘Plays for dancers’ there.
From 1928 to 1934 de Valois divided her time between London, Dublin, and Cambridge. The first ballet season at the Abbey took place in January 1928. Over the next six years there were two ballet seasons each year, which were well received, and she produced nearly fifty short works from a repertory that was shared with her London group. De Valois also commissioned music and designs from Irish composers and artists. Her first collaboration with Yeats was staged in Dublin in August 1929. He had rewritten The only jealousy of Emer as the dance-play ‘Fighting the waves’ and gave her the central role of the Woman of the Sidhe; the work was performed again in London the following year. Such was de Valois’ fame in Dublin that in April 1931 she was imitated by Micheál MacLiammóir in a ballet skit called ‘La chèvre indiscrète’. In November 1931 she sent Nesta Brooking to take over the direction of the Abbey ballet school and to start a company. The school’s evening classes were particularly popular, especially the Wednesday and Friday classes for businessmen. De Valois came to Dublin every three months, staying for ten days on each visit, during which she assessed the work of the school and its pupils.
Her next collaboration with Yeats was ‘The dreaming of the bones’ (December 1931), which was followed by ‘At the hawk’s well’ (June 1933) and ‘The king of the great clock tower’ (July 1934), which Yeats wrote specially for her. This was their last collaboration as de Valois was by now busy with her new company at Sadler’s Wells and financial cutbacks later closed the Abbey school. She wrote about Yeats with great affection and insight in her memoirs Come dance with me (1957) and Step by step (1977). In the latter she commented that there was too much discussion about Yeats’s symbolism and mysticism: ‘A great poet sings to us from his heart, and how the heart arrives at all the wonderment that it finds is a matter of vision.’ To the end of her long life she regarded her work with him as a cherished experience and it also influenced her later appreciation of Samuel Beckett.
From as long ago as 1926 Baylis had nursed an ambition to renovate the dilapidated Sadler’s Wells Theatre in north London. She now did so and it opened in January 1931; the theatre became the home of an opera company and de Valois’ ballet company. The first full evening of ballet took place in May 1931 and from then on the Vic–Wells Ballet, as it became known, gradually attracted a loyal audience. Besides her work for drama and opera companies, de Valois had been choreographing her own ballets since 1925. Her best choreography was created in the 1930s, but when planning a repertoire for her company she wanted a choreographer who could develop a native English classical style, the foundation for which was to be the great Russian classical ballets, which were hardly known in the West.
In 1933 de Valois invited Nikolay Sergeyev, who had directed the Maryinsky Ballet in St Petersburg just before the revolution, to stage for her company the masterpieces by Petipa and Ivanov from the notations he had brought with him from Russia. Between 1933 and 1939 he produced ‘Coppélia’, ‘Giselle’, ‘The nutcracker’, ‘Swan lake’, and ‘The sleeping beauty’. The productions were modest both in design and performance, but they were the basis of later, grander productions which made the company’s classical reputation in the 1940s and 1950s. Frederick Ashton joined the company as resident choreographer in the 1935–6 season. For forty years his choreography shaped and defined English classical ballet and provided a wealth of roles for generations of dancers starting with Margot Fonteyn. With de Valois and Ashton, the third member of the triumvirate at the Vic–Wells company was the musical director Constant Lambert.
On 5 July 1935 de Valois married Dr Arthur Blackall Connell , a general practitioner in south-west London. Their marriage lasted for more than fifty years until his death in July 1987; they had no children. After war broke out in September 1939 Sadler’s Wells became a shelter for the homeless and the ballet company led a peripatetic existence on tour. One of the most dramatic moments in its history occurred during a tour of the Netherlands in May 1940 when it narrowly escaped the German invasion. The war years were the making of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (as the company was renamed in 1941). Regular tours taking in a large range of venues made it well known. In addition to her own work de Valois helped her husband most weekends at his London surgery. After the war she reorganised the Sadler’s Wells ballet school (1946–7) to include both academic and dance studies for its students, appointing teachers of high calibre, which led to the school’s growing reputation; she also instituted influential seminars for ballet teachers.
In 1945 the Sadler’s Wells Ballet was invited to become the resident company at Covent Garden which was due to reopen after the war. A smaller company was retained at Sadler’s Wells and became an important training ground for young dancers and choreographers, among them John Cranko and Kenneth MacMillan. Covent Garden reopened in February 1946 with a lavish version of ‘The sleeping beauty’ produced by de Valois, a major achievement since strict rationing was still in force. In 1949 the Sadler’s Wells Ballet was invited to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and had a triumphant reception. The United States became the company’s most important touring destination and there were almost annual visits until the 1960s; these tours were an important source of revenue at a time of severe financial difficulties in Britain. De Valois achieved personal success on the American lecture circuit and found that her work with Yeats attracted considerable interest among college audiences.
At Sadler’s Wells de Valois mounted works with new choreography by Cranko and MacMillan, and she later urged Cranko to take on the directorship of the Stuttgart Ballet. In 1951 she sent Celia Franca to Canada, where she founded the National Ballet of Canada and its school. In 1963 she persuaded Peggy van Praagh to become the director of the Australian Ballet. De Valois also took an active interest in other companies, which she had helped to found in the 1950s – the Turkish State Ballet and the Iranian National Ballet. In Ireland she was patron of the various companies run by Joan Denise Moriarty: the Cork Ballet Company, the Irish Theatre Ballet, and the Irish National Ballet. In 1985, when the Arts Council terminated funding for Moriarty’s company, de Valois wrote a strong letter of support to the Irish Times declaring that ‘one woman’s intelligent effort should not be forgotten or underwritten’ (10 Oct. 1985).
De Valois was made a dame of the British empire by King George VI in 1951, and in 1956 her company and school received a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth II becoming the Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet School. After thirty-two years as director, de Valois retired in 1963 and was succeeded by Frederick Ashton. However, she remained closely involved with the Royal Ballet School. In 1977 she supervised a new production of ‘The sleeping beauty’. As she neared her centenary, she retained an active interest in the company and the school, and there was also increased scholarly interest in her choreography. In Step by step she wrote that the Royal Ballet ‘was never meant to be a personal effort in a particularly specialised direction. It was to become something that would have a root in the country’s theatre.’ She was made a member of the Order of Merit in 1992. Although she was by now very frail she attended a number of events to celebrate her hundredth birthday in 1998. She died 8 March 2001 at her home, 1 Elm Bank Mansions, The Terrace, Barnes, London.