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The author pieces together a 36-year history that shows that ballet was a valued part of the Irish cultural landscape and that production standards, particularly between 1927 and 1945, were comparable with those of British ballet. The list of collaborators and supporters reads like a who’s who of Irish cultural life: they include Mainie Jellett, Patrick Kavanagh, Louis le Brocquy, Brinsley MacNamara, Donagh MacDonagh, Elizabeth Maconchy, Micheál Mac Liammoir, Lennox Robinson, John F Larchet, AJ Potter and FR Higgins.
The genesis for ballet created in this period is the Abbey Theatre School of Ballet, established by Ninette de Valois and WB Yeats in 1927, which staged Irish-themed ballets and Yeats’s Plays for Dancers . Its closure, in 1933, didn’t spell the end for ballet in Dublin, in spite of previous accounts. Kathrine Sorley Walker, de Valois’s biographer, states that her work in Dublin was “a failure” because nothing was left in its wake. Apart from Jill Gregory and Tony Repetto (who both went to London), Walker claims, none of the students at the Abbey Theatre School of Ballet became dancers.
The genesis for ballet created in this period is the Abbey Theatre School of Ballet, established by Ninette de Valois and WB Yeats in 1927, which staged Irish-themed ballets and Yeats’s Plays for Dancers . Its closure, in 1933, didn’t spell the end for ballet in Dublin, in spite of previous accounts. Kathrine Sorley Walker, de Valois’s biographer, states that her work in Dublin was “a failure” because nothing was left in its wake. Apart from Jill Gregory and Tony Repetto (who both went to London), Walker claims, none of the students at the Abbey Theatre School of Ballet became dancers.
