In a bright studio wedged between Lake Ontario and a smoggy Toronto expressway, four ballerinas spent an October afternoon practicing a series of trust exercises.
The Act 3 pas de deux in John Cranko’s “Romeo and Juliet” demands rehearsal time; the ballerina must perform staggering dives and lunges without ending up on the floor. To do it justice, a dancer has to give the illusion of recklessness, a test of both artistry and guts, qualities that have characterized the National Ballet of Canada since its founding.
On Oct. 31, the production will open the National Ballet’s 75th anniversary at the Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts in Toronto, the glass and concrete theater the ballet shares with the Canadian Opera Company. “Romeo and Juliet” is a nod to company history; in 1964, the National Ballet was the first company to perform Cranko’s version outside of the Stuttgart Ballet in Germany, where it had premiered two years earlier — a coup for a fledgling troupe struggling to establish a diverse repertoire, an international reputation and some manner of distinct Canadian identity.
When the New York Times critic Clive Barnes visited Toronto in 1966 to review the production, he called the ballet “spectacular,” noting the dancers’ “vitality” and the company’s importance in North America. But he was less sure whether there was anything distinctly Canadian about what he saw onstage. “In Toronto they talk of what is and what is not Canadian ballet. Perhaps that elusive Canadian ballet is simply Canadians in Canada dancing as well as they can the best ballets they can find,” he wrote.
Fifty years later, that conversation continues. Canadians remain undecided about how Canadian their ballet company is, what that means and whether the subject is in any way important. As the National Ballet celebrates this landmark year, it has plenty to be proud of. It has toured the world, amassed an impressive repertoire, created international stars, welcomed important choreographers and commissioned innovative work. But unlike companies indebted to a particular choreographer or associated with a specific technique, the National Ballet doesn’t come with a built-in identity, other than its purported Canadianness. And that itself is up for debate: Is it a Canadian ballet company or just a first-rate ballet company based in Canada?
Hope Muir, the artistic director since 2022, suggested that the distinction was a bit outdated. “Dancers are so international these days, they go to summer schools all over the world, they have online access to so many styles and techniques,” she said between rehearsals. “Of course we’ll hire a Canadian if there’s an option, but we are all so global at this point.”
Veronica Tennant, a principal dancer with the National Ballet from 1964 to 1989, said the company’s character had less to do with nationalism than with its pioneering essence: “If there’s a defining word for the National Ballet of Canada, starting at the beginning and continuing all the way through every artistic director, every dancer — it’s spirit.”
That spirit dates back to February 1951, when a striking 29-year-old woman from a poor Polish-Jewish family in East London arrived in Toronto with a mandate to build a ballet company from scratch. Celia Franca (born Franks, changed a generation earlier from Frankelstein) had danced in London with Ballet Rambert as a teenager before joining the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1941, where she performed soloist roles beside Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer. She was widely praised as a character dancer, but it was generally accepted she didn’t have the technical facility of a great ballerina.
What Franca did have was personality, vision and grit. She left the Sadler’s Wells company in 1946 and reinvented herself as a ballet mistress and choreographer. When a group of Canadian businessmen and society women sent an envoy to London to ask Ninette de Valois, founder and director of Sadler’s Wells Ballet, whom she would recommend to start a company in Toronto, she didn’t hesitate, or so the story goes: “Celia Franca, if you can get her.”
The city that Franca arrived in was not a cultural hot spot; the Canadian-born writer and painter Wyndham Lewis had described Toronto as a “sanctimonious icebox.” While it had a good university and a small orchestra, the two institutions that would become the bedrock of the country’s arts scene — CBC Television and the Stratford Festival — didn’t exist yet.
But Canadians were increasingly interested in distinguishing themselves both from their colonial past and their American neighbors. And Toronto was experiencing a postwar economic boom, with a growing elite that wanted to enjoy its newfound affluence.
At the center of this milieu were the “Three Ladies,” society wives who were instrumental in bringing Franca to Canada. They loved ballet and were good at convincing wealthy philanthropists to love it, too. In January 1951, Sadler’s Wells performed five sold-out shows at the Royal Alexandra Theater. Clearly there was enthusiasm in Toronto for a permanent ballet company.
The idea that the company be a national, and not just local, institution, came partly from a desire to model it after Sadler’s Wells (now the Royal Ballet) and its unrivaled status in England. Another reason was that Canada already had a popular ballet company: the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Founded in 1939, it toured across the west to great acclaim.
The Three Ladies wanted to outdo the Winnipeg company in both quality and scale and appreciated Franca’s grand ambitions and uncompromising standards. Franca made it clear that she wanted to train world-class dancers and perform on the best stages in New York and Europe. Music was also central to her vision; she insisted on a first-rate orchestra no matter the expense.
Money was an issue from the start. There was no public funding (the Canada Council for the Arts, the government’s arts funder, didn’t begin until 1957), which meant the ballet company would have to rely entirely on donations and ticket sales. The hiring committee hadn’t come up with enough to pay Franca’s salary so she was set up with a box-office job at Eaton Auditorium, where the company would perform, to cover the missing funds.
Franca was undaunted. She scoured the country for talent, hustling for media attention while fund-raising at every opportunity.
There were many “half-trained” dancers, she said in a 2001 CBC documentary, “and all trained in different styles. I had to get them into a cohesive style. I had six weeks in which to do it before we opened in November of 1951 at the Eaton Auditorium.”
On that rainy evening, the company performed an excerpt from “Les Sylphides,” Franca’s original interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” a pas de deux from “Giselle” and a short ballet by a Canadian choreographer. Critics were enthusiastic.
Over the next 24 years, Franca, who died in 2007, built an eclectic repertoire while commissioning at least 30 new ballets. She had bruising arguments with her all-male board, usually about money, whether for a new production or to establish the National Ballet School, which opened in 1959.
“I had to sell my ideas to the board,” she said in the documentary. She fought back when they accused her of not knowing the value of a dollar. “My problem was I couldn’t get hold of the bloody dollar!”
Franca fought for her dancers, too. When Rudolf Nureyev mounted a lavish production of “The Sleeping Beauty” on the company in 1972, he expected Franca to hire international stars to dance opposite him. “She championed us Canadian ballerinas,” Tennant said. By the mid-1970s, the company had produced its biggest homegrown star to date: Karen Kain, who won over audiences everywhere with her emotional depth and killer technique.
Still there were grumblings that Franca was merely creating a mini-Royal Ballet in Toronto rather than building something singularly Canadian. For the first 40 years, the company mostly had Canadian-trained dancers led by foreign-trained directors. The National Ballet didn’t have a significant homegrown artistic director until 1989, when Reid Anderson was hired. (David Haber, a former stage manager, led briefly in 1974-75.) And Anderson’s arrival inspired a wave of resignations. Several dancers considered him a step down from the Danish danseur noble Erik Bruhn, who ran the company from 1983 until his death in 1986, and they left to join companies in the United States.
When Muir took over in 2022 (after two Ontario-born National Ballet School grads, James Kudelka and Kain), her Canadian citizenship was little more than a ticked box on her résumé. She had left Canada as a teenager, trained at the newly formed English National Ballet School and built a career in England and the United States.
And yet there’s something about Muir’s leadership that seems to echo Franca’s. Muir is determined to shake up the classical tradition and challenge her dancers with innovative work. Her acquisitions and commissions have brought new choreographers to the Four Seasons stage, some who work within a classical vocabulary (Christian Spuck, Helen Pickett), and others who are pushing at its borders (Alonzo King, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Emma Portner).
Muir is also determined to make the company a leader in diversity and inclusion. Like several other ballet companies, the National Ballet has axed the convention of pale tights on dancers of all skin colors, allowing the company members to wear tights and shoes that match their flesh-tone, even in the most traditional ballets. Muir has made it protocol to have an intimacy coordinator in rehearsal when a production includes simulated sex or sexual violence. And she hired the company’s first trans woman as an apprentice, an exceptional National Ballet School graduate who dances on pointe. “Talent is talent,” she said.
But while the National Ballet may be more diverse than ever, it’s less Canadian trained. This season, only 30 of its 76 dancers attended Canadian training institutions, significantly fewer than under past leaders and a point of contention for taxpayers since those institutions (and the company) receive public funding. And when Muir appointed a resident choreographer, a role that hasn’t existed since 1996, she appointed the British David Dawson rather than a Canadian. For Muir, the considerations were artistic: “I really believe that he’s one of the only choreographers working today who is using all of the classical technique to push the art forward.”
Franca also made decisions that championed artistic quality and relevance. And, like Muir, she was a savvy leader who understood the importance of speaking to the contemporary moment.
“Celia loved the word ‘guts.’ And you know something? I think Hope has guts,” Tennant said. “The best part is — you don’t know what she’s going to do next.”
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