When I was growing up in Windsor, Ontario, it was a big deal when the National Ballet of Canada came to town. It was a symbolic bit of Canada appearing in a place otherwise overwhelmed by American culture.
The details are a distant memory, although I’m pretty sure that I went with my elementary school class and that we probably saw “The Nutcracker.” I certainly had no idea who any of the dancers were.
Unlike the National Gallery of Canada and the National Arts Centre, the National Ballet is not a federal institution. While it receives some government money, the dance company has always been a nonprofit organization run by a board of directors.
As the National Ballet celebrates its 75th anniversary, Martha Schabas, an arts critic, a novelist and a contributor to The Times’s dance coverage, has written an engaging history of the company and the never-ending debate over what defines Canadian ballet.
I spoke with Martha, who lives in Toronto, this week about her article. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
The fact that Toronto’s only auditorium 75 years ago was in the Eaton’s department store suggests that there wasn’t much of a performing arts scene in the city at the time.
It was a bit of a cultural wasteland. There was a small symphony at the time, but the Canadian Opera Company wasn’t up and running yet. There was no real theater company in Toronto, and the theater culture that has since thrived outside of Toronto — like the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival — didn’t exist either.
So when this 29-year-old woman from London showed up, she had to essentially convince the country that it needed a cultural scene.
How did that 29-year-old, Celia Franca, come to appear in Toronto to build a ballet company with national aspirations?
There was a group of women who had seen Sadler’s Wells — the ballet company that would later become the Royal Ballet Company in London — perform in Toronto a few times, and they saw it as the platonic ideal of a ballet company. That’s what they aspired to.
They managed to get an envoy off to London to speak with the head of Sadler’s Wells, Ninette de Valois. She had been Celia’s boss and hadn’t been a great fan of her as a ballerina. But she was very impressed with her ability to choreograph and her facility as a ballet mistress.
The National Ballet seems to have had a shoestring beginning despite its founders’ ambitions.
They hadn’t come up with enough money for Celia’s salary. So she was working officially in the box office above the Eaton’s department store in the Eaton Auditorium.
On top of that, for their rehearsal hall they had the old St. Lawrence Hall, which at that time was a shelter for men. They were given it with the proviso that they vacate in the winter to allow the men to come back. There are these anecdotes of the company being in rehearsal and a man forgetting that it’s off season and wandering in.
What was Franca like?
Before I wrote this article, I’d heard that she was someone who you either love or hate. But while doing my research, I heard only praise. I heard that she was strong. I heard that she was courageous. But I heard none of the negativity.
I wonder how many of those negative stories come from the fact that she was pleading her case in front of businessmen. Her board was all male. All the money in Toronto at that time was monopolized by men. And here was this very young woman with no business experience making these strong demands and not relenting.
When did the touring start?
They toured from the outset because they didn’t have enough of an audience in Toronto to largely just stay in Toronto as they do now. Celia had aspired from the outset to tour everywhere, but I don’t think she quite realized just how big and cold Canada is.
It was very expensive for them to tour with an orchestra. So there are also these anecdotes of Celia being unable to pay her dancers, and all of them scrounging together for pennies and change and figuring out a way to get through it.
It was really a labor of love for the company.
How important to the National Ballet did international tours later become?
It’s the Canadian cliché: We need to prove ourselves internationally before we can take ourselves seriously. They start going to New York in the ’60s and the ’70s. Then they produced Karen Kain, who was really an international star. She was dancing with Nureyev at the Met and getting rave reviews internationally. So it became not just a national force, but an international one.
Is there such a thing as Canadian ballet?
There’s no real such thing as Canadian ballet, other than the fact that the country’s investment in ballet and in the company for the past 75 years has created something really remarkable that we can be proud of. And it involves many Canadian artists, be they dancers or choreographers, and many Canadian arts administrators and musicians.
But is it different in any inherent way than what’s happening at the American Ballet Theater or at the Dutch National Ballet? I don’t think so. And does it matter? I don’t think so either. Canada is fundamentally a country of immigrants and a country of Indigenous people, and we want our culture to reflect that diversity. It’s Canadian because it’s here.
What’s the place of ballet in the 21st century?
Ballet is, in many ways, a controversial medium in the modern world. One might argue that it celebrates a physical ideal that is problematic. This sort of feminized ideal of beauty that champions this idea of fragility. There’s something problematic that there are all these women who are turned into swans and sylphs. They are deprived of any autonomy, and they’re victimized. Most ballet heroines end up dead by the end of the ballet.
But that has inspired interesting things to come into being. Contemporary dance in Canada and Montreal and Quebec has traditionally been very irreverent about the way that it produces dance.
The National Ballet School has graduated so many incredible artists since it was founded in 1959. And the National Ballet of Canada remains the icon of classical ballet in the country, and that’s important.
When was the first time you saw the National Ballet perform?
It would have been “The Nutcracker” at the O’Keefe Centre, probably 1985. I don’t know for sure if Karen Kain was dancing, but I’d like to believe she was.
My mom would subscribe to the ballet every year. At that point, you had to call in to find out what the casting was. We would have to wait to find how many performances we got in which Karen Kain would be dancing. Neither of us had a technical knowledge of ballet at that point. I later trained in ballet. But at 5, I didn’t know anything other than I needed to covet Karen Kain.
Carney’s ‘deepest possible partnership’
After a summit meeting in Montreal with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and António Costa, president of the European Council, Prime Minister Mark Carney said that Canada planned to become an “associate member” of the European Union by next June.
That category, which was initially proposed by Ms. von der Leyen earlier this year, doesn’t actually exist. But Canada and Europe formally agreed to a series of negotiations that will define it.
All three leaders said they expected increased trade and investment as well as greater cooperation in a variety of areas.
However it eventually looks, the announcement was another step in Mr. Carney’s efforts to distance Canada from the United States.
Trans Canada
-
Happy Halloween! The sales of horror books are up by nearly 40 percent from last year, and specialty bookstores that cater to the genre are popping up everywhere, like Little Ghosts Books in Toronto.
-
The Trump administration said Canadian officials were trying to sway the midterm elections for Democrats. Prime Minister Mark Carney said those claims had “no merit.”
-
In 2019, the activist Greta Thunberg headlined a rally for roughly 10,000 people in Vancouver. The event coincided with the filing of a lawsuit against the Canadian government by a group of young people who said that the country was not moving fast enough to transition away from fossil fuels, and was thus violating the rights of Canadian citizens to life, liberty and security. This week, the lawsuit went to trial.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
How are we doing? We’re eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to [email protected].
Like this email? Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here.
The post 75 Years On, the National Ballet of Canada ‘Remains the Icon’ appeared first on New York Times.
