Dame Ninette de Valois (born Edris Stannus; 6 June 1898 – 8 March 2001) was an Irish-born British ballet dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director of classical ballet. She danced professionally with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, later establishing The Royal Ballet, one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century and one of the leading ballet companies in the world. She also established the Royal Ballet School and the touring company which became the Birmingham Royal Ballet. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of ballet and as the "godmother" of English and Irish ballet.
De Valois was born Edris Stannus on 6 June 1898 at Baltyboys House, an 18th-century manor house near the town of Blessington, County Wicklow, Ireland, then still part of the United Kingdom. A member of a gentry family, she was the second daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Stannus DSO, a British Army officer, and Elizabeth Graydon Smith, a glassmaker known as "Lilith Stannus". She was the maternal great-granddaughter of the diarist Elizabeth Grant Smith and the maternal great-great-granddaughter of Scottish politician John Peter Grant. Through her mother she was also the great-grandniece of Sir John Peter Grant and a first cousin twice removed of Lady Strachey. In 1905 she moved to England, to live with her grandmother in Kent. She started attending ballet lessons in 1908, at the age of ten.
At the age of thirteen Stannus began her professional training at the Lila Field Academy for Children. It was at this time that she changed her name to Ninette de Valois and made her professional debut as a principal dancer in pantomime at the Lyceum Theatre in the West End.
In 1919, at the age of 21, she was appointed principal dancer of the Beecham Opera, which was then the resident opera company at the Royal Opera House. She continued to study ballet with notable teachers, including Edouard Espinosa, Enrico Cecchetti and Nicholas Legat.
In 1923, de Valois joined the Ballets Russes, a renowned ballet company founded by the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. She remained with the company for three years, performing around Europe and being promoted to the rank of Soloist, and creating roles in some of the company's most famous ballets, including Les biches and Le Train Bleu. During this time, she was also mentor to Alicia Markova who was only a child at the time, but would eventually be recognized as a Prima Ballerina Assoluta and one of the most famous English dancers of all time. Later in her life, Valois said that everything she knew about how to run a ballet company she learned from working with Diaghilev. She stepped back from regular intense dancing in 1924, after doctors detected damage from a previously undiagnosed case of childhood polio.
London and Dublin dance schools
After leaving the Ballets Russes, in 1927, de Valois established the Academy of Choreographic Art, a dance school for girls in London and the Abbey Theatre School of Ballet, Dublin. In London, her ultimate goal was to form a repertory ballet company, with dancers drawn from the school and trained in a uniquely British style of ballet. Students of the school were given professional stage experience performing in opera and plays staged at The Old Vic, with de Valois choreographing several short ballets for the theatre. Lilian Baylis was the owner of the Old Vic at that time, and in 1928 she also acquired and refurbished the Sadler's Wells Theatre, with the intention of creating a sister theatre to the Old Vic. She employed de Valois to stage full-scale dance productions at both theatres and when the Sadler's Wells theatre re-opened in 1931, de Valois moved her school into studios there, under the new name, the Sadler's Wells Ballet School. A ballet company was also formed, known as the Vic-Wells Ballet. The Vic-Wells ballet company and school would be the predecessors of today's Royal Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Royal Ballet School.
Also in 1927, in May, W. B. Yeats, poet and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, suggested to de Valois while she was visiting Dublin the establishment of a ballet school in the city, and from around November, she took responsibility for the setting up and the programming of the Abbey Theatre School of Ballet in Dublin. This, the first of perhaps five Irish national ballet school projects during the 20th century, ran until June 1933, and 7 of the 16 final students continued in active dancing, with 2 founding the next national ballet project, the "Abbey School of Ballet".
During these years de Valois produced a number of ballets each year, mostly to her own choreography. She also worked with music specially commissioned from Irish contemporary composers such as Harold R. White's The Faun (April 1928), Arthur Duff's The Drinking Horn and John F. Larchet's Bluebeard (both in July 1933).
At its formation, the Vic-Wells Ballet had only six female dancers, with de Valois working as lead dancer and choreographer. The company performed its first full ballet production on 5 May 1931 at the Old Vic, with Anton Dolin as guest star. Its first performance at Sadler's Wells Theatre came a few days later, on 15 May 1931. As a result of the success of the company, de Valois hired new dancers and choreographers. She retired fully from the stage herself in 1933, after Alicia Markova joined the company and was appointed as Prima Ballerina.
Under de Valois's direction, the company flourished in the 1930s, becoming one of the first Western dance companies to perform the classical ballet repertoire made famous by the Imperial Russian Ballet. She also set about establishing a British repertory, engaging Frederick Ashton as Principal Choreographer and Constant Lambert as musical director in 1935. She also choreographed a number of her own ballets, including her most notable works, Job (1931), The Rake's Progress (1935) and Checkmate (1937).
Eventually, the company included many of the most famous ballet dancers in the world, including Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Moira Shearer, Beryl Grey, and Michael Somes. In 1949 the Sadler Wells Ballet was a sensation when they toured the United States. Fonteyn instantly became an international celebrity.
In 1947, de Valois established the first ballet school in Turkey. Formed as the ballet school of the Turkish State Opera and Ballet in Istanbul, the school was later absorbed into and became the School of Music & Ballet at Ankara State Conservatory, a department of the Hacettepe University.
In 1956, the ballet company and school were granted a Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth II, and formally linked. De Valois made sure that her company had a constant supply of talent, and in later years it had such stars as Svetlana Beriosova, Antoinette Sibley, Nadia Nerina, Lynn Seymour, and, most sensationally, Rudolf Nureyev. She also invited choreographers such as Sir Kenneth MacMillan and George Balanchine to work with her company. She formally retired from the Royal Ballet directorship in 1963, but her presence continued to loom large in the company, and the same was true with the School, from which she formally retired in 1970.
De Valois acted as patron or supporter to a number of other projects, including the Cork Ballet Company and the Irish National Ballet Company in Ireland.
As with ballet in Britain and Ireland, de Valois exerted a great deal of influence on the development of ballet in Turkey, which had no prior history with the art form. The Turkish Government invited her to research the possibility of establishing a ballet school in the country, and she subsequently visited the country in the 1940s, going on to open a school following the same model as her Sadler's Wells Ballet School in London. Initially, very few people took the project seriously, but the school did become firmly established under the direction of Molly Lake and Travis Kemp, who in 1954 had undertaken to run it at de Valois' request; this ultimately led to the development of the Turkish State Ballet.