Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
It was Julia Drake, the director of communications for the National Ballet of Canada, who suggested to me several years ago that I write this book. I had published a history of the company in 1996 (Power to Rise: The Story of the National Ballet of Canada), but in the intervening years the National Ballet had changed significantly. James Kudelka, who led the company for nine years from 1996 to 2005, was acknowledged in the earlier book as an important choreographer, but made only a fleeting appearance at the end as artistic director designate. Karen Kain, the company’s artistic director since 2005, was an important presence, but only as a dancer. As artistic directors, these two individuals have transformed the company, so that the National Ballet of 2011 is a fundamentally different company from the one of 1996. Julia thought that the company’s sixtieth anniversary season would be a good time to tell the complete story.
Without the active cooperation of the company’s senior administration this book could not have been written. I want to thank Karen Kain for her gracious foreword and for the role she played personally in encouraging this project and setting the standard for helpfulness that the rest of her colleagues have followed. Among them, I am especially grateful to Julia Drake, Kevin Garland, and Diana Reitberger for answering my questions and encouraging my work.
I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to James Kudelka, who agreed to be interviewed in the midst of a hectic schedule. He gave his time generously, both in the interview and in reviewing an early draft of portions of the manuscript.
What started out to be simply a revised and updated second edition turned into much more. All of the original material was, of course, carefully edited, corrected, and brought up to date, but the final product also contains two substantial new chapters, an extensive new opening, and new illustrations, many of them now in colour. The appendices, listing the company’s itinerary and personnel, have been corrected and updated to the end of the 2010–11 season, a mammoth task in itself. One chapter (on board affairs and finances) has been omitted. So Passion to Dance builds on previous work, but stands on its own as a comprehensive history of the mature company, a full decade into the twenty-first century.
Many people helped in the creation of Power to Rise, some fifteen years ago. Though I have not repeated the earlier acknowledgements here, my debt to all of those individuals remains enormous. All who agreed to be interviewed, both for the 1996 volume and for the present one, are acknowledged, with thanks, at the beginning of the “Notes” section of this book.
In the past two years, while preparing Passion to Dance, I received invaluable help from Sharon Vanderlinde, the company’s senior manager — education and archives, and from Adrienne Nevile, its archives coordinator. Adrienne guided me through the National Ballet’s rich archival resources and answered my many questions and requests for information cheerfully and with good grace. Pamela Ouzounian, the board secretary, responded to countless questions relating to board activities. At the company, Laurie Nemetz, Bridget Benn, and Brianne Price helped to collect and verify the information that makes up the various appendices to this volume. At Canada’s National Ballet School, Katharine Harris supplied information about graduates of the school who went on to dance with the company. Setareh Sarmadi did the scans of all the photographs supplied by the National Ballet of Canada. Both Julia Drake and Catherine Chang arranged my interview schedules at the company. Ernest Abugov and Jeff Morris allowed me to watch a performance from the wings and gave me a new admiration for the technical and professional skills that keep a show running smoothly. My thanks to all of them.
I am grateful to Jocelyn Allen for permission to use a photograph from her personal collection, and to Amy Bowring, director of research at Dance Collection Danse, for locating and giving me permission to use the photo of Celia Franca and Erik Bruhn in The Lovers’ Gallery. Carol Bishop Gwyn answered many questions and allowed me to read her new work, The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca, in manuscript.
With Passion to Dance, Dundurn Press continues its strong commitment to producing books about the arts in Canada. My thanks to the Press and to Kirk Howard, its president and publisher, for this ongoing support. At Dundurn, my special thanks to Michael Carroll, associate publisher and editorial director, to Marta Warner, publicity assistant, and to Cheryl Hawley, for her careful final editing of a long and complex manuscript.
My greatest debt of gratitude is to my friend, Ramsay Derry, and my wife, Lynn Neufeld. Ramsay acted as editor and mentor for this project, as he has done for my other books. His eagle eye and alert editorial sense have improved the text in countless ways, and saved me from embarrassing errors and questionable turns of phrase. Lynn’s superhuman work and devotion to accuracy in bringing the appendices up to date are acknowledged in the note at the beginning of those appendices. Her patience and unflagging support have made this, and all my work, possible.
In preparing this book, Lynn and I spent many hours at the Walter Carsen Centre for the National Ballet of Canada, where the archives are housed and the company leads its offstage professional life. As I observed the dancers, they seemed like perfectly ordinary young people, dressed in dancers’ motley, preoccupied, busy, hurrying from class to rehearsal, getting coffee, chatting during their breaks. However, as I spoke with them, and with non-dancing members of the company in preparation for this book, I found them to be quite extraordinary — thoughtful, intelligent, articulate, generous — in a word, gracious toward the curious stranger disrupting their routines with questions and interviews. The gracefulness of their profession seemed to condition the rest of their behaviour as well. For all their grace, then, I thank them. It reaffirms ballet’s past, and assures its future.
Foreword
Foreword
by Karen Kain
When all is said and done, a ballet company, like any performing arts organization, will be remembered primarily for what it accomplishes on the stage. How well it brings to life the works it mounts and articulates a particular choreographic vision, how powerfully and memorably it connects with its audiences, and how deeply it enriches the artistic tradition of which it is a part, will always be the principal criteria by which it is defined and valued.
But at the same time, a ballet company is an institution that exists in history, the product of a particular time and place and range of forces. It is a living, workaday operation made up of many individuals, all with different talents, backgrounds, and personalities, and all intricately enmeshed not just with the art of ballet, but with the broader processes of the larger culture. Marked by ups and downs, elation and struggle, and the ongoing effort and sheer determined labour of making the whole endeavour function year in and year out, it is a story of sweat, ingenuity, love, high purpose, courage, and belief.
When James Neufeld’s Power to Rise: The Story of The National Ballet of Canada was published in 1996, many people were aware of our work on stage. In the forty-five years since our founding, we had established ourselves as one of the best classical companies on the international scene and had long been embraced within Canada as one of the country’s brightest cultural jewels. Many of our dancers were widely recognized for their talent both at home and abroad.
Fewer people, though, were aware of the extraordinary story of the company’s beginnings, of its amazing and redoubtable founders, of the people both on the stage and behind the scenes who had shaped and nurtured a fragile and fledgling dance troupe into one of the glories of modern classical ballet. James’s book told that story. And it told it with both a scholar’s diligence and a ballet-lover’s passion. As insightful about the financial, structural, and administrative realities of running the company as it was about the artistic and production decisions, repertoire, casting, and choreography, the book brought the National Ballet’s astonishing narrative to thrilling life, capturing a good part of the tenor of the times in Canadian culture along the way. Above all, the book captured the personalities of the extraordinary number of people involved in the story, in so many different capacities, with real understanding. For anyone wanting to know how the wonderful company they saw on stage had come into being and grown, they had only to read James’s book.
Karen Kain, artistic director,...
