75 Years of The National Ballet
November 12th
A Date With History
DCD would like to wish The National Ballet of Canada a very happy 75th anniversary.
On Monday, November 12, 1951, an excited Toronto audience gathered at the Eaton Auditorium on College Street — right across from DCD’s current offices — to witness history. Young Canadian dancers who had been trained by Boris Volkoff, Mildred Wickson, Gweneth Lloyd, Mara McBirney, Marion Errington, Laine Metz, Bernice Harper, and others came together under the direction of Celia Franca, an English émigrée who had been invited to build a new ballet company worthy of a national moniker.
Also in the audience was Stewart James, the first manager of the National Ballet. It was James, as manager of the Volkoff Canadian Ballet, who had first approached Aileen Woods about the creation of a national company — an idea that sprang from the Canadian Ballet Festivals (1948-1954). She gathered other friends, namely Pearl Whitehead and Sydney Mulqueen, to form a National Ballet Guild that would begin the fundraising for this new company.
Stewart James took it upon himself to travel to England to study the company structure of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. While there, he asked artistic director Ninette de Valois if she could suggest a potential ballet mistress for this new Canadian company and she made the fateful suggestion of an accomplished dramatic dancer and choreographer named Celia Franca.
Mulqueen invited Franca to attend the 1950 Canadian Ballet Festival in Montréal to assess ballet in Canada. Franca found a vibrant and creative community but could also see where she could make a contribution. She returned in February 1951 as artistic director (poor Volkoff was on the outs but that’s another story), staged preliminary shows in Toronto and Montréal that summer, completed a Western audition tour in August, and debuted the new company in November. A triumphant accomplishment by any measure, and certainly one that was assisted by the foundation laid by ballet pioneers across Canada since the tours of Anna Pavlova in the 1910s and ’20s.
Included in the repertoire was a work from the Canadian Ballet Festivals, Étude by Vancouver choreographer Kay Armstrong, alongside Michel Fokine’s Les Sylphides, Franca’s The Dance of Salomé, Act I pas de deux from Giselle, and Fokine’s Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor.
– Amy Bowring, Executive & Curatorial Director
Opening performance of the Canadian National Ballet Company, Eaton Auditorium, November 12, 1951 / Jim Bolsby Collection
Earl Kraul, Natalia Butko, Katherine Stewart and Oldyna Dynowska in Kay Armstrong’s “Étude”, 1951 / Jim Bolsby Collection, Photo: Gene Draper
Celia Franca and Jury Gotshalks, His Majesty’s Theatre, Montréal, 1951 / Jim Bolsby Collection
Jim Bolsby (aka Stewart James), c. 1951 / Jim Bolsby Collection
National Ballet of Canada charter members Lois Smith and David Adams, in rehearsal, 1950s
