Betty Oliphant – 2024 Inductee
DCD Hall of fame Inductee
Betty Oliphant, C.C..
Betty Oliphant, C.C. was born in London, England in 1918. She had a passion for dance and fought her middle-class British family for ballet lessons. In the late 1920s and ’30s, she studied ballet along with stage, tap, and ballroom dancing. When she was 13, she was teaching and dancing professionally, and at 17 she opened her own school above the Twinings Tea Emporium in London. During the Second World War she worked as an ambulance driver, as a choreographer of pantomimes, and also for a British Army touring group – “The Blue Pencils”. She arrived in Canada in 1947 as a war bride with her Canadian serviceman husband and their two children. She then opened a school on Sherbourne Street, and helped found the Canadian Dance Teachers’ Association. Betty was the ballet mistress for eight years and later the Associate Artistic Director of The National Ballet of Canada.
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Central to her approach as a ballet teacher was the importance of mastering technique, with the sole purpose of achieving freedom of expression. In 1959 “Miss O”, as she was called, co-founded Canada’s National Ballet School with Celia Franca guiding it to gain an international reputation for superb ballet training. She helped re-organize the Royal Danish Ballet School in 1978. Her training methods produced some of Canada’s most renowned ballet dancers including Veronica Tennant, Martine van Hamel, Karen Kain, Frank Augustyn, Kevin Pugh, and Rex Harrington, and choreographers such as James Kudelka and John Alleyne.
Portrait Photo:
Christopher Darling
