Toronto-born Alison Sutcliffe became a member of the Association in 1933 when she travelled overseas to study and take her ballet exams. Originally trained by Leon Leonidoff and Florence Rogge in Toronto in the 1920s, Sutcliffe danced for three seasons with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in New York City in the late 1920s and is likely the first Canadian to join the Met Ballet. She returned to Toronto in 1929 just after the stock market crash and soon found work teaching ballet at Cecil DaCosta’s studio as a complement to the ballroom classes he taught. She quickly developed contacts at Hart House Theatre and the Toronto Conservatory of Music and carved out a place for herself as a teacher of ballet, Spanish dance, and Expressionist modern dance at the Conservatory, while she also served as the Director of Dances at Hart House Theatre. This involved choreographing danced sections of theatre productions by directors such as Andrew Allan, Roy Mitchell, and Dorothy Goulding, among others. Her travels to the UK in 1933 included classes with Phyllis Bedells, Adeline Genée, and Felix Demery, all founding members of the RAD, and led to passing her Elementary ballet exam in June followed by Intermediate and Advanced exams in September. She was also able to expand on the Spanish dance training she had begun in New York by taking classes with Elsa Brunelleschi in London. Future summer travels throughout the 1930s involved studies with Expressionists Mary Wigman in Germany and Kurt Jooss in England, which informed both her teaching and her choreography

Sutcliffe is a figure who is often missing from the story of the RAD in Canada. She deposited a significant archival collection to Dance Collection Danse when she was nearly a century old and, consequently, her true and significant role in the history has since been revealed. Though she taught for only about a decade, and was a bit of a rebel when it came to following the RAD syllabus, she is the catalyst for a series of events that led to the RAD’s substantial expansion into Canada. It was Sutcliffe who introduced Bettina Byers to the RAD method and took her to England in the 1930s to study with RAD teachers such as Phyllis Bedells. Bedells subsequently encouraged Byers to become the first organizer for the RAD in Canada. In her capacity as organizer, Byers assisted Adeline Genée with her lecture-demonstration tour to central Canada during the Second World War – another key event in the growth of the RAD in Canada. Without Sutcliffe, the Canadian expansion of the RAD would undoubtedly have been delayed.