Ninette de Valois: how her philosophical convictions and creative ambitions shaped an ethos for ballet in England, 1925-1934.

This thesis builds on the work of Kathrine Sorley Walker, Beth Genné, and Richard Allen Cave to re-examine the philosophical convictions that led Ninette de Valois to found the Academy of Choreographic Art and the Vic-Wells Ballet (later The Royal Ballet School and Companies). It identifies a range of productive tensions between ‘classical ballet’ traditions and ‘modern dance’ reforms that became fundamental to her pedagogy and choreography. Adopting Alexandra Carter’s approach to history as a ‘web’ of discourses, it connects de Valois’s theoretical writings and creative practices to the collaborative networks and operational structures she established between 1925-1934.

A critical revision of de Valois’s agency within the English repertory theatre movement shows that her personal choreographic idiom was formed at her Academy and Terence Gray’s Festival Theatre, rather than at the Old Vic or the Camargo Society. De Valois’s first authorial choreography, The Arts of the Theatre (1925), pre-dated her Academy. My discovery of Ursula Moreton’s notation for the piece in The Royal Ballet School archive enabled me to re-create this ‘lost’ ballet. Guided, in part, by the concept of dance reconstruction as ‘the re-enactment of past thought’ (Larraine Nicholas), the process culminated in 2021, with a full performance by Royal Ballet School students (included as a video appendix). Unexpected outcomes of the re-creation linked de Valois’s earliest work to Anna Pavlova, and to Margaret Morris’s ideas about movement and painting.

Bronislava Nijinska’s enduring influence on de Valois is explored within an overall framework of feminist historiography that interrogates the ‘pervasive sexism’ in ballet with which women have had to reckon (Lynn Garafola). The patriarchal narratives surrounding de Valois’s partnerships with Marie Rambert and Lilian Baylis prompt questions about why women’s work in the theatre is so often explained ‘in sets of negative antitheses’ (Tracy Davis). Contesting de Valois’s own self-effacing accounts, this thesis asks why she underplayed the significance of her innovative choreography and leadership, and considers how her selective silences still resonate in ballet today.