Part 1

Background: Borovansky Ballet and Anne Mackintosh

The back cover blurb of The Heart’s Ground, a Life of Anne Elder by Julia Hamer (Lauranton Books, Melbourne, 2018), claims ‘Anne Elder was a dancer with the Borovansky Ballet in the 1940s’ but a quick check of the definitive list of the personnel Borovansky recruited to his company shows no such name. What the blurb doesn’t mention is that Elder danced under her birth surname Mackintosh, which is on the list.

That list, included at the beginning of the footnotes below, is one of the cornerstones of the Borovansky Ballet’s documented history and it appears at the start of Frank Salter’s Borovansky, the man who made Australian ballet (Wildcat Press, 1980), one of the only two books to date that deal specifically and exclusively with the Borovansky Ballet. The other book is Borovansky Ballet in Australia and New Zealand by Norman Macgeorge (F.W. Cheshire, 1946). Anne Mackintosh has more than a glancing connection with both and now, thanks to the new biography, we not only learn more about that but also discover some leads from which we can piece together more of history of the Borovansky Ballet.

So, although the focus of Hamer’s The Heart’s Ground, a Life of Anne Elder is on Elder as the noted poet she eventually became, it not only offers a deep insight into this enigmatic and temperamentally volatile creative woman’s life, it also adds to the documentation of Borovansky Ballet history.

While the name Elder is not on Salter’s list, a cursory glance at his index corrects any confusion by not only naming ‘Elder, Anne Chloe’ but adding ‘(see Mackintosh)’. Even though Anne Mackintosh was not what we might call a dancer’s dancer, she did spend ten years of her life in the pursuit of dance. As a result she left one of the important early records of Borovansky and his enterprise because she was in fact an important member of Borovansky’s retinue from when he founded the Borovansky Ballet Academy (known in its first year as The Academy of Russian Ballet) in 1939, then his company in 1940. She remained with Borovansky until—by coincidence—just before the company went professional under the aegis of J C Williamson in 1944. Furthermore, Salter relied heavily on a tribute to Borovansky, written by Elder (the surname under which she published), to create a vibrant portrayal of Borovansky during the formative years of his ballet enterprise. That tribute is probably the first and only one produced so close to Borovansky’s lifetime (1902–1959) and as such it is invaluable. Thanks to Salter’s use of it, it is the one that by its example set the trend for later memorialists. We now have it, published for the first time in full, thanks to Hamer’s biography where it is included as an appendix.

Remarkably, and until very recently, formally recorded documentation of the Borovansky era relied almost exclusively on the memories, particularly in the way of oral histories, and memoirs of its former members, especially Barry Kitcher’s From Gaolbird to Lyrebird, a life in Australian ballet (print edition Front Page, 2001; revised and expanded eBook edition BryshaWilson Press, 2016). Aside from the books by Salter and Macgeorge, the only exception was Edward H. Pask’s Ballet in Australia, the Second Act 1940–1980 (OUP, 1982). Germinating contemporaneously with Salter’s book, it provided much concise information, chronologically organised, about the work of Borovansky and his company: its personnel, repertoire and performances. Macgeorge’s book, written in the early days of the Borovansky Ballet as a professional company, is an ambitious compilation of information about it, abundantly illustrated by photographs and images of artworks. As such it is a critically significant record.

Elder’s influential Borovansky tribute was started while Borovansky was still alive and published after his death in an abridged version in Overland. Titled Borovansky: Strong Man; Sad Pierrot, Memories of a Maestro from a forgotten dancer, it appeared in Issue 17, 1960 and again in the 1965 anthology An Overland Muster, Selections From Overland, 1954–1965 (ed Stephen Murray-Smith Jacaranda Press).

When Edouard Borovansky and his wife Xenia opened their academy in Melbourne, they embarked on an enterprise that permeated the subsequent history of ballet in Australia. They were serious about training professional ballet artists and among their first students was Anne Mackintosh, who was serious about becoming a ballet artist.

The Borovanskys’ 20-year quest in training local dancers and establishing a professional Australian company that developed the dancers’ talents and built audiences for the art form enabled the formation of The Australian Ballet in 1962. More than half of the founding Australian Ballet personnel came from the Borovansky Ballet.¹ And while the background to The Australian Ballet’s genesis is multi-faceted and intricately woven from various separate strands, it is a fact that the new company’s three Australian principals and more than half of the remaining dancers, the musical director, the stage director, the associate ballet master and the assistant ballet mistress were all Borovansky alumni. Even the artistic director Peggy van Praagh first came to Australia from her native England, at the invitation of J C Williamson to direct Borovansky’s company after his death in 1959. Borovansky had in fact attempted to recruit her in 1958 as ballet mistress and artistic associate.²

Although it was at the closing performance of the Borovansky Ballet that van Praagh made her impassioned plea for a government subsidised ballet company and urged the audience to lobby for it, once the new venture received the go-ahead, the memory of Borovansky found no place in it, despite the fact that his company was on various occasions in both the 1940s and 1950s billed as ‘The Borovansky Australian Ballet’ and ‘Borovansky Australian Ballet’.³ Anne Elder was among the first to note this and recorded in her diary, ‘I was quite horrified to hear about the suggestion to drop “Borovansky” from the company (name)—if they want a memorial for him surely that is a more honest one than to name an RAD (Royal Academy of Dance) scholarship after him.’ (p 225). She had already shown an almost prophetic perception of the need to record something of Borovansky’s phenomenal achievement even while the man was alive and began composing her tribute to that effect.

Author Julia Hamer, whose mother April was Elder’s younger sister, pieces the biography together from family archives, which include a good deal of correspondence and other documentation such as Elder’s diary entries, other text sources, various interviews, her own memories and valuably extensive use of Elder’s poetry. The material is chronologically organised, beginning from the early 19^th C with an exploration of Elder’s bloodlines and ending with her death at the age of 58 in 1976.

Because the focus is on Elder as poet, a volume of her poetry The Bright and the Cold, Selected Poems of Anne Elder (compiled by Catherine Elder, Laurantan Books, 2018) was also published simultaneously to complete the picture and make the poet’s work readily available again.

However, The Heart’s Ground also charts Elder’s dancing life in some detail, devoting two chapters to the subject, which is set in the context of her life about which we learn much in the course of the narrative. She was born in 1918 in her parents’ native New Zealand, descended from Scottish and English business people whose financial fortunes wavered but who managed to remain well heeled. Her mother’s family was more cultivated in the perceived refinements of the era, so she wrote poetry, drew and painted, sewed exquisitely and even wrote her memoir. Elder’s father Norman Mackintosh was an insurance executive of high ranking and a board member of the Royal Melbourne Hospital. During her Borovansky era, which straddled WW II, in 1940 she married lawyer John Elder, a member of the Melbourne Club, historically a bastion of socially elite power. On his return from active army service she became a housewife, had two children and began to concentrate seriously on writing poetry. She began publishing in the 1960s, gaining significant acclaim in Australian literary circles. Anne Elder had suffered poor health all her life, eventually enduring debilitating scleroderma, an autoimmune disease of the rheumatoid type, which was undiagnosed until the very end of her life. She died in 1976. During her life one volume of her poetry For the Record (Hawthorn Press, 1972) was published. Another, Crazy Woman and Other Poems (Angus and Robertson, 1976, reprinted 1978) appeared posthumously.

Hamer uses excerpts from Elder’s Borovansky tribute and from Salter’s book, as well as quotes from Borovansky dancer and Anne’s close friend Jonet Wilkie to reconstruct Elder’s Borovansky Ballet phase. This serves acceptably as progressing the biography in the context of the whole work; in terms of Borovansky Ballet history, its value lies in the insight if offers into dancer Anne Mackintosh and the picture of her life as a player in the Borovansky phenomenon. What is priceless is the inclusion of Elder’s whole Borovansky tribute because it is rich with information that through the publication of this biography is now readily available to the public.

As children, Anne and her sister were doted on and grew up largely in the Toorak area, Melbourne’s economically most exclusive locale. They learned ballet for a period in their childhood, with Anne returning to it at the age of 16 (1934), infatuated with Pavlova. The author offers no information about what sparked the infatuation at that stage of Elder’s life, except to say, ‘This desire came from her earlier glimpses of Pavlova.’ A quote from Elder’s tribute to Borovansky follows:

Pavlova was my goddess, my white swan, my pearl beyond price. Her almond eyes, the arch of her throat, the arch of her foot glowed from the pages of childish scrapbooks. I prattled in my measles delirium of the little dark head nestling in a hood of white fur and rosy satin, the lovely wrist extended for the kisses of a score of gallants while the first snowflakes drifted, drifted past a lighted Christmas window. The Russian ballet was my Mecca, my dream of heaven. (p 106)

 

Although Hamer mentions Pavlova’s Australian tours of 1926 and 1929, there is no indication of whether Elder went to a performance and we can perhaps assume that she didn’t because she only refers to images in her ‘childish scrapbooks’, but there is no mention of actual dancing. Nevertheless, anyone who has the eyes to see dance—an ability something akin to having an ‘ear for music’—can appreciate the movement in a dance photograph. Given that no single dancer in history can match what Pavlova achieved across the globe in popularising ballet with the help of photographs as her principal publicity tool, it would be no surprise if Elder was among the countless worshippers seduced in this manner. The spell still works if the number of Pavlova images and devotees on line is any proof.

Furthermore, Pavlova in fact gave ‘a large framed coloured photograph of herself in the divertissement Christmas‘ to Melbourne-based ballet teacher Eunice Weston during the 1929 tour,⁴ which indicates that the image was clearly a well-known and often reproduced one. Considering that Borovansky opened the Borovansky Academy by joining forces with Weston, relying on her capital, absorbing her school into his to the point that even ‘her studio furniture was transferred to Borovansky’s premises,’⁵ there is a strong chance that Anne Mackintosh, who was among the Borovanskys’ first ballet students, was even also familiar with Weston’s memento at some stage.

Whether Anne ‘prattled’ about this specific photograph is not as intriguing as the information that she did it in the ‘delirium’ accompanying her measles, which we are told, on the preceding page, she endured at the age of 20, four years after returning to the barre.

But the mystery remains, why at the late age of 16 Anne Mackintosh suddenly decided to devote herself to the relentless rigors of learning classical ballet? Others who made that same decision as late in their lives usually did so because that was when they first encountered the art or because it was their first opportunity to try it, or because they were natural dancers, as was the case with Elder’s Borovansky colleague and friend Dorothy Stevenson, who also started at the age of 16.⁶ Considering Elder had had ballet lessons as a child and considering she had collected a Pavlova scrapbook while Pavlova was still alive, it is something that raises questions. Since she specifically refers to Pavlova in the divertissement Christmas, it is also possible that her serious interest was triggered by some film footage, which references that ballet, released after Pavlova’s death in 1931, Pavlova—A Memory. This movie short, filmed in Germany during the Continental Tour 1926–27 features the cloak and bonnet, a Christmas setting and the gallants mentioned. It would have been shown extensively during the time leading to Anne’s decision to return to dance.

 

Part 2

Anne Elder’s Tribute to Borovansky

To make full sense of the Pavlova passage quoted above we must turn to Elder’s Borovansky tribute, which it opens and in which it is used as both a set up for and a foil to her description of her dance class experience pre the arrival of the Borovanskys. There she continues:

‘Reality was blistered feet and bruised toes and the back row of a dancing class. It was the only sort of class then in existence…a troupe of befrilled first cousins to Shirley Temple…their tour de force, the pose pirouette en tournant…off they went like a flight of slightly drunken fairies revolving dutifully in diagonal…I was bitterly jealous of the fairies for to me their technique seemed perfect. I was sixteen, tallish and too old to start… But martyrdom must be endured, and so it was for close on five years. I passed three exams by a narrow squeak. Since our training went strictly by the book we clutched pages of roneo-ed instructions to our bosoms wherever we went, learnt parrot-fashion in buses and trams. The Elementary, the Intermediate and the Advanced were the be-all and end-all, unless you went into Panto with the little Miss Temples or learnt to tap and tried for Rio Rita. For some it was an abortive and spirit-breaking state of affairs, hard work with no prospects. But a door was soon to open on a wider field and the man who opened it was Edouard Borovansky. He taught Melbourne the meaning of Maître de Ballet.’ (p 293-4)

Considered in this context, the information takes on a kind of poetic truth: childhood fancies grow to obsession that is then acted upon through a gruelling and punishing endeavour, which itself is a rite of passage towards fulfilling the fantasy that originally inspired the effort.

Elder expends over 400 words on herself and her own fraught relationship with dance before mentioning Borovansky. That she wants to set the scene against which the Borovanky’s achievement looks most miraculous seems an acceptable strategy for a eulogising tribute. That she puts herself centre stage tells us much more about her than the pre-Borovansky state of local ballet, which was undergoing radical change as various teachers with various competing systems of ballet tuition affiliations competed for students and to assert the supremacy of the specific system each of them followed.

The ballet school Elder describes, in fact libels by implication, is that of Jennie Brenan , a formidable character, who was the major supplier of dancers to the J C Williamson theatrical empire and the first president of the Royal Academy of Dance (1936) in Australia. Elder’s description implies that the school was an incompetent and inferior ballet teaching institution without making any allowance for the fact that she was hardly a natural dancer but rather one whom no amount of ‘martydom’ would shape into anything beyond being able to pass some exams ‘by a narrow squeak’.

It is ironic that Elder’s tactic of aggrandising Borovansky’s accomplishment as a maître de ballet by denigrating the Brenan school is guilty of the same redacting techniques that van Praagh and other anti-Borovansky elements used to diminish Borovansky’s achievements and dismiss his company to the realms of minor significance.

Despite that, it does seem that under the Borovanskys’ intensive professional ballet tuition, Elder’s determination to dance enabled her to acquire a level of competence for tackling certain soloist roles. The self-styled ‘forgotten dancer’ did not forget the one who made that possible.

And indeed, what follows is a masterful portrait of a deeply complex, flamboyantly colourful, disconcertingly contradictory, often abusive and relentlessly visionary artist and leader, in whose company the young Anne Mackintosh and her gifted alter ego Anne Elder were right at home.

In her tribute Elder takes us back to her first encounter with Borovansky when he came to Australia as a member of the Covent Garden Russian Ballet in 1938. He was charged with hiring girls from local dance schools to appear as extras in Aurora’s Wedding. Borovansky conducted the audition with absolute professionalism and Anne Mackintosh was one of the four selected. Elder continues her description:

 …the most memorable moment of the morning came next. Borovasnky turned to the rejected ones and said with a little bow:

 ‘Thank you…I’m ter’bly sorry, that is all. But there will be much need of you another time. I will need many girls for other ballets.’

 It was a dismissal full of courtesy and dignity, it presupposed that they were serious artists…So it is for kindly and charming manners that I first remember Boro; and this may surprise some who suffered under his unprintable sarcasms in rehearsal, and others who experienced his impatience of the well-meaning hanger-on, deplored his tendency to use people for just so long as they were useful to him.

Borovansky’s treatment of the extras was pure Pavlova from whom he learnt much in the way of stage craft, publicity and the cultivation of audience. Pavlova was acutely attuned to winning people over not just as ticket buyers but as young dancers, too, and even organised classes for them on her tours.

If the image of Pavlova ignited Anne Mackintosh’s passion for ballet, that first meeting with Borovansky replaced fantasy with thrilling reality. In a bid to share her experience, Elder creates word pictures for us, describing Borovansky as:

A shortish man with a dancer’s flexible walk and the firmly modelled face of a Slav…how flatly the obituaries read…how haunting the photos of the well-cut shoulders, the jaunty bow tie, the debonair smile and the curiously sad pierrot eyes.

Madame Borovansky also features prominently:

…she herself has been a dancer with a superbly classical line, and she is a magnificent teacher. She was entirely responsible for the classical training, Boro took the character and those in national dancing. Each was the perfect foil for the other. Where he spurred us on with jibes and the goad of his enthusiasm she calmed us with her most reticent and perspicacious sympathy. How she worked at us and with us, day by day moulding this very raw and ill-assorted material into something like a troupe of coryphées…Well do I remember the pallid and congealing contents of teacups forgotten on the windowsill while she thrashed out the next step. Then in would stride Boro, throw himself into a chair, chin on chest, eyes lowering and critical; he would stab in a comment, she would counter, they would break into Russian, we would be glad we didn’t understand the meaning of the words…

Elder wires her word pictures for sound. Madame is quoted:

‘and a one two, and a one two, and Up! And Up!…How you expect to jump, my darling, if you not bending the knees in plié?’

On a note of encouragement she would say:

‘I was watching, Annushka, and it was not so bad as I expected.’

But it is Borovansky who is the star of this duet:

‘I am just a bloody peasant. My wife, she is aristocrat. You listen to Madame, what she is telling you my dear guerl.’

 How to describe his slight distortion of the English language? It was part of his personality but is hard to convey. His accent was not so guttural as heavy, the vowels swallowed, an occasional transposition of consonants and omission of the verb ‘to be’. The tone alternated between a hoarse cajoling whisper and a roar of exasperation.

 ‘My Gord’ he would bawl, ‘you ter’bly heavy today, Annushka. Vot you have for lunch…the pork pie and the big sausage?’

Elder also describes Borovansky the performer in detail:

We forget that he was first a truly great character dancer. He had that mastery of mime which enabled him to alter not only his mobile face but also it seemed, his mobile body with each different part.

In paying tribute to his seemingly magical shapeshifting abilities, Elder unleashes all her poetic power using words to capture the unspoken, that which can only be expressed through the wordless language of dance:

He was in fact short in stature; but how do we remember him in his delightfully ponderous character of the circus Strong Man in Beau Danube? Surely an enormous man, powerful but fleshy, in fact a man entirely made of pink ham. The next night his very bones have shrunk, are bowed and creaking at the knee. He is the elderly lover, paunchy with a hint of corsets beneath the velvet and lace, sweeping his tricorn to the ground with finicky stylishness. It is the very essence of “L’Amour Ridicule”, adorably ridiculous. And do not imagine (although he was a master of make-up) that these cameos relied on the trappings of costume and wig alone. He could rehearse the part in slacks and sweater and it would live in the bare room, perfectly convincing, easy to the last finished gesture. He had a deep insight into both pathos and comedy, and he combined them both to the point of heart-break in that role which became perhaps his signature, the sad Pierrot in Carnaval. I have seen Woizicovsky do this part and since then several adequate performances by Australians. No-one else but Borovansky has caught the moment for me; the most deliciously funny and pathetic moment is all ballet when the fumbling hands in their impeding sleeves clap together in ecstasy, the tragic mouth opens a black O of anticipation in the dead-white face, the zany eyes with their agonised brows almost meet the hair-line in unbelieving glee. He has caught the sweet pretty Butterfly! He has got her under his hat! Softly, carefully he peeps. Consternation. No Butterfly! Poor Pierrot, poor silly lovelorn clown. But he has the audience spellbound. The ballerina is forgotten. This is artistry, this is Borovansky.

 I think the greatest part was one which has been passed over by Australian audiences; that of Malatesta’s court Fool in the original version of Francesca da Rimini composed for de Basil by David Lichine. It was an interpretation with a deep sense of history behind it. Never was there a Fool who was less of a Fool than this one. Borovansky made of him an evil and repulsive cripple with a crooked scheming mind. A balletic Iago, he slunk, dragging a leg and dangling a withered hand, through the panoply of a mediaeval princely court, planning his machinations for the downfall of beauty and young love. The moment when he seized upon the scarcely-dead body of the old nun, and dragged it away for his own cold and obscene purpose was unforgettable. Borovansky had a quality which made his own corner of the stage magnetic to the eye of the audience. At the same time he never detracted from the general pattern. He was too much of an artist and an old hand to do that.

While Cyril Beaumont singles out Borovansky’s Strong Man role for praise and notes his use of mime as Girolamo (Elder’s ‘Fool’),⁷ Borovansky the performer has been buried under his role as a company founder/director, which makes this unique appraisal of his performing achievements, by one who witnessed them, all the more valuable as a historic record of superbly wrought detail.

Elsewhere in the biography The Heart’s Ground even includes Jean Stewart’s  celebrated photo of Borovansky as tragic Pierrot but without crediting the photographer, only citing the NLA, which has a copy.

 

The tribute covers much more besides. We are given glimpses of the company’s early performances in ballet galas and the evolution of Borovansky’s enterprise:

A group of enthusiastic supporters under the title of the Melbourne Ballet Club built us a tiny stage in the studio, and there for the next two years new works were tried out in monthly week-end performances. Dorothy Stevenson and Laurel Martyn were given the chance to produce a number of their own short ballets, several of which were included later in larger shows. Daryl Lindsay and Dargie sketched us in class and rehearsal. Geoffrey Hutton was a friend and an honest critic. William Constable Florence and Kathleen Martin, later Alan McCulloch, designed sets and costumes. We had three faithful pianists; and all the dresses were cut and sewn in the studio, Edna Busse being queen of the sewing machine as well as a hard-worked dancer. The names came thick and fast, it is not possible to give them all their due place. Something large was in the making and the pace increased from month to month.

Before the powerful conclusion in which Elder brings the focus back to herself, now the fully formed dancer, and the ‘irreplaceable’ maestro—wishing ‘him long life in the continuity of Australian Ballet which he built’—she throws us another historic gem that Salter missed in his use of the tribute but for which he provides possible additional information in the way of a photo, and for which Macgeorge definitely provides additional information.

While acknowledging the entrepreneur and accomplished artist, the Strong Man in Borovansky, Elder offers two anecdotes to illustrate his ‘appealingly naïve’ side ‘the loveable Clown’. The first, which is relevant here, provides the background to the photo in Salter’s book:

The first memory is of a cold night on Station Pier, myself one of a row of girls holding little bouquets of flowers to present to Colonel de Basil and his ballerinas . . . a pathetic welcome to Melbourne by a bunch of hopefuls. Boro, having marshalled us, waited edgily in the gusts of rain. Suddenly a line of limousines appeared through the barriers, gathered speed and swept past us without a falter. Boro darted out, gesturing wildly. “There is big mistake!” he cried despairingly. “De Basil he is great friend of mine!” Of course there was a big mistake and it was put right later but it was horribly embarrassing. He had talked assuredly to us about our chances of getting in to the Company and he was made by the night and the rain and the misdirection of a message to look a fool. He was a hurt little boy and we couldn’t bear it for him.

A photo in Salter’s book illustrates a visit de Basil and his ‘ballerinas’ made to the Borovansky studio. A mash up of facts states that de Basil visited the studio while the Original Ballet Russe was in Melbourne and that Borovansky took some students up to Sydney to appear as extras; the caption reads: ‘Colonel de Basil visits Borovansky’s Melbourne studio with some of the de Basil dancers, to see what progress their former colleague is making in his uphill struggle to establish an Australian ballet company.’⁸

As with all the photos used in Salter’s book, there is no photographer credit, in this case S. Alston Pearl. The photograph also shows Anne Mackintosh, the second dancer in leotards from the left. The other dancer beside her is Laurel Martyn. Borovansky is third from the right, flanked by Edna Busse, who has her arm around Rachel Cameron, a leading early Borovansky dancer, whom Borovansky brutally discarded, and whose story Salter faithfully reports. Borovansky, Busse, Cameron and Martyn are easy to identify because their images are extensively documented; by deduction we know the other man must be de Basil. Thanks to photos of Anne Mackintosh in The Heart’s Ground, we can now also name her in the photo. The visitors’ names can be sourced from the NLA photo collection, which has this and two other accompanying photos in it, all of them from the Geoffrey Ingram Archive. As Geoffrey Ingram is thanked by Salter in his Acknowledgements, we can even assume that the photo he included is the same print as the one held by the NLA. From the NLA’s identification we can name all the visitors: ‘De Basil company members (left to right) Colonel de Basil, Olga Morosova, Tatiana Stepanova, Nina Verchinina.’ Morsova was de Basil’s wife at the time and Verchininia, who was one of the most accomplished of the company’s dancers, was also Morsova’s sister.

It does look like this photo shows the unintended slight at the docks being ‘put to right’. Furthermore, Macgeorge records:

Following an audition by de Basil, who had brought his Russian Ballet Company to Australia and was seeking local talent, Edna Busse, Laurel Martyn, Anne Mackintosh, Rachel Cameron, Phillipe Perrotet [sic] and others accompanied M. and Mme. Borovansky to Sydney in December, 1939. They continued with their classes while some of them were doing “super” work with the Russian Ballet in Sydney.⁹

It is well known that Borovansky appeared with the de Basil Original Ballet Russe as a guest artist, reprising some of his acclaimed roles, including Girolamo, as shown in the photo among those above. It is also documented that this company’s dancers arrived in Sydney in December on two passenger ships, one from England and the other from America. But piecing the information from Elder and Macgeorge, it looks as though de Basil and his small entrourage actually arrived in Melbourne from overseas. Considering that some of the Borovansky dancers were auditioned by de Basil and appeared as extras in Sydney on the first leg of this tour, the Station Pier incident must have taken place prior. This also throws into question the NLA date of 1940 for the photos but since that is attributed to a researcher, we can assume it is derived from the facts that the Borovansky academy was in Melbourne and that the Original Ballet Russe opened its Melbourne season in March, 1940. Even Elder’s description of the miserable wet night of the welcome at Station Pier is far more consistent with Melbourne’s Decembers rather than its traditionally gloriously sunny and mild autumns.

The Mackintosh and Macgeorge timeline for the de Basil visit to the Borovansky academy is also supported by Kathrine Sorley Walker in De Basil’s Ballets Russes (Hutchinson, 1982), where it is stated that one of the ships bringing dancers passed through Melbourne, that the Colonel was on it and that he visited the school.

The second anecdote also contains some new information because it shows that Borovansky socialised with his dancers in the early days, which according to all other sources he no longer did in the Borovansky Ballet’s professional era, when he kept his social interactions away from the dancers. Elder wrote:

As for the big fish, it was the biggest he had ever caught, and he was a passionate fisherman. Alas, just at the moment of landing it into the boat it slipped through his fingers and was gone. Consternation…. No fish! A roar of pain escaped from his lips and he was almost in tears on the way home. It was the Clown and the Butterfly all over again, the moment when the confident character is completely undone and which draws forth indulgence from every human heart.

The Heart’s Ground also mentions Borovansky’s socialising with dancers and even hosting some of them at a beach holiday house, and visiting at the Mackintosh home. However, the included famous portrait of Borovansky in hat and ‘jaunty bow tie’—as Elder so aptly described his sartorial preference—which is captioned: ‘Edouard Borovansky, possibly at Montalto Avenue’, where the Mackintosh family lived for part of the 1930s, is attributed by the NLA as being from the Auckland Star, 1944, during the company’s first New Zealand tour, and the first overseas tour made by any Australian ballet company.

Elder’s tribute, with its vibrant evocation of the Borovanskys and their endeavours, makes it clear that ballet was her muse at a critical point of development in her life, that it stirred some creative essence within her from which the poet emerged. Dance is to movement what poetry is to words; her raw material was words not movement but it was movement distilled into the art of ballet that inspired her art of words. Apart from the tribute, another even more radiant example of this muse and poet relationship is evident in Elder’s poem about Borovansky, ‘Commedia Dell’ Arte’, which The Heart’s Ground also includes in full. It was first published after Elder’s death in Crazy Woman and Other Poems and is now also reissued in The Bright and the Cold. Elder’s multilayered virtuoso treatment of complex content and profound themes deserves an expository monograph on its own. Although the Clown characterisation is a portrait of Borovansky as observed from the outside during a performance of the ballet Carnaval, the poet creates the persona of the artist and enters the experience from the inside where it grows to the ineffable heights of that amorphous concept recognised as great art.

 

 

Part 3

Dancer Anne Mackintosh

That Borovansky chose Anne Mackintosh without seeing her dance is probably at least in part the explanation for their positive professional relationship. He would have appreciated her maturity, self-important bearing and her sharply observant eyes that radiated an imposing intelligence. Proof of the bearing is evident in photographs included in the biography but also in the text.

Company colleagues Jonet Wilkie and Laurel Martyn are both quoted. Wilkie had ‘never met someone so outwardly cool’ and was ‘quite put out, she seemed so poised and sure of herself.’ Martyn described her as ‘an elegant, lovely person with a certain aura: calm but with passion underneath that was not a distancing thing. She was an onlooker, and remembered lots of things, including what people had said.’ We also learn that ‘Jonet agreed with Laurel in seeing Anne as talented, with a classical cool quality’ but it seems that aside from using adjectives such as ‘lovely’ and ‘enchanting’ in reference to Anne’s dancing, neither Wilkie nor Martyn felt able to be more specific. By inference we can deduce that Anne was a competent but not memorably expressive dancer, a deduction that is supported by photographs of her in various ballets. In a company that built a strong fan base on the vivid stage personalities of its artists, Anne Mackintosh was an unobtrusive member, a reliable but not outstanding dancer when compared to various others.

One of those others and the only one still alive from Anne’s dancing days, Martin Rubinstein, remembers her as a company member but not her dancing. Given that he was six years her junior, and still a teenager when she left, this is not surprising considering how focused he would have been on his own training and professional ascension. Audrey Nicholls,¹⁰ Borovansky Ballet and Rambert Ballet veteran of the 1950s, points out that you didn’t need to be a star to have a following among the audience in that era, that it was a time when audiences could become familiar with the work of particular dancers and enjoy it for a range of qualities, not just superior dance skills. Nicholls still approaches her ballet viewing this way, finding interest in various performers who may never rise to stardom. Indeed, this outlook is supported in The Heart’s Ground by a letter Elder wrote to her husband about the Christmas eve festivities at her wartime office job: ‘my ballet fan officer gave all the girls a glorious sheaf of flowers each.’ (131) Furthermore, according to another Borovansky Ballet veteran, Marilyn Bogner, Anne Mackintosh was still remembered by name as one of the company’s early dancers, when she was a member of the Borovansky Ballet in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Considering how hard it could be to survive in the relentlessly competitive environment of ballet at the performing company level, Anne’s ability to fit in would have been a huge asset. It is quite surprising that she could do this, given what we learn elsewhere in the biography about her abrasive and difficult nature as displayed in her behaviour with her family and even with fellow poets.

Anne not only fitted in with the ballet scene, she made friends, some of them for life. She went on holidays with them and, like most Borovansky dancers before the company became professional, had a day job. Unlike most others, she didn’t need to work to support herself but had taken on employment as part of the war effort. One friend Anne made through the ballet was artist Norman Macgeorge, author of Borovansky Ballet in Australia and New Zealand, another previously unknown but valuable fact revealed by the biography. Although Macgeorge is not mentioned among the artists in Elder’s Borovansky tribute, he does appear in a letter about Christmas 1942 that Anne wrote to her husband, fighting overseas:

Anne went to stay for the rest of the weekend with elderly friends, the MacGeorges [sic], who lived on the Yarra in Ivanhoe. Norman MacGeorge was a painter, and after cold duckling,

‘He and I went out on the punt…while she [Mrs MacGeorge] wrote letters—it was a night of fairytale beauty, stars punctuating the pale green sky behind the gums leaning over the river. We drifted along and talked about important things & came home to the landing stage about half past ten…’ (p131)

From this we learn that Macgeorge was Anne’s friend, rather than a friend of her family. The friendship between the two is also indicated in Macgeorge’s book where ‘Mrs John Elder (Anne Mackintosh)’ appears in the Acknowledgements at the beginning of the work. That they met through ballet and were good friends by 1942 shows that Macgeorge was, like Elder, a Borovansky believer, someone who joined Borovansky’s quest to establish an Australian ballet company. Although he was a critic who wrote for the press, as well as an artist, and well connected in the Melbourne cultural scene of that day, as the author of the Borovansky volume he was much more than a hired hand, he was—for want of a better term—a player, just like Anne Mackintosh and all the others fired up by Borovansky’s vision.

 

Part 4

Borovansky Ballet in Australia and New Zealand and Anne Elder

There can be little doubt that Borovansky Ballet in Australia and New Zealand, was produced in direct response to Pioneering Ballet in Australia, edited by Peter Bellew (Craftsman Bookshop Sydney, 1945), the book about Hélène Kirsova and her company the Kirsova Ballet, as the two arch rival company builders Borovansky and Kirsova battled it out in the ballet wars of the early 1940s. The Kirsova book came out in 1945, after the Kirsova Ballet folded in 1944. It went into a second edition in 1946 and must have been printed in vast numbers because it is still readily available at very reasonable prices. Macgeorge’s Borovansky book came out as a 300 limited copy edition in 1946, and then in two more editions before the end of 1947. It is by far the scarcer and therefore more expensive book. It is evident that Pioneering Ballet in Australia was produced to enshrine Kirsova’s memory as an artist of supreme integrity and originality. The fact that the editor Peter Bellew became Kirsova’s husband should be considered as essential product disclosure although it is mostly ignored.

By contrast Norman Macgeorge is an author without any ulterior motive. He was merely someone with whom Anne Elder could talk about ‘important things’ such as, in their case, art and more specifically, the art of ballet. Meanwhile, Peter Bellew dedicates his book to ‘Helene Kirsova a true and sincere artiste who, with unswerving idealism and courage, pioneered Australian Ballet…’ In his introduction ‘Birth of a Ballet’ he constructs a case to memorialise her as ‘a true creator and not merely a reproducer or adaptor…’ She is presented as someone of ‘almost fanatical idealism and uncompromising determination that aesthetic values must always come first… qualities which fit most uneasily into the commercial side of theatre.’ J C Williamson had in fact first offered Kirsova the deal that Borovansky took up with such vigour and confidence, having no qualms of the sort Kirsova clearly felt.

Bellew’s manifesto of Kirsova’s art ends with a coup de grace which makes it clear that his effort is skewed to ensuring that Kirsova is recognised as occupying an immeasurably higher ground than Borovansky as both artist and company builder. In a small print asterisked footnote, he writes: ‘Australia’s second professional company was formed by J. C. Williamson Ltd. in May 1944, three years after the Kirsova company’s premiere. Under the leadership of E. Barovansky [sic] and comprising a group of former members of the Kirsova company and pupils of the Barovansky and other schools, it has toured Australia and New Zealand.’

The misspelling of Borovansky’s name —two times is more than a typo—in an otherwise meticulously produced book is insignificant compared to the distortion of fact embedded in this footnote. The company was formed by Borovansky in 1940 and performed as the Borovansky Australian Ballet; the mantle of J C Williamson only enabled it to go professional. Secondly, the leading dancers of the Borovansky Ballet, Laurel Martyn, Edna Busse, Dorothy Stevenson and Martin Rubinstein had never been in the Kirsova company. The Kirsova dancers who came to Borovansky were Peggy Sager, Helene ffrance Paul Hammond (who at the time danced under the surname Clementin), Strelsa Heckleman, Joan Gadsden and Judith Burgess. Borovansky’s colleagues from the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, Tamara Tchinarova and Serge Bousloff, who both joined his company, had danced with the Kirsova company for varying degrees of time but given their full Ballet Russe background, it would be wrong to give their credentials as ‘former members of the Kirsova company’. Any credit that might be given to the Borovansky academy for supplying the rest of the dancers is diluted by relegating it to merely one of the schools responsible. Furthermore, of the Kirsova dancers—again, with the exception of Tchinarova and Bousloff— only Peggy Sager was ever accomplished enough to be ranked with the Borovansky dancers mentioned above. The remaining ones were designated as soloists.

Macgeorge’s book is a powerful reply packed with information, verbal and visual, which leaves the reader in no doubt that the Borovanskys’ five years of work resulted in a substantial company that clearly belonged on a professional stage. Macgeorge gives Madame Borovansky equal prominence with Borovansky on introducing them and their credentials. Apart from assuming wrongly that both Xenia and Edouard Borovansky were contracted to the Covent Garden company when Xenia was only an accompanying wife, and claiming that Xenia was ‘related’ to Pavlova, although she was at most just a distant cousin of Pavlova’s partner Victor Dandré, he sticks to the bare facts of the Borovanskys’ backgrounds and credentials. Xenia’s exact ballet background has never been incontrovertibly established beyond that she was from Moscow and had been exposed to the Bolshoi tradition. Salter claims her mother was a Bolshoi soloist and had had Xenia trained by a colleague. Macgeorge claims she was trained by her mother.

Either way, one detail relevant to this emerges from Elder’s Borovansky tribute when she describes Mme Borovansky’s mother as being a ballet mistress in ‘the Marinsky tradition’. While it could be argued that Elder probably meant ‘Bolshoi,’ it is unlikely because up until the current century the Bolshoi and Marinsky (and later, Kirov) approaches were vastly different in terms of technique and style. Elder would have understood that given her love of Pavlova and appreciation of the Ballets Russes plus the fact that she continued to follow mid century Russian ballet, as evidenced in the biography when she is quoted on the subject of Ulanova, a celebrated Kirov dancer, appearing with the Bolshoi in the famous 1956 Giselle film. It does imply that Elder picked up this notion of Xenia’s mother’s ‘Marinsky tradition’ from something Xenia said. At the very least, this is something valuable to follow up considering how important Xenia’s teaching was to the early Borovansky Ballet, when she had complete charge, and even later, when the professional company classes were given by various dancers, usually a principal in the company, Xenia’s classes still continued to be the first port of call for many aspiring dancers.

But back to Macgeorge. While supplying brief biographies of the Borovansky principals and soloists, he acknowledges the Kirsova connection of the above named dancers—with the exception of Tchinarova and Bousloff— who came from her company. The book includes a photograph of the entire 1945 company and a list of names (Paul Hammond, who appears on the list as Paul Clementin, is the only absentee). The repertoire is itemised in a series of separate articles, accompanied by photos, for each work. Some ballets by visiting companies are also included, among them Lichine’s Graduation Ball, which received its world premiere in Sydney, 1940, a fact Macgeorge relates. He also deals in brief with the coming of ballet to Australia from the time of Adeline Genée, limiting the information to foreign companies, which is obviously an excuse to ignore the existence of the Kirsova Ballet, and that’s a pity because it detracts from Macgeorge’s otherwise dignified partisanship.

Macgeorge even reveals that when the newly formed Borovansky Australian Ballet held its inaugural two-night season at the Comedy Theatre, in December 1940, ‘A group of enthusiasts, headed by Mr. Roger Raine [sic], Mr Mackintosh, father of the dancer, and others had guaranteed the funds to cover possible loss, but there was never any doubt of the result.’

It is also regrettable that more copies were not printed to balance the historic record of Borovansky’s achievement in a context contemporary to Kirsova’s. Salter argues that Kirsova ‘must be acclaimed the winner’ of this ‘cold warfare’ because when A Dictionary of Modern Ballet was published by Methuen in 1959, ‘Kirsova’s achievements in Australia are recorded quite fully, but Borovansky rates no personal listing at all.’¹¹

Despite the fact that for whatever reason Macgeorge’s book did not have the impact of Bellew’s volume, over time it has become a major historic record. Elder’s credit in it, together with the new revelation of her friendship with its author, shows that the role she played in the early days of the Borovansky Ballet went beyond dancing and that her tribute is more than a fond ramble down memory lane but rather an integral piece of a bigger picture on the creation of which she and others were working actively and which we are still trying to put together.

Another seemingly incidental but in this context valuable piece of information that The Heart’s Ground delivers is a snippet from a letter that Elder wrote to her parents about taking class with Kirsova, while on holiday in Sydney, late 1940. She wrote:

‘…never enjoyed anything so much in my life; after a few days of feeling rather at a loose end it was heaven to be back in a familiar world…She gives a rather technical & far less pretty class than Madame, & with not such exacting attention to detail—not a marvellous teacher but composes rather nice enchainements. She seemed quite interested in my dancing…’ (p125)

Kirsova is generally remembered as a solo operator; in establishing and running her company, she also taught all the classes and created most of the choreography. Elder’s description of the class indicates that Kirsova was developing dancers through technical exercises and the execution of dance sequences, which are the prerequisites for any professional dancer. Kirsova was also known for favouring technically strong dancers, which is understandable. Despite Elder not getting the hands on attention that she might have had from a ‘marvellous teacher’ and that the much more proficient Peggy Sager and Strelsa Heckleman were to get later from Kirsova, she enjoyed the experience tremendously. It indicates to us that Kirsova was able to engage dancers in her class without personalised attentiveness which would have been a very useful skill given the constrained circumstances and considerable demands under which she had to operate.

 

Part 5

Exit the Dancer, Enter the Poet

By contrast, Borovansky was primarily concerned with building a company and its brand rather than producing the raw product for it. He had high professional standards to maintain but he was also a great pragmatist, capable of making do with whatever was the best of the material at hand for moulding his artistic visions. He was content to reproduce the works of other choreographers and even encouraged both Laurel Martyn and Dorothy Stevenson to choreograph ballets—as both Macgeorge and Elder noted—that he mounted as part of the company’s repertoire. From The Heart’s Ground we learn that Anne was even gripped by the desire to choreograph. Writing to her husband, she describes an idea for a ballet that was inspired by a concert of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. It was never created, the densely worded description clearly pointing to the fact that Elder thought in words rather than movement, as choreographers do.

Nevertheless, we know that Borovansky valued her work in the company because he rewarded her dedication, loyalty and presence with a leading role—along side historically significant artists Laurel Martyn and Dorothy Stevenson— and himself as her partner in his Fantasy on Grieg’s Concerto in A Minor (1941). Although we learn nothing more about it from the biography, Elder does refer to it in the conclusion of her tribute, stating she is:

…proud that in my one important role I was partnered by a man who had created for me and who had himself danced with the very great ones. (302)

So, clearly this honour was a dream achievement for the dancer who had been envious of jewellery music box baby ballerinas’ wonky accomplishments.

And how lucky for them both that she left Borovansky before he was quite through with her. He was notorious for his vicious invective when dancers he needed told him that they were leaving. In fact, Elder had a taste of this when she chose to spend time with her husband while he was on army leave rather than dance in a weekend Ballet Club performance. The biography states ‘Boro hit the roof’ (p 132-3) but there is no mention of how Boro greeted the news of her departure from the company when it went professional and was going on a tour of New Zealand. With money to pay young and much more accomplished dancers, he would not have been too fussed.

Elder left the company to be a housewife and mother, which she saw as her role in life. The effect of leaving the ballet environment was not beneficial to her emotionally. The biography reveals:

Years later, after Anne’s death, Jonet commented that it was only when her poetry began to be recognised that Anne could watch ballet without pain. (p139)

In terms of ballet history, the ballet chapters of The Heart’s Ground would benefit from more clarification and some minor corrections, while this does not impact on the biography as a whole, it would be very valuable to those interested in the ballet content. Among the corrections only one needs mention here: Laurel Martyn’s ‘fiancé’ (later husband) was Lloyd Lawton not ‘Lloyd Linton.’ (p 127).

Clarification regarding the relevant tours by Russians would be helpful. While Elder’s tribute mentions Borovansky’s ‘days in the Pavlova company’ (p300), Hamer only mentions that Borovansky had been on painting expeditions with Pavlova (p.111). If The Heart’s Ground is read chronologically—as most would read it—some mention would have been valuable of the fact that Borovansky came to Australia the first time as a member of Pavlova’s company on the 1929 tour, which would not be known to most readers, including younger readers studying Australian ballet history.

Likewise the references to the Covent Garden Russian Ballet tour of 1938–39 need clarification in relation to the information that Borovansky ‘and his Russian wife Xenia toured Australia a second time with the Covent Garden Ballet in 1939. While the company was in Sydney Hitler annexed Bohemia-Moravia…’ (p 109). The Covent Garden Russian Ballet’s appearance in Australia in 1938 and 1939 is classified as a single tour, though fragmented by the fact that the company also toured New Zealand from late January to mid March 1939 before returning for additional seasons in Melbourne, then Adelaide, and a closing gala featuring some of the dancers in Sydney in late April.¹² The annexation of Bohemia-Moravia was on 15 March 1939.

This whole tour is regarded as the second of the three Ballets Russes tours of the 1930s  and while these three tours operated under the mantle of Col de Basil, it was managed by Victor Dandré. Furthermore, Xenia was not a member of the tour but an accompanying wife. This distinction is relevant because she was a dancer, had been on tours as a member of Pavlova’s company (although she missed the Australian tour of 1929 because her mother was ill)¹³ and went on to be an important influence on the development of professional ballet in Australia. The more accurate we can be with historic information the better.

Then there is the problem regarding the naming of the companies because while the third company was mostly billed as the Original Ballet Russe, it was also known as Colonel de Basil’s Covent Garden Russian Ballet. That Borovansky also appeared with this third company in Australia as a guest artist and given that the tour commenced in Sydney in late December 1939, is more than a clue to how carefully worded any information regarding anything to do with those tours must be. It can be put simply as follows: Edouard Borovansky first came to Australia in 1929 as a dancer with the Pavlova company, of which Xenia was also a member but did not come on this tour. She first came to Australia when Borovansky toured again as a member of the Covent Garden Russian Ballet tour of 1938–39 and she accompanied him as his wife. During that tour they decided to stay on in Australia and began by opening a ballet academy.¹⁴ Borovansky also danced as a guest artist on the de Basil Original Ballet Russe tour of 1939–40.¹⁵

The rest of the biography delves broadly and deeply into Elder’s life. Hamer’s introduction explains both the complexity and enormousness of her attempted task to present a broad, incisive expository exploration of her subject’s life, a task both helped and hindered by the author’s privileged and exclusive access to material and knowledge. Hamer is also fascinated by concepts of the relationships between creativity and personality, particularly in her aunt’s case the destructive behaviour linked to her mindsets and narrow thinking that on observation can be classified as what is these days regarded as ‘mental instability’. The biography is densely packed with intimate detail and such information can heavily prejudice the reader against Elder. While exquisitely attuned to her own emotional sensitivities, Elder does not seem to have had much empathy with the feelings of others. She was a supporter of capital punishment in an era when popular opinion was growing strongly against it. She could treat people around her very callously. One story in particular sticks in the mind and concerns an occasion when Elder’s son aged twelve was ill and she wanted to give him a treat by giving him

some food on a plate that she treasured and had stapled together after it was dropped. She said, ‘Be very careful of that plate.’ Inevitably, he broke it. Anne was furious, and shouting, ‘you little bugger!’, she seized of one of the pieces of his Meccano set and broke it in a vengeful gesture. (p 183-4)

We also learn that Elder and Wilkie, who formed a lifelong friendship while they were ballet colleagues, also shared an interest in religion of the formal church going western style with its traditional polarisations depending on the brand followed. In Elder’s case that was Anglicanism and Wilkie’s, Roman Catholicism, to which she converted after marriage to Joe Doolan, a man who also wrote poetry and whose comments on her poems Anne valued.

A startling revelation is Anne’s very narrow but arrogantly held view of the concept of ‘beauty’ that showed a very limited appreciation of aesthetics. While her diary rhapsodises about the loveliness of Mount Vernon, George Washington’s colonial house, on the same trip to America she describes Picasso’s Guernica in terms of: ‘If you want horror, there you have it.’ She clearly does not want this from art, but rather something conforming to her notion of appealing to the eye to make her feel comfortable. Had her poetry conformed to such an outlook, it would never have been published. Ironically, her detailed description of Picasso’s painting shows she can see the content but not respond to the art:

a screaming face full of teeth lamenting over a dead babe whom you see upside down, so that the nose falls upwards towards the eyes. What an astonishing device to depict utter deadness—so hideous but one can’t help admire the impact of it.

The confines of Elder’s inner existence are also reflected in her attitude to the women’s rights movement of the 1970s. In a letter to to poet Graham Rowlands she wrote:

A small point, but please do not address me as Ms!! I have been a totally dependent female all my life, including 35 years as wife and mother (happily) without any ambitions on my own account other than to have a slim book of poetry published. Any shadow of Women’s Lib. or lesbianism simply disgusts and horrifies me…I am very definitely Missis John Elder. I only use the Anne for poetry business.

Biography by its nature invites reading between the lines, leaving readers to interpret what they may and this will vary according to each reader. As a study of a privileged, circumscribed life in a certain historic context, The Heart’s Ground is a biography for our time because it is open to various readings, most obviously from feminist, socio-political and psychological perspectives, with a thick overlay of interest in history.

So what can we make of Anne Elder? There can be little doubt that her poor physical health must have impacted the rest of her as a person. But who can say whether the ill health contributed to her personality or her personality exacerbated her autoimmune system? Also, it is likely that her archly conservative and repressively traditional views complicated her life by preventing her from exploring her full potential and by that limitation contributing to her despair, depression and relatively early death. In that sense she was a tragic figure in the literary meaning of the word—someone whose undoing is a product of her own making.

Despite that, Anne Chloe Elder produced reams of poetry and, as Anne Mackintosh, for one glorious period of her life—inspired by the image of a woman who through her daring independence and leadership inspired an artistic revolution in popularising an art form throughout the world—found a milieu where her will power and self-discipline enabled her to harness her fragile body and steely creativity in an enterprise of artistic expression within a like-minded community. She may have stood apart, a sharp observer, as Laurel Martyn astutely and perceptively noted, but really in her unique way she was actually in the thick of it. We have her magnificent tribute and sublime poem to prove it.

Blazenka Brysha

 

With thanks to Borovansky Ballet veterans Audrey Nicholls and Barry Kitcher for additional research and insights in the research for this monograph.

Footnotes

The official list of Borovansky Ballet personnel recruited by Edouard Borovansky

As recognition of the Borovansky Ballet’s major importance to Australian ballet history has grown, so too have claims of company membership. Salter’s dedication at the start of the book includes an alphabetical list of nearly 400 names, which is recognised by Borovansky veterans as the definitive record of the company’s membership throughout its existence under Borovansky’s direction. It includes all the local dancers as well as international artists who joined for various seasons, and also the music staff. If your name is not on the list, you were not a member. This distinction has become relevant in recent years with the growing awareness of the Borovansky Ballet’s importance in the history of Australian ballet and the various claims, of having been in the company, by people who were not.

Sometimes the claims are made by the elderly who may have been in another company such as the National Theatre Ballet but had studied with the Borovanskys at some point. Sometimes they are made by those who were Borovansky students and found themselves recruited to the professional performances as additional dancers. Many people, including non-dancers appeared as extras in crowd scenes. Borovansky knew how to pad out the ranks for maximum impact and minimum expenditure.

The only omissions on Salter’s list acknowledged by Borovansky alumni as having been in the company are a few dancers recruited by Peggy van Praagh after Borovansky’s death in 1959. Their names are to be found in the official performances programmes and most notably include Patricia Cox, Barry Moreland and Janet Karin.

 

 

1. The Australian Ballet 1962/63 Season programme
2. Salter, Frank, Borovansky, the man who made Australian ballet (Wildcat Press, 1980), 203–4; Sexton, Christopher, Peggy van Praagh, a life of dance (Macmillan, Australia, 1985) 112
3. Brissenden, Alan, and Glennon, Keith, Australia Dances, Creating Australian Dance 1945–1965 (Wakefield Press, 2010), p8
4. Pask, Edward H., Enter the Colonies Dancing, A History of Dance in Australia 1835–1940 (OUP,1979), 126
5. Brissenden, Alan, and Glennon, Keith, Australia Dances, Creating Australian Dance 1945–1965 (Wakefield Press, 2010), 144
6. Salter, 108
7. Beaumont, Cyril W., Complete Book of Ballets (Putman, 1949) p 916, 1020
8. Salter, 96, 102
9. Macgeorge, Norman, Borovansky Ballet in Australia and New Zealand (F.W. Cheshire, 1946), p 12
10. Audrey Nicholls interviewed Martin Rubinstein, who lives in a Melbourne retirement home, and Marilyn Bogner, who lives in Italy, on the author’s behalf
11. Salter, 118
12. Pask, 156
13. Salter, 36–37
14. Salter, 80–82
15. Salter, 95