The image of British ballet was set in the United States by one brilliant evening at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1949, when the Sadler's Wells Ballet, on its first transatlantic visit, staged The Sleeping Beauty. The success was sensational. Audience and press were entirely captivated by the production of the great nineteenth-century ballet, originally produced in Imperial Russia. Marius Petipa's choreography had been lovingly reproduced under the aegis of the company's founder-director Ninette de Valois and the sparking and imaginative designs were by Oliver Messel. Equally, everyone fell in love with Margo Fonteyn, an incomparable Princess Aurora--Time magazine featured her on the cover with the caption 'For Sleeping Beauty, an awakened audience.' The impact of that performance, and another British import, the Powell-Pressburger film The Red Shoes starring Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann, affected a generation of American ballet lovers.
Modest Orgins
Of course there was much more to the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) than The Sleeping Beauty. Its development from modest beginnings in 1931, with important modern creations as well as faithful revivals of the classics, is one of Britain's cultural romances. In 1949 it already had a record of solid achievement and its subsequent history has been varied and eventful. The swinging and permissive sixties, for instance, when Britain was internationally identified with the Beatles and the trendy fashions of Carnaby Street, were strong years for the company based at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 1960 Frederick Ashton, their brilliant resident choreographer, created his enchanting ballet La Fille mal gardee, and later launched a superb pairing in the young Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley in The Dream. Their contemporaries, Lynn Seymour, Merle Park, Christopher Gable, and David Wall, each had a special place in the story, while from 1962 Fonteyn's partnership with Rudolf Nureyev constantly made world headlines.
Other companies existed in Great Britain. There were the Royal Ballet touring company, smaller and quite distinct from the one at Covent Garden; London Festival Ballet; the Scottish Ballet; and Northern Ballet Theatre. The main talking point of the period, however, was the establishment of two modern dance groups, a completely new development. In 1966 Ballet Rambert, the celebrated little classical company that had launched both Ashton and Antony Tudor, was metamorphosed into a modern dance group with Norman Morrice as Dame Marie Rambert's codirector, and three years later Robin Howard founded London Contemporary Dance Theatre, a Martha Graham-based group directed by Robert Cohan. Through these two companies the British public at large became more aware of dance beyond ballet.
London, as the capital city, had always known about it. London, in fact, was for years the leading world center for ballet and dance, regularly seeing every kind of company from the Royal Danish Ballet to the Spanish ensembles of Antonio or Pilar Lopez. The dance public was widely experienced and vigorously independent in its assessments. American modern dance had been shown by the Martha Graham Company, by Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, and Merce Cunningham. Now, mainly through the London School of Contemporary Dance (also set up by Robin Howard), modern dance began to be accessible throughout the country, appealing enormously to the young--and especially to young black men and women in what was rapidly becoming a
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