Early Days, Early Dancers by Jocelyn Terell Allen

Author:Jocelyn Terell Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Betty Oliphant, 1980.

Courtesy: National Ballet Archives.

Betty Oliphant, 1980.

Courtesy: National Ballet Archives.

When I was six years old my mother, who had danced ballet in England, decided that Miss O. was the best teacher in Toronto and that I should study dance with her. It also helped that we lived in Willowdale and Miss O. had a Saturday class in the North York Community Centre nearby. Truth be told, I didn’t much like giving up my playtime on Saturdays, but I continued anyway. After a year, Miss O. suggested that I take classes in her “real” studio at 444 Sherbourne Street in downtown Toronto. That’s wheret the like-minded students were, she told me. The studio, which was actually on the main floor of her house, had real dancer barres, not chairs, plus mirrors and a piano accompanist named Mrs. Mahew, and of course, Butterscotch, the cat, who weaved between our feet as we practiced our steps.

It is at Miss O.’s studio that I first met and studied with Nadia Potts, Veronica Tennant, Linda Fletcher, Vicki Bertram, Michele Starbuck, and Barbara Malinowski. But for Michele, all of us went on to join the National Ballet Company. Miss O.’s excellent assistants, especially Nancy Schwenker, also helped us immensely on our journey to become dancers. By this time Miss O. was a single mother of daughters, one of whom also took ballet lessons. The house was like my second home.

Miss O. introduced us to the National Ballet by taking all of us to the Royal Alexandra Theatre. We would watch from the second balcony for fifty cents. Each time the lights would dim, the music would start, and the curtain would rise on this magical land of beautiful dancers and costumes. After one particular performance of Swan Lake, Miss O. took us backstage to meet Lois Smith and David Adams. There Lois was, in her white tutu so wide it grazed both sides of the hallway. Right then I knew that she was all I wanted to be—the Swan Queen. And so it was that I danced Swan Lake as my first full-length ballet with the Company in 1972.

Classes continued, but now we were die-hard fans of the Company’s dancers. The costumes for the ballets were stored in a room in the basement of Miss O.’s studio where we all got changed for class. We would, of course, try them on, imagining what it might be like to dance in them on stage. Naughty, maybe, but so much fun. In those days, Miss O. would call Barbara, Michele, and I “the Three Brats.” Depending on who was in favour at the time she would rearrange our names. The first coup came when Barbara was chosen to dance Clara in The Nutcracker. What an amazing experience for her, though, in the end, Barbara’s career was short-lived. When we were around ten years of age, Miss O. began to let us take company class at a small, mouse-infested studio on Pape Avenue. Mice or not, we were just happy to be dancing near the people we wanted to be.

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