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Peggy
van Praagh (second from right) in the 'Tiny Tots Troupe'
8 April 1916
Peggy van Praagh Collection from the Pictorial Collection
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In
the first of a series looking at recent additions to the Library's
dance holdings, Michelle Potter reviews the papers of Peggy
van Praagh
The
National Library of Australia's dance collections have been
enhanced since the establishment of the Keep Dancing! Project
in 1997, and Australia Council funded initiative between the
Library, ScreenSound Australia and the Australian Dance Council
(Ausdance) to encourage preservation of Australia's rich dance
heritage. Among the key holdings-preserved as MS 7223-are
the personal papers and photographs of Peggy van Praagh.
Van
Praagh, founding artistic director of the Australian Ballet,
most likely could not remember a time when dancing was not
part of her life. In photographs taken in England in the early
part of the twentieth century, when she was just four or five
years old, her commitment is already clear. There she is,
a tiny tot with chubby legs and baby curls and a fiercely
determined look on her face. Her personal papers and photographs,
acquired by the Library in three stages between 1986 and 1999,
record that as a child in London she passes various examinations
in ballet, Greek and ballroom dancing, mostly with very good
results despite what one examiner thought was 'a tendency
to exaggerate'. By 1929 the legendary dancer Anna Pavlova
decreed that van Praagh was ready to begin a career as a professional
dancer. In her studios at Ivy House in Hampstead, Pavlova
watched van Praagh and two of her friends and wrote:
I
consider that all three girls are sufficiently advanced
in their training to become professional dancers and would
do credit to any company of which they might become members.
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Peggy
van Praagh teaching the
Australian Ballet in Melbourne, 1961
From the Manuscript Collection MS 7223
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Later
photographs from the Library's collection show van Praagh's
growing artistic maturity, and record the important roles
she danced throughout her career. Perhaps most notable among
her early roles in London in the 1930s and 1940s were parts
in the ballets of choreographer Antony Tudor. Van Praagh danced
in Jardin aux lilas, Dark Elegies, Soirée musicale, Gala
Performance and The Planets and in many cases created
roles for Tudor in these works. The choreographer's psychological
insight and the dramatic and interpretative skills his works
demanded affected her deeply. Other early roles includes some,
such as the principal part in Coppélia, that would
have special significance in van Praagh's later career in
Australia. (She would eventually mount two new productions
of Coppélia here-the first for the Borovansky Ballet
in 1960 and the second for the Australian Ballet in 1979.
Her 1979 production, designed by Kristian Fredrikson and made
in association with George Ogilvie as dramaturge, remains
in the repertoire of the Australian Ballet to this day and
is to be restaged in several Australian cities during 2000.)
Van
Praagh came to Australia in 1960 to direct the Borovansky
Bally after Edouard Borovansky's death in 1959. Shortly afterwards
there were concerted moves, I which van Praagh was deeply
involved to establish a national company. The eventual outcome
was the establishment of the Australian Ballet, which in 1962
gave its inaugural season with van Praagh at the helm as artistic
director. While the background to the setting up of the Australian
Ballet has been documented in a number of official accounts,
the correspondence on her appointment as artistic director
gives a rather more personal picture.
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Peggy
van Praagh in Gala Performance,
London Ballet, 1939
Peggy van Praagh Collection from the
Pictorial Collection |
In
early negotiations and proceedings, she certainly reveals
herself as committed to the idea of a national company, but
there is also a strong indication in her meticulously kept
papers that she felt she was in a vulnerable position: she
was engaged by the Australian Ballet Foundation initially
for one yea only. Correspondence in 1962 with Rudolf Bing
(general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, New York) indicates
that she was concerned for her future and was negotiating
a position as ballet director and teacher at the Met for 1963
and beyond. A salary significantly in excess of what she would
earn as artistic director of the Australian Ballet was on
offer. Ultimately, however, van Praagh did not take up the
New York offer. She went on to direct the Australian Ballet
from 1962 to 1974, and then again in 1978. Between 1965 and
1974 she shared the directorship with Robert Helpmann.
Correspondence
during that time sets outs what expectations her employer,
the Australian Ballet Foundation, had of her, and how the
Foundation envisaged the co-artistic directorship would operate.
As her papers indicate, her years as director were not without
their problems, some of which the Australian Ballet also had
many highlights. During that time the company welcomed guest
artists of the calibre of Erik Bruhn, Sonia Arova, Margot
Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, commissioned its first all-Australian
ballet-Robert Helpmann's Display-and made its first
overseas tour. Van Praagh's pleasure at the gradual growth
of the Australian Ballet is evident in her personal correspondence
with friends and colleagues, and in the photographs and programs
she collected as mementos of those years.
The
papers also give a clear idea of how van Praagh operated on
a day-to-day level in rehearsing and restaging her ballets.
She had everything written down in exercise books, in longhand
and with diagrams to indicate choreographic floor patterns
for particular dances. The Library's van Praagh collection
contains written descriptions, scene-by-scene, step-by-step,
for excerpts for Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Coppélia,
Giselle, Gala Performance and Lady and the Fool.
Director's notes for certain ballets also appear in a number
of annotated musical scores in the collection. Van Praagh
also kept notebooks in which she recorded particular exercises
she had learnt and found valuable with some of her own dance
teachers, or with teachers who had been invited to work with
the Australian Ballet. The teaching strategies of some of
the best-known ballet teachers of the twentieth century are
hidden in these notebooks, including Olga Preobrajenska and
Lubov Egorova (the two legendary ballerinas from the Imperial
Russian Ballet who set themselves up in Paris after the Russian
Revolution), Hans Brenaa from the Royal Danish Ballet, and
Asaf Messerer from the Bolshoi Ballet.
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Edouard
Borovansky during rehearsal with
(left to right) Pamela Wyatt, Lesley Sexton,
Grace Macleon, Noel Murray, Joan Potter and
showing the legs of Edna Burse
Geoffrey Ingram Archive of Australian Ballet;
from the Pictorial Collection |
As
well as leading the Australian Ballet through its early years,
van Praagh made a particular contribution to the development
of dance through education. Her own formal education had been
at the King Alfred School in London and in those early years
she had been especially influenced by the liberal and reformist
attitudes of one of her teachers, A.S. Neill. Her own early
creative ventures as writer appear in school magazines from
the King Alfred School (some of which are also preserved in
the Library's van Praagh papers). A consuming interest in
creativity and its role in the education of dancers and choreographers,
as well as in the need to educate the general public about
dance in all its aspects, remained with van Praagh all her
life. On a formal level she played a leading role in the 1970s
in the formation of the Australian Association for Dance Education,
now Ausdance. One of her most interesting ventures associated
with Ausdance was a series of residential summer schools organised
with the assistance of Bernard James for the Centre for Continuing
Eduction at the University of New England. These summer schools,
held on several occasions between 1967 and 1976, were largely
opportunities for emerging choreographers-including, in 1976,
a young Graeme Murphy-to explore and experiment with their
craft. The same records also reveal the dept of van Praagh's
approach: the tutors she invited, the musicians she included
as part of the team, and the associated seminars on history
and criticism, all speak of a woman committed to the total
education of choreographers, dancers and potential audience
members.
Peggy
van Praagh's personal papers and photographs are augmented
by an oral history interview recorded by Hazel de Berg in
1973, and two recorded addresses-one given to a 1980 meeting
of the ACT Division of the Arts Council of Australia, and
another recorded at the National Press Club in 1985 for the
launch of her biography. Further photographs relating to van
Praagh's career were recently acquired for the Library's Pictorial
Collection.
Together,
this material provides an in-dept, personal look at a woman
who, having been awarded both ad DBE and an honorary doctorate,
often used to joke above whether she was Dr Dame Peggy or
Dame Dr Peggy. Van Praagh died in 1990. Her influence on Australian
dance in the middle decades of the twentieth century is of
exceptional significance.
MICHELLE
POTTER manages the Keep Dancing! Project, an Australia
Council funded partnership between ScreenSound
Australia, the National Library of Australia and Ausdance
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