Margaret Craske (1892-1990). British dancer and teacher

Margaret Craske is best known as one of the people to whom the great teacher Enrico Cecchetti entrusted the care of his work. She started ballet quite late, at the age of 16, and after several teachers found Cecchetti’s West Street studio in London. During the 1920s she danced briefly with several companies including the Royal Italian Ballet, and, under the name Margareta Krasova, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. She also produced ballets for the Carl Rosa Opera Company, as well as a number of West End productions.

Cecchetti left London in 1923 and Craske opened her own school in 1924. She was a devoted disciple of his work and became an authority on his method. During this period she could count many of the “movers and shakers” of the developing British ballet scene as her pupils, including Frederick Ashton, Anton Dolin, Antony Tudor, Peggy Van Praagh and Margot Fonteyn. In this way Cecchetti’s work entered the life-blood of British ballet in its formative years. Craske spent 1939 to 1946 studying spirituality in India, returning only briefly to London before being invited by Tudor to become ballet mistress for Ballet Theatre (American Ballet Theatre) in New York. She then made New York her home, introducing a new generation of dancers to the Cecchetti work.

From 1950 until 1968, Craske taught at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and, after that, at the Manhatten School of Dance until 1983. Craske was the co-author of two authoritative textbooks. The first, with Cyril Beaumont, was The Theory and Practice of Allegro in Classical Ballet (London, 1930), followed by The Theory and Practice of Advanced Allegro in Classical Ballet (London, 1956) with Derra de Moroda.