The ballet writer Gerald Dowler is joined in a special episode of Voices of British Ballet by Monica Mason (former Royal Ballet student, principal dancer and director), Jane Pritchard (curator of...
training » The Royal Academy of Dance
Adeline Genée (1878-1970) was a Danish ballerina and founder-president of the Royal Academy of Dance. At the age of three she started taking dancing lessons from her uncle Alexander Genée and his...
Timeline Event » 1906 – Phyllis Bedells makes her London debut
Phyllis Bedells (1893-1985) was a British dancer and teacher, and founder of the Royal Academy of Dance. She rose to ballerina level using her own English name at a time when Russian names were...
Timeline Event » 1910 – Launch of the Dancing Times
Dance writer and editor Philip JS Richardson relaunched The Dancing Times, the house magazine of the Cavendish Rooms, a ballroom dancing establishment in London, as a periodical to cover all forms of...
Timeline Event » 1912 – Winifred Edwards joins Anna Pavlova’s company
Most famous for the work she did with many dancers of The Royal Ballet towards the end of her career, the fascinating early life of Winifred Edwards (1895-1989) is often overlooked. Her early...
Timeline Event » 1914 – Pauline Bush opens the Pauline Bush School of Dancing in Nottingham, the forerunner of the Bush Davies School
The Bush Davies School of Theatre Arts became one of Britain’s most renowned performing arts schools. Opened in Nottingham by Pauline Bush, the school moved to premises in East Grinstead in 1945....
Timeline Event » 1920 – Founding of The Association of Operatic Dancing of Great Britain (now the Royal Academy of Dance, (RAD))
On 31 December, 1920, Philip JS Richardson and Edouard Espinosa established The Association of Operatic Dancing of Great Britain, which would later become the Royal Academy of Dancing (RAD) in 1936...
Timeline Event » 1930 – Establishment of the British Ballet Organization (BBO)
Edouard Espinosa left the Association of Operatic Dancing in Great Britain (later the Royal Academy of Dancing) and formed the British Ballet Organization (BBO) in 1930 alongside his wife Louise Kay,...
Timeline Event » 1961 – Rudolf Nureyev defects in Paris
Following his defection from the Soviet Union in Paris earlier that year, Rudolf Nureyev gives his first performance in the Britain in 1961 in Poème tragique at the Royal Academy of Dancing’s Gala...
Timeline Event » 1997 – New premises for dance companies
The millennium years and the 2010s can be seen as a time when investment within British dance went not to artistic output, but to infrastructure in the form of new facilities for dance companies....
Timeline Event » 2001 – Cassa Pancho’s Ballet Black founded
Cassa Pancho was born in London to British and Trinidadian parents. Completing her dissertation at Durham University on Black women in ballet proved the catalyst for establishing a company that...