International Ballet
[3]: 24 On the outbreak of war she had volunteered to drive an ambulance, but she soon decided her talents would be better used taking ballet to audiences in the bomb damaged cities of Britain.
It had a Council of Management chaired by Baroness Ravensdale,[2]: 43 and as a "cultural organisation not operated for profit" it was exempt from entertainment tax.
The first tour started at the Alhambra Theatre Glasgow[8] on 19 May 1941 with 22 artistes and a full orchestra, consisting of a permanent nucleus of 15 augmented by local musicians.
[2]: 44 The soloists were Inglesby herself, the experienced ballerina Nina Tarakanova[9] and the virtuoso star Harold Turner, and the corps included the 15-year-old Moira Shearer.
[10] As time went on more even ambitious ballets were added to the repertoire and the company was enlarged, reaching 80 in number.
[2]: 7 A small number of scholarships were made available to male dancers too young for military call-up who would otherwise need to earn a living.
The company was further expanded after the war, to enable the mounting of the very large productions The Masque of Comus, Sleeping Princess and Swan Lake.
The end of the war meant that male dancers were back from armed service and artistes could more easily be recruited from abroad.
[2]: 79 In 1950 the company received a boost with the arrival of Léonide Massine, the brilliant and very experienced choreographer and former dancer, though probably better known now for his role in the film The Red Shoes.
[2]: 108 To pay for the post-war expansion of the company and the large and expensive new productions International Ballet had to find larger audiences.
During the Sadler's Wells visit in June 1949 the theatre burnt down and destroyed their scenery, costumes and entire collection of musical instruments.
This novel presentation of ballet attracted criticism from some quarters, but all performances of the long summer season were sold out.
[2]: 116 The last three chapters of Inglesby and Hunter's book[2] are devoted to the European tours and contain a wealth of anecdotal detail as well as the information given here.
Open to the sky, the audience of up to 30,000 sat on cushions on the stone tiers and on rows of seats on the arena floor where originally the gladiators battled and the lions ate the Christians.
Some dressing rooms were in the lions' dens and some in the Christians' prison cells underneath the tiered stone seating.
The 1953 tour took in the opera houses of Palermo, Reggio Emilia, Brescia, Trieste, Turin and Sanremo before moving to Spain for a four-week season at the Gran Teatro del Liceu in Barcelona.
In 2012 a plaque was put up inside the artists’ entrance of the Royal Festival Hall commemorating the achievements of International Ballet and its founder and Director, Mona Inglesby.
[n 4] In the 1948–9 season for instance the Sadler’s Wells company at Covent Garden performed 22 ballets, four of them new productions.
In 1941 International Ballet had official approval, in that a number of its male dancers were exempted from military service.
$ The title Sleeping Beauty was coined for the first time by Ninette de Valois for the Sadler's Wells revival of 1946.
Prior to that the ballet was universally called Sleeping Princess, including by Sadler's Wells for its 1939 Sergeyev-directed production.
George Weldon (1941–43) Ernest Irving (1943–47)[24] James Walker (1947–53) Anthony Baines (Associate Conductor, ~1949–53) Kay Hunter's book[2] lists 213 artistes who appeared with International Ballet at some time in its 12-year life.
Those taking principal roles included the following:- As of 2014 there is no official history of International Ballet, but these two books contain much information.
