Alan Foley on the perils of staging princess-free ballet: ‘When we did Giselle I lost €55,000. People just didn’t come and see it’

Directing a ballet company anywhere presents numerous challenges, from raising funds and hiring dancers to choosing productions that hold an audience’s interest. Audiences have long supported Cork City Ballet, which traces its roots back to Joan Denise Moriarty’s Irish National Ballet in the 1970s. In 2019 Cork City Ballet’s Swan Lake sold out 11 days before opening night. Dancers from all over the world audition for its productions. When Cork City Ballet celebrates its 30th anniversary with a production of Swan Lake this week, it will mark a notable moment for ballet in Ireland.

Alan Foley, its artistic director, has led the organisation through three decades in a country with little ballet infrastructure. He has survived Arts Council cuts and has coaxed dancers to Cork for three-week contracts. He has maintained a positive outlook throughout.

“I remain optimistic because I have one huge thing in my armoury, and that is the most incredible team around me,” Foley says. “I have Yury Demakov, my choreographer; Patricia Crosbie, my ballet mistress; Colette McNamee, for my PR. Janet Dillon has been with me since the very beginning and is responsible for all the auditions. Then there’s my lighting crew, my stage crew, my sound crew. They’ve all been with me for 30 years. And I could not do what I do without these people. I just couldn’t do it.”

Joanna Banks danced with Moriarty’s Irish National Ballet from 1974 to 1984, after launching her career at the Royal Ballet. “I have a huge respect for Alan, because he saw a vacuum and he filled it,” Banks says. “He is carrying on the legacy that Moriarty began and with one stroke of a pen was gotten rid of with funding cuts in the 1980s.”

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In its heyday, Irish National Ballet presented smaller-scale ballets and excerpts from larger ones, travelling to cities and towns throughout Ireland to perform. Dancers worked under full-time annual contracts that included summertime work and paid time off. The nominal salary for Irish National Ballet dancers was balanced by the steady work, Banks says. No other ballet company in Ireland has offered dancers that level of stability before or since.

Moriarty’s passion and commitment influenced a generation of dancers, including Foley. He attended her school and performed with her student company, which eventually inspired him to audition for the summertime programme at the Vaganova Ballet Academy. Based in what was then Leningrad, the prestigious Russian school at that time was closed to most westerners. In the 1980s the majority of outsiders knew Russian ballet because of travelling groups such as stars of the Bolshoi Ballet and the Kirov Ballet, whose dancers trained at the Vaganova school and toured internationally, including to Dublin. Legendary Russian dancers also made headlines at the time for their defections to the West, including the superstars Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova.

“The first time I went was in 1989,” Foley says. “It was the first time the school opened its doors to westerners. I remember everyone in the Moriarty ballet school all wanted to go to London. I thought, ‘it’s London this and London that. I want to do something different’. So I applied for the craic actually, because I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great? I’ll at least have a letter from that school saying, ‘no, you’re crap. Go away’. And I actually got a letter saying, ‘can you send in a video of yourself?’ And then I got a letter saying, ‘yeah, you’ve been accepted. You’re one of 60 from all over the world that is coming.’ It was the most incredible experience. Ridiculously tough. It was like going back in a time warp.”

Foley relies heavily on the Tchaikovsky triumvirate of Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty for his programmes with Cork City Ballet

Foley spent weeks during his Leningrad summer studying in the school’s infamous studios, learning from Russian teachers and bonding with students from around the world. He remembers long queues outside of McDonald’s and shops with Mars chocolate bars in locked cabinets. He also recalls the school’s exceptional training. It influences his programming choices to this day.

Foley relies heavily on the Tchaikovsky triumvirate of Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty for his programmes with Cork City Ballet. Although he has ventured into more contemporary ballets throughout the years, he is less willing to take those risks.

“I really am a traditionalist, you know. Like, I don’t want to bring the swans in on horseback. It’s not what I’m trained for. I don’t want to have naked nymphs on stage; it’s not my gig. So I’m pretty restricted insofar as I don’t want to go that road now. That said, over the years we’ve presented a number of very spectacular evenings with a whole variety of choreography, including some jazz ballets with choreography by Pat Crosbie and myself.”

As for the possibility of presenting any other full-length ballet classics that do not involve a swan or a princess? “When we did Giselle in 2016, I lost €55,000 because people just didn’t come and see it. We only had half-full theatres.”

Foley is employing 25 professional dancers for this year’s Swan Lake. They will come from Japan, England, the United States, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Ireland. Many dancers return year after year for the experience of working with Foley’s team.

“You get to do the kind of repertoire that you trained for all those years in school — the big story ballets are what everyone wants to dance,” says Lauren Speirs, a US-based dancer and choreographer who performed with Cork City Ballet for five seasons. “Most of the time as a freelancer you don’t always get that, so I think the repertoire is really appealing.” Performing with a company the size of Cork City Ballet means more stage time for dancers. In larger companies roles must often be shared between a bigger cast.

Not too many companies provide you with that. We came from all over the world, and the environment there just allowed us to click right away. The camaraderie of putting together a four-act ballet in a few weeks will do that

—  Lauren Speirs

Cork City Ballet pay starts at €450 a week for corps-de-ballet members. Rates increase for principals and soloists. Women are also offered a €75 pointe-shoe allowance, which is about the cost of one pair of shoes.

“The dancers are also provided with housing, which is a huge plus and rare,” Speirs says. “Not too many companies provide you with that. We came from all over the world, and the environment there just allowed us to click right away. The camaraderie of putting together a four-act ballet in a few weeks will do that.”

Patricia Crosbie, Foley’s ballet mistress, also danced with the Irish National Ballet under Moriarty. Now that she teaches and coaches dancers with Cork City Ballet, she acknowledges that Foley must grapple with the same issues Moriarty did 50 years ago. Crosbie has noticed some positive developments for ballet in Ireland, however.

“When Moriarty first started teaching ballet, the church declared her a heathen or whatever she was declared,” Crosbie says. “And there were issues with that because Irish National Ballet toured to every town in the country. In the 1970s that was bizarre. So ballet has evolved and it has changed and it has grown. A lot of that is to do with the internet, Zoom and Netflix. People can see just what it takes to be a dancer and what the training requires. It’s not just about putting on a pair of shoes and looking pretty, which people thought it was, certainly in my day.”

Crosbie says anyone who comes to work with Cork City Ballet now consistently arrives with a higher standard of training, year on year, a reflection of the rising levels of ballet technique worldwide. She also notices changes in Cork City Ballet’s audience.

Foley has already programmed Sleeping Beauty for next year and is sanguine about the company’s future

“The audiences that are coming to see ballet are much younger and they’re much more cool about it,” Crosbie says. “There are a lot more men. Whether it’s their girlfriends or whoever bringing them, they’re definitely coming. And the feedback is always really, really positive. People don’t feel like they’ve got to get all dressed up to go to the ballet anymore, which has always been the case in places like New York and abroad. In Ireland, we always had that whole thing of ‘we have to dress up to go to the ballet and then we don’t understand it’. All of that is changing. Slowly. But it is.”

Foley has already programmed Sleeping Beauty for next year and is sanguine about the company’s future.

“In the forward to a book I wrote, said Mary Clark, editor of the magazine Dancing Times — and I’m paraphrasing now — ‘somebody said to Ninette de Valois many years ago, when she started her ballet company” — the Royal Ballet — “it couldn’t be done. So she went and did it anyway. The same could be said of Alan Foley.’ “When I read that paragraph,” Foley says, “I thought, ‘If nobody ever said anything nice about me ever again, I could die happy with that. Just that little paragraph.’”

Cork City Ballet presents Swan Lake at Cork Opera House from Thursday, November 2nd, to Saturday, November 4th