IN THE cornucopia of memorabilia at the Firkin Crane in Cork’s Shandon Quarter, the dancing life, props and achievements of the late Joan Denise Moriarty are arrayed in a panoply of nostalgia.
Although video screens large and small offer a dancing shuffle of Cinderella and Giselle, along with the productions based on Irish legends and literature from the Táin to Playboy of the Western World, the impact is in the costumes. Tangible, though never of course as glittering as they appeared under the lights of the stage, they are mounted above original drawings by designers Patrick Murray and Marshall C Hutson. Boots and slippers, tulle and creels and crowns, the frilled memorials of the magic of ballet are assembled in layers like reminders of a treasury unvalued until it was lost.
Curated by Monica Gavin and Breda Quinn, the display continues daily through the year as part of the programme celebrating Moriarty’s centenary, even though there has to be something appropriately fanciful about the date, as the dancer and choreographer was notoriously shy about her birthday.
There is nothing fanciful in the cabinets of medals, citations, certificates (that for her birth is missing), and honours which recognised Moriarty’s passionate relationship with dance and which include the glass slipper presented by her Cork Ballet Company in 1970. Yet for those who remember it, perhaps the only significant reward was the acclaim which greeted the Cork Ballet Company’s production of Swan Lake at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in 1972; it was not the applause which was important so much as the support that it signified. One of those performances was attended by the then taoiseach Jack Lynch and his wife Máirín. It was not going too far to believe that the inauguration of the Irish National Ballet company stemmed from that week in Dublin, even though it was not the first Dublin week for Moriarty and her dancers, nor was it her first professional company.
There had been performances at the Abbey Theatre – both Coppelia and Giselle in 1971 – and there had been the Irish Theatre Ballet company, founded in Cork in 1959 with Marie Rambert as its patron. When Patricia Ryan registered her ballet company in Dublin as professional in 1962, the Arts Council had recommended a merger of the two groups. This was quickly seen as unsuccessful and the joint enterprise was disbanded within a year. Undeterred, Moriarty won both a government and an Arts Council grant with which to fund the new Irish National Ballet company; additional help came with the donation by its patron Dame Ninette de Valois, of half her Erasmus Prize money (shared in 1974 with Maurice Bejart and now worth €150,000).
Facts and memories have been compressed into an illustrated book published by the Cork City Library and edited by Ruth Fleischmann with contributions from a variety of practitioners and friends, from composer Seamus De Barra to choreographer Domy Reiter-Soffer. Together these chapters relate the effort and achievements of a long career which embraced folk as well as classical dance, native music and rhythms (she was a winner on the war-pipes) as well as the scores of Tchaikovsky, Delibes, Hamilton Harty, Seán Ó Riada and her most loyal musical collaborater, Aloys Fleischmann, conductor of the Cork Symphony Orchestra.
On the page, and even now on the walls of the Firkin Crane, it all looks composed, ardent and deliberate. But nothing can properly convey those hectic journeys from town to town with dancers and scenery – and pianist Charles Lynch – in the back of a van, uncertain of their welcome and confident only of what must often have seemed more like a mission than a working life. Impressive names take walk-on parts in this saga: John Gilpin, Alicia Markova, Anton Dolin and Michel de Lutry among the advisers and tutors guiding the company and its small international quota of contracted dancers.
Into this ensemble were woven the more local talents; at the Firkin Crane their skirts whirl to the thrum of the company’s production of The Playboy of the Western World (with The Chieftains) which travelled successfully to New York and London and which now offers a reminder of the many commissions Joan Denise Moriarty offered to Irish musicians.
Well, it all ended in tears with the Brinson Report of 1985; commissioned by the Irish Arts Council to study the development and funding of dance theatre in Ireland, this detailed examination of the different companies noted the “grossly inequitable artistic policy” by which the Irish National Ballet took 87 per cent of Arts Council expenditure on dance. Its recommendations included the restructuring of the company board as well as the appointment of a new artistic director.
Moriarty resigned from the company, the Arts Council grant was withdrawn four years later and Moriarty herself died in 1992. The 46 seasons of the Cork Ballet Company came to an end in 1993. Yet something lives on, not least in the work of Alan Foley’s Cork City Ballet. Up here in the Firkin Crane the story is told in the recycled costumes such as the gold dress from Swan Lake which did duty in 1972, 1983 and 1987, or in Patricia Crosbie’s white chiffon gown for the 1980 Cinderella, which was starring again in 1983 and 1987. The Firkin Crane itself is now the centre of dance in Cork and, with the neighbouring Cork Butter Museum, provides a vibrant contrast to the empty portals of the old butter exchange building across the street.
Something lives on, for in a coincidence both personalities would have appreciated, Moriarty’s is not the only centenary Cork is celebrating. Gerald Yoel Goldberg was born in 1912 and his life as lawyer, alderman, lord mayor, antiquarian and patron of the arts was recognised recently by the current lord mayor Terry Shannon at a reception hosted by Theo Goldberg at the Crawford Gallery. This year, too, the Cork Orchestral Society’s programme of lunchtime concerts at the Crawford is dedicated to the society’s founders, Gerald Goldberg and his wife Sheila. So it’s not just memories, after all.
* Joan Denise Moriarty; Ireland’s First Lady of Dance, edited by Ruth Fleischmann