History
The National Ballet School of Canada is the associate school of the National Ballet of Canada, which was formed in 1951 by the English ballet dancer Celia Franca. Franca had previously been a leading dancer with ballet companies in the United Kingdom, before Dame Ninette de Valois recommended her as the best candidate to form a new Canadian ballet company modelled on her own Sadler's Wells Ballet, better known today as The Royal Ballet.
Franca subsequently emigrated to Canada in 1951 and founded the National Ballet of Canada that same year, also hiring the English ballet teacher Betty Oliphant to work with the Company. As the Company became established, Franca and Oliphant decided it was essential to establish their own ballet academy to train dancers for the Company. This led to the formation of Canada's National Ballet School in 1959 as a feeder school to the Company.
Oliphant became the School's first Artistic Director and having studied the Cecchetti method under Dame Marie Rambert and Antony Tudor, she chose the method as the foundation for the School's training programme. The Cecchetti method taught at the school was the original syllabus devised by Enrico Cecchetti himself in collaboration with the dance writer and historian Cyril Beaumont, and which is today preserved and examined worldwide by the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing. Students of the school were notably assessed by examiners from the United Kingdom, to ensure complete impartiality.
The School had been based in a former Quaker meeting house at 111 Maitland Street in Toronto, a building purchased for the school by the National Ballet Guild at a cost of $80,000. The first enrolment of full-time students included 27 females, with 202 students enrolling for part-time study, of which nine were boys.
In 1983, students at the School were featured in the Academy Award-winning National Film Board of Canada dance film Flamenco at 5:15.
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