Ninette De Valois

Edris Stannus was born on 6 June 1898 at Baltyboys in County Wicklow, Ireland, and moved to England as a child. Training at the Lila Field Academy for Children led to professional theatre work and further study with Edouard Espinosa, Enrico Cecchetti and Nicolas Legat, alongside the stage name Ninette de Valois. Her early employment included revues and music-hall work, practical environments that exposed her to theatrical production alongside ballet technique.

From 1923 to 1926, de Valois danced with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The engagement gave her direct experience of a touring repertory company in which choreography, music, design and performance were planned as an integrated whole. That model informed her later organisational thinking, though the institution she built in Britain was not simply a copy of the Ballets Russes.

In 1926 she opened the Academy of Choreographic Art and began working with theatre manager Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic. The partnership gave students performance experience and tied training to a working theatre. When Sadler's Wells reopened in 1931, the school moved there and the Vic-Wells Ballet was established. De Valois combined inherited classical repertory with new British work, hiring Nikolay Sergeyev to stage Mariinsky ballets and appointing Frederick Ashton as resident choreographer in 1935.

Her own choreography was central to the company's early identity. *Job* (1931), *The Rake's Progress* (1935) and *Checkmate* (1937) used British composers, designers or visual sources while treating ballet as dramatic theatre. These works demonstrate that de Valois could organise movement around character, allegory and stage picture with unusual economy.

The Sadler's Wells Ballet became resident at the Royal Opera House in 1946, reopening the theatre after the Second World War with *The Sleeping Beauty*. A second touring company established that year later developed into Birmingham Royal Ballet. In 1956 a Royal Charter formally linked the companies and school under the Royal Ballet name, consolidating a system that deliberately joined professional performance, touring and education rather than treating them as separate enterprises.

De Valois also advised ballet development abroad, notably in Turkey. The 1974 Erasmus Prize recognised her formative international influence. She stepped down as company director in 1963, continued to direct the School, and retired from that role in 1970. She died on 8 March 2001 in Barnes, London, aged 102, leaving an institutional legacy that continues through the Royal Ballet organisations and the School's choreographic programme.