Cranko: the Man and his Choreography

By Ashley Killar

Shortly after the New York Times had hailed John Cranko’s achievement as 'The German Ballet Miracle', his death mid-Atlantic deprived the world of one of its greatest choreographers. After leaving his native South Africa at eighteen, never to return, Cranko quickly became a resident choreographer with the Royal Ballet. He collaborated closely with luminaries such as Benjamin Britten and John Piper and encouraged the young Kenneth MacMillan. Tirelessly innovative, he devised a hit musical revue, Cranks as well as perennial favourites such as Pineapple Poll. His charm and wit endeared him to colleagues and royalty alike, but in the late 1950s his star began to wane. This, and a much-publicised scandal, drove Cranko to leave England for Germany. There, his work as director and choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet enjoyed phenomenal success in USA, Russia and Europe. Fifty years after his tragically early death, Cranko’s story ballets continue to enrich ballet audiences around the world.

The author danced in the Stuttgart Ballet’s premieres of Cranko’s Onegin, Romeo and Juliet and many more. He reveals the man behind the masterpieces and explores an array of lesser-known works, bringing to light fascinating facts about the genesis of Cranko’s ballets. Lavishly illustrated with rare photographs, the book contains Cranko’s personal letters and extensive reference material. It brings the reader surprising insights into the life and work of a truly exceptional man of theatre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781803133560

Ashley Killar

Ashley Killar trained at the Royal Ballet School, starting his career with John Cranko at Stuttgart Ballet. Cranko’s work inspired Ashley throughout his career with Scottish Ballet, Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet and as artistic director of Napac Dance Company and the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Students from Killar’s vocational ballet school in Sydney dance in companies around the world.

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About this book

After leaving his native South Africa aged eighteen John Cranko quickly became a resident choreographer to the Sadler’s Wells and Royal Ballet companies. His works such as Pineapple Poll and the revue Cranks were hugely popular, and Cranko’s personal charm and wit endeared him to people of all backgrounds. But by the late 1950s his star was waning, and his outspokenness and a much-publicised scandal drove him to leave England for Germany.

There, Cranko’s work as director and choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet enjoyed phenomenal success in USA, Russia and Europe. The New York Times hailed John Cranko’s achievement as ‘The German Ballet Miracle’, but his tragically early death would deprive the world of a visionary man of the theatre.

Fifty years later, audiences in four continents enjoy Cranko’s story ballets Onegin, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew. This book explores these and the many lesser known ballets, uncovering remarkable facts and fascinating new evidence about a controversial choreographer.

The author was born in London, son of a music librarian at Covent Garden. Ashley Killar received his training at the Royal Ballet Schools, graduating to begin his career with Cranko at Stuttgart Ballet. He was, in his own words, ‘galvanised by Cranko’s personal ethos and inspired by its expression in the way he worked’. This inspiration pervaded Ashley’s later career with Scottish Ballet, Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet and as artistic director of Napac Dance Company and the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

Now Ashley brings the man, his mentor, to life in a unique biography that takes the reader into Cranko’s world.

CRANKO

THE MAN AND HIS

CHOREOGRAPHY

Copyright © 2022 Ashley Killar

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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In loving memory of my father Charles ‘Tim’ Killar 1913-1971

CONTENTS

Foreword

Prelude The Greek Restaurant

One Childhood

Two Cape Town

Three Sadler’s Wells

Four Settling In

Five Becoming Established

Six Making a Name

Seven The Pipers

Eight Two Opera Premieres

Nine Masks and Identities

Ten Roving Choreographer

Eleven The Prince of the Pagodas

Twelve Aftermath

Thirteen Three Resident Choreographers

Fourteen Gathering Clouds

Fifteen Depression

Sixteen Upheaval

Seventeen Germany

Eighteen Initial Steps

Interlude A Young Dancer’s Impressions

Nineteen Romeo und Julia

Twenty Cranko’s Domain

Twenty-One Contrasts

Twenty-Two Onegin

Twenty-Three New Aspirations

Twenty-Four The Taming of the Shrew

Twenty-Five Acclaim in USA, Leverage at Home

Twenty-Six Dark Times

Twenty-Seven Two Testaments

Twenty-Eight Final Months

Postlude Fifty Years on

Catalogue Cranko's Complete works. Annexures.

Appendix A Selected Letters

Appendix B A Selection of Cranko’s Synopses and Programme Notes

Appendix C The Stuttgart Ballet and School after Cranko

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

References

FOREWORD

By Sir David Bintley

It is one of the great sadnesses of my life that I never met John Cranko. I worked with, and revered, all the major architects of The Royal Ballet – de Valois, Ashton and MacMillan – but Cranko died just one year before my studies at the Royal Ballet School began.

In my second year at the school, the Stuttgart Ballet, who must still have been reeling from John’s death, was making its first London appearances since the loss of their leader. They were rehearsing at the Royal Ballet studios, part of the building shared with the school, and I watched through a door window, my face pressed against the glass. They exuded a warmth, a sense of family that I had always expected of a Cranko company. Not that I knew a great deal about the man or his ballets at that time, but I was an avid reader of ballet history and already felt an affinity for John and his ethos.

The photograph of Cranko printed alongside his obituary in the Dancing Times, which I first saw as a sixteen-year-old, was of him standing on a rooftop wearing a Russian-style smock. On graduating from the Royal Ballet School and joining the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, it was the same picture that was displayed outside the newly built Cranko Studio atop Sadler’s Wells Theatre which I passed every day on my way to class and rehearsal. In that theatre, home to so many of Cranko’s early successes and so rich in English ballet history, I first danced Pineapple Poll and The Lady and the Fool. Later with the company I performed an array of roles in The Taming of the Shrew, Broulliards and Card Game. I revelled in the comedy of these ballets, being more of a character dancer than a classicist, but then John’s ballets always did take care of every dancer. He choreographed for the whole company, not just a handful of soloists.

Like John, my first stumbling footsteps into the world of choreography had been a teenage version of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, created before I even knew what a choreographer was. Later pieces, especially those using comedy, were informed, if not directly influenced, by John’s exuberant theatricality, wit and pure stage craft. As with de Valois’s ballets, I always found that I learned more from these two choreographers’ works than any others, their methods being laid bare, transparent: de Valois tending towards the academic, Cranko towards honest vulnerability.

In 1993 I left the Royal Ballet and my post as Resident Choreographer. Like Cranko thirty years earlier, I felt stifled by expectation and politicking and suddenly, like another ‘Stuttgart miracle’, for me at least, I received a call from Marcia Haydée asking if I would create a ballet for the company!

My first visit to Stuttgart was exactly as I had imagined. The theatre was much as it had been when John was alive, the backstage beautifully worn and workmanlike, as all good theatres are, the auditorium large, yet intimate, almost embracing the stage, as the Stuttgart audience embraced the company. I pictured all of those wonderful premieres: Onegin, Taming, Romeo. But the overwhelming feeling was one of familial welcome, from the moment I entered the building to my introduction to Marcia in her office-cum-dressing room, filled as it was with pictures, posters, cards and trivia spanning her entire career as Cranko’s muse. It was as though a large piece in the jigsaw of my life had suddenly fallen into place.

As a young dancer I was lucky to share the stage not only with dancers who had worked with Cranko, but also with people who had actually been members of his company, like Bernd Berg, the East German dancer who had escaped to the West hidden in a suitcase in the trunk of a car. Along with Bernd, Ashley Killar too was a window into that world; not only were they both a source of oral information but also a great example when it came to seeing how Cranko’s work should be performed. I remember with great fondness the pathos that Ashley brought to Moondog, the romantic clown of Cranko’s Lady and the Fool, and the way John had used Bernd’s particular physical gifts when he created ‘Voiles’ from Broulliards.

When Ashley asked me if I would write the foreword for a book he was planning on Cranko, I had no idea that the resulting work would be so compelling and impressive. I had read and enjoyed John Percival’s biography of Cranko, Theatre in my Blood, when it was published in the 1980s, but nothing prepared me for the depth of research and perception that Ashley has brought to his subject.

He is of course ideally placed to write such a book, having worked with John in Stuttgart, and then having had the objective distance of a varied career as dancer, choreographer, and director with other companies. But it is the emotional and intellectual acuity, and above all the sheer readability of his book, which I believe will not only mark it out as the definitive record of Cranko and his ballets, but also make it widely read and enjoyed, and not solely of academic interest.

In its pages Ashley paints a vivid picture of a man driven by his love for dance and its limitless possibilities. A man racing from one project to the next – ballet, opera, musical, revue. A man who perceived perhaps that his life was being poured out faster than others’, and was therefore extravagant in his effort, his time, his generosity; a man who ‘loved not wisely, but too well’, in the words of his beloved Shakespeare.

It is one of the great sadnesses of my life that I never met John Cranko. Ashley’s book brings him to life in such a way that I almost feel I have.

David Bintley

Canterbury, UK

John Cranko

PRELUDE

THE GREEK RESTAURANT

In Stuttgart during the 1960s, hungry ballet dancers would gravitate to a small Greek taverna. It was open late, and the food was good value, so it became a regular haunt. John Cranko often joined us there, and he relished the lamb kleftiko and the cheap retsina, a wine infused with the resin of pine trees. Occasionally, as we all finished our meals, a sudden amplification of the background music would interrupt the gossip, the laughter and even the earnest conversation. The waiter Dmitri, normally rather sullen, would stand with outstretched arms and eyes half closed, making the hissing sounds that herald Greek dancing. John was always the first to jump up delightedly and join arms with Dmitri, who led him, studiedly at first, into the side-steps, half kneels and rocking moves of the syrtaki. While they twined their way around the restaurant, chairs scraped back on the tiled floor as everyone stood to link arms and dance. John was in his element.

I can still see his face glowing with happiness, and, like many other former colleagues, I have masses of memories from that happy period in Stuttgart. But my nostalgia has little place in a book about John – he was not one to look back, he was always hungry for new experiences. Yet he found time to be deeply reflective, too. Using those penetrating blue eyes that missed nothing about people, he produced ballets that exposed his abiding fascination – human relationships in all their diversity.

John’s cascade of ballets ranged from popular hits to offbeat curiosities, and not one of them was ever dull. His output was prodigious, as if he knew that his life would be short. There were two musicals, two revues and numerous opera-ballets, as well as over ninety ballets and occasion pieces. He is unsurpassed as a storyteller in choreography, finding new ways of weaving dance and narrative into one. He made sure that his story ballets not only entertained, but they had something profound to say about the human condition.

This book has dual aims. I want to provide a sense of the context in which John conceived his ballets, and – through an exploration of his works – to offer a considered appreciation of a controversial artist. John’s association with luminaries such as Kenneth MacMillan, John Piper and Benjamin Britten during a dozen post-war years in Britain form a background to ballets like Harlequin in April that will soon disappear from living memory. I include discussion of some of these, plus, of course, all the ballets that are still performed today. In all these commentaries I select an aspect that seems to shine a light on some special quality, or, in some cases, a significant weakness. Several Cranko ballets are now available in commercial video recordings, allowing you, the reader, further close reference – and opportunity to dispute my opinions.

Cranko realised that the sheer purity of style in the ballets of Frederick Ashton and his revered George Balanchine often put his own choreography in the shade. Many critics seem to rate Cranko’s successes as freakish, but I think a reappraisal of his accomplishments is overdue. The full-length story ballets are only a small part of his output, and too few people know anything of the several scintillating short ballets, not to mention his immense achievements in other spheres.

I was fortunate enough to be one of John’s dancers for five years and was present when he was creating some of his finest ballets. Despite treasuring my experiences in Stuttgart, I accept that personal recollection is a slippery device, better at selecting than recording. As for my opinions of the ballets, well, everyone knows that artworks can hold vastly different meanings for different people. Nevertheless, I maintain that Cranko’s ballets still have much to give, and I hope that this book will show why.

My way of responding to John’s choreography and life story, so inextricably intertwined, is to write about the chequered nature of both, frankly and honestly. This book is intended as a loving tribute to an unforgettable man.

Cranko and Marcia Haydée at a rehearsal in November 1972. Birgit Keil and Richard Cragun are reflected in the studio mirror.

ONE

CHILDHOOD

John’s Parents – Rustenburg – Separation – Puppetry – Ballet Lessons

The plains to the north-west of Johannesburg, city of gold, extend far beyond the labyrinth of mines and the ugly spoil heaps. The sweeping grasslands of the highveld where giraffe, springbok and zebra herds once roamed unfurl to meet the Magaliesberg mountain range. There, nestling into a fertile valley of the foothills lay the community of Rustenburg. Occasional settlers would reach the area with their oxen and horses. Seventy miles of dirt tracks isolated them from Johannesburg, and the major seaport of Cape Town was many weeks’ trek to the south.

At first Rustenburg grew unhurriedly, but when, soon after the First World War, prospectors discovered platinum and iron ore deposits in the region, speculators from far and wide began to arrive. They came from the coal and tin mines of Europe, and some of the more skilled men became mine managers. Others who followed during the 1920s found use for their experience as engineers, builders, solicitors, and the like; their wives made homes as best they could in the new environment. Indian families arrived from the sugar fields of Natal, the so-called Coloureds, mixed race people from the Cape, migrated north, and Chinese traders opened shops. Not unexpectedly, the adventurers, crooks and philanderers came too.

The managers brought in indigenous Africans to do the hardest physical work, some of whom had already laboured in the diamond pits of the Kimberley and the gold mines of Johannesburg. Virtually slaves, they found themselves relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy by the Coloureds, Indians and the new immigrants and their families from Europe, not to mention the long-established Boers, who considered themselves more virtuous than everyone else.

Herbert, John’s father, wrote in his journal that the white people, who then numbered half the population of Rustenburg, were ‘of many different origins and races, and also bitterly divided’.

—

Herbert’s father Frederick Cranko (formerly Krankoor) married Bilhah Solomon Jacobson, a matriarch who raised their six children in the Jewish faith. Herbert was the youngest. The family scattered to the USA and Australasia as well as throughout South Africa, and Herbert visited Australia when he was about sixteen – the beginning of his love of travel. He qualified in law before going to fight in France from 1917, but, once home again he began to practise law with one of his elder brothers. Before long he went off to Vienna, ostensibly for further law studies, but, reading between the lines of his journal, this was a time of sowing wild oats.

Back in Johannesburg, the debonair Herbert met a divorcee, Grace Martin. According to Grace ‘lightning struck’, and after a courtship of only three weeks, they married. She must have hoped that her new husband would provide security for herself and her six-year-old daughter, Peggy.

Grace seems to have craved bourgeois respectability, but adventurers surrounded her. Her sister, Stella van Druten, was married to Major Chaplin Court Treatt, who planned to lead the first expedition by motor vehicles from the Cape to Cairo. Stella enthusiastically supported him, and they found a kindred spirit in Herbert, who readily offered to help with planning. Detailed arrangements had to be made for the convoy’s supplies on its route through the red-coloured, British areas on the map; but first they needed to seek financial sponsorship from British businesses. Armed with a letter of support from the prime minister, Jan Smuts, the two couples and young Peg boarded a ship to England.

Soon after their arrival in London in 1924, the Crankos saw performances by Diaghilev’s ultra-fashionable Ballets Russes. The romantic Les Sylphides, Le Tricorne with its amazing Picasso designs, and the fabled Petrouchka captivated them. More ballet was on offer in 1925. Anna Pavlova and her company performed at Covent Garden for the whole of October, and the great dancer enchanted everyone who saw her. The Ballets Russes returned to the London Coliseum for two long seasons, and the South African couple booked for as many performances as they could afford. There was the glamorous fairy tale Aurora’s Wedding, and the new Les Biches, presented in London for the first time, and they did not want to miss seeing the thrilling Russian warriors in Polovtsian Dances. Ballet became a shared, abiding passion for Herbert and Grace, and they sent Grace’s daughter Peg to classes with Princess Serafina Astafieva at her studio on the King’s Road.

By the middle of 1926, the Cape to Cairo expedition successfully accomplished, Herbert’s work in London was complete. Reluctantly, he returned to South Africa where he was to arrange a tour of lectures about his brother-in-law’s pioneering adventure, illustrated by slides and moving pictures.

Herbert had intended to re-join his wife and stepdaughter, probably to set up home in London, but when he received Grace’s cablegram to say she was pregnant he reconsidered, no doubt anxious about how he would provide for his growing family. He decided to set up a country law practice in Rustenburg, where his eldest brother ran a hotel; the town was expanding rapidly, and Herbert had an eye for the main chance. He cabled Grace that she and Peg should return on the next available ship.

Reunited, they settled into the modest hotel that had once belonged to Herbert’s mother, the Rustenburg Grand, to await the birth of the new baby. The intoxicating thrill of London’s theatres seemed a million miles away.

—

Herbert grew fond of Rustenburg and the surrounding area; his law practice, which represented people from all backgrounds, grew to extend ‘from the middle veld north of the Magaliesberg Mountains to the bank of the Crocodile River bordering Bechuanaland’. Expecting to ‘suffer the tedium of a few years living in the backfield’, Herbert found that, ‘against all expectations I had wandered into a bewilderingly interesting, exciting and varied world’.

Herbert and Grace Cranko, John’s parents. He said that they were ‘like oil and water. Ballet, for some reason, was their no man’s land’.

John in his first Johannesburg school uniform.

John in his early teenage years.

John was a good horseman from the age of seven and often rode at the farm of a family friend.

John with a witch marionette that he had made himself.

Herbert was no longer religious, and Grace had ‘accepted Herbert’s assurances that the Crankos were not Jews’. However, she made sure that their son, born in Rustenberg’s hospital on 15 August 1927, was ‘circumcised by the doctor not by a rabbi.’ She stressed that John ‘was baptised in the Church of England. So, by all standards except for his paternal grandmother he was of Christian religion’.

Grace wrote that John was a bubbly infant, always talking to himself, and that he ‘found everything a huge joke’. In early childhood he was never far from his adored horses, dogs, cats, and other animals, in a sunny, outdoor life. He heard euphoric accounts of exotic ballets from his parents, and some of the first music he listened to was a gramophone record of The Firebird.

John grew up as part of South Africa’s dominant classes; theirs was a life of relative privilege, a life eased by the comforts bought by the cheap labour of maids and gardeners. According to Grace, it was only because she chose to take a clerical post in the town that she employed a nursemaid for John. ‘In those days of growing up I was not allowed’ [by Herbert] ‘to check or discipline John in any way, and he always had white nannies so you see John was not left to the tender mercies of Black servants at any time.’ Grace did employ a white nanny from Switzerland for a while, but later John was most certainly left in the care of an indigenous black woman, like nearly every other white South African child.

Rustenburg was particularly conservative and divided, the whites living in the town, the blacks on the periphery. The streets of the white area were subject to a curfew after nine in the evening, and Black people were required by law to carry special documents from their employers, officials or the police. If, from time to time, the Crankos’ maid Evelyn did not appear for work at the Cranko household, it meant that the police had detained her for being without her pass. Herbert would have to vouch for her release from custody.

When John, as a small child, went with his father on trips to visit clients at outlying kraals and farmsteads, he quickly saw that in the eyes of adults, the indigenous African was subordinate to even the most ineffectual of masters. John talked of his youth shortly before he died, and he remembered his family’s maid especially well; ‘Evelyn was, for me, almost a mother figure, psychologically very important’. She and other black South Africans were the first to teach him art. He learned how to paint stones with natural colours from the earth. Evelyn and the very young John made clay model figures together, and she showed him how the long thorns from acacia trees could become the horns of miniature oxen.

—

According to Grace, Herbert decided that ‘he had had enough of provincial life’, and in 1935 the family moved to Johannesburg. The eight-year-old John must have missed the horses that he loved riding, but he faced a much harder blow when, after a short while in Johannesburg, his parents separated. Grace alleged that Herbert’s conduct in Rustenburg had been disgraceful. ‘During all this time he had been going his own way’, but she noted, with evident relief, that ‘his girlfriends and other friends were always Christians’.

Herbert took an apartment elsewhere in the city and Grace sent John to a boarding school, Johannesburg’s high Anglican St John’s College. There, he shone in the subjects that interested him, like geography, music, and history, but simply ignored those that bored him, a trait that was to continue throughout his life. Grace thought that the school was ‘one of the best’, but admitted that ‘it did not suit John, as he was accustomed to follow his whims, and invent or discover for himself, and therefore did not like the regimentation of doing things at a given time.’

It was not long before he made an escape – without the fare for the bus, he walked the several miles home. Returned to school the next day, he soon absconded again. John’s misbehaviour appalled the headmaster, but when Herbert heard about it, he remarked that if the teachers had been doing their job properly their charges would not want to run away.

John was much happier at Highlands North, the first co-educational school of its type in the area. It had a young, enthusiastic teaching staff, and John excelled at his lessons in French, a language in which he would become fluent. Many refugee families from Nazi Germany and the occupied countries had settled in the school’s catchment area, so John’s fellow pupils formed a cosmopolitan mix. Throughout his life he enjoyed being among people of divergent backgrounds.

John became aware, at far too young an age, of the terrible cruelty with which many white people treated the indigenous Africans. Years later he related a frightening experience from this time to Walter Erich Schäfer, his employer in Stuttgart. One of his father’s clients, a wealthy white farmer with several children, owned a ranch in the country, and John, aged about eleven, received an invitation to stay there during the summer holiday. One night he heard a commotion in the dark yard and looked from his bedroom window to see a black man seemingly cowering in self-defence. He thought, rightly or wrongly, that someone was brutally whipping the man. First thing next morning, he rang his father to say, without explaining why, that he wanted to be fetched home.

Predictably, his mother told of the events ‘at Tommy Ellis’s barb-be-que ranch’ quite differently. In a 1983 letter to John Percival, she tried to justify John’s account of the flogging. ‘This, as I told Prof. Schaffer [sic] made an impression on his young mind.’ She wrote how she had explained to John that the noise he heard might have been ‘African people in their primitive ways’ doing what she called ‘courting’. ‘I tried to explain the possibility, but he made a drama out of it’.

Many white South Africans at the time held abhorrent prejudices, and it is particularly disturbing that a child could have even imagined such a beating, only to be accused of ‘making a drama’ out of it. The event and, indeed, his mother’s attempted explanation, certainly made an impression on his young mind.

To her credit, Grace encouraged John’s first interest in ballet. Peg attended a ballet school in Johannesburg, and John, taken along to watch, sat mesmerised: ‘If there was a stage rehearsal John would disappear and later be found in the wings, sitting perched on a pedestal in a world of his own’, Grace wrote. He went through a phase of making pipe-cleaner figures arranged in a cardboard box theatre. The gumboot dancing displays by black workers from the Johannesburg gold mines impressed John with their powerful yet lilting rhythms, but he showed no strong desire to dance himself.

Perhaps the miners’ dances instilled in John a sense that dance movement can be a natural part of everyday life. Yet his parents had described the very different, artificial magic of theatrical dance. He related how each of his parents told him excitedly about the ‘enchanted world’ of the ballets they had seen performed in London, when, as he put it, ‘they were young and in love’. He thought that the reason they talked so much about ballet was that it was ‘the only thing they really agreed about … Sometimes I think I only grew interested in it because it was the only common ground we had.’

About the time that his parents filed for divorce, when John was fourteen, he expressed an interest in learning to dance. Thinking of his parents’ glowing accounts of ballet in London, he was probably trying to please them both. He started his training, privately at first, with Nina Pavlochieva, an Austrian married to a Russian. He then progressed to Marjorie Sturman, doyenne of ballet teachers in Johannesburg, and one of the pioneers attached to the Association of Teachers of Operatic Dancing, the British organisation that evolved into today’s Royal Academy of Dance. The organisation concentrated its efforts on formulating a well-structured system of teaching ballet. Pavlova’s worldwide tours had inspired legions of little girls to want to learn ballet, and schools offering party-frock-clad ‘fancy dancing’ were springing up everywhere. The Association’s ballet teachers from the dominions who had studied in London returned to their homelands, fired with the zeal of missionaries to instruct in ballet’s strict rules.

The RAD Grades syllabi from the period shows that relatively young students were expected to be able to explain the meaning and use of French terms, and to be familiar with a raft of national dances. As well as learning about correct aristocratic deportment in sixteenth– to nineteenth-century Europe, students at all grade levels had to perform mime gestures. A little later, a ‘Note to Teachers’ in the 1947 syllabus stressed that its lessons would ‘only come to life by the use of imagination … A syllabus is a scrap of paper … The whole essence of this syllabus lies in teaching. The teacher should be able to hold the pupil’s interest at every stage and should take the pupil fully into her confidence’. Arnold Haskell, chairman of the Education Committee of the RAD, went so far as to write in 1954 that he would ‘like to see the cover of every syllabus carefully labelled ‘Poison, handle with great care, dangerous to exceed the stated dose’’. John benefitted from a sterling introduction to ballet technique; the formidable Miss Sturman taught what was a none-too-prescriptive and wide ranging syllabus.

—

Herbert Cranko was courting Phyllis Hirsch, a married English woman with two daughters, both a little younger than John. They had been evacuated from London at the start of war in 1939. Grace obtained a divorce on grounds of her husband’s desertion and adultery. The proceedings were ‘all very quietly done, no nastiness, only incompatibility … I made my big mistake in refusing maintenance’ as Grace put it in a 1988 letter to John Percival. Grace was awarded custody of the children, but before long a maintenance agreement was drawn up – John would spend six months per year with each of his parents.

Herbert Cranko now lived in Houghton, an affluent Johannesburg suburb. Houghton Heights, a relatively new apartment building, was designed in the art deco mode. The exterior used alternating bands of red and orange brick and the vestibule, richly decorated with marble and brass, had a modern lift with arrowed dials over their doors. When John moved to be with his father in apartment 604, Herbert allowed John the larger of the two bedrooms, so that it could accommodate the puppet theatre given him by a relative.

John made marionettes and devised shows and was soon planning ambitious entertainments using an even bigger model theatre. He enrolled the help of a new friend, Hanns Ebensten, four years older and a talented designer. He visited regularly, and they soon became close. The marionettes that John made were, in Hanns’s words,

delightful, with carved heads and limbs of dowel stick very cleverly dressed and bejewelled … I did all the decor for the performances and designed costumes, handled the light and sound (and fire!) effects, etc. We presented A Midsummer Night’s Dream, some fairy tales, and an oriental play by Daniele Varé to schools and fetes and other charities.*

John sewed all the costumes, and when he needed verses to accompany the action, he wrote them himself. Having invented these worlds of make-believe, he insisted that he oversaw every detail of each production.

According to Hanns, John’s mother deplored her son’s unconventional ways, and what she called his ‘odd taste in companions’. When the time approached for him to move back with his mother and Peg, Herbert asked Grace to come to his flat to talk. She recalled that there was a huge wooden structure in the form of a stage in John’s bedroom, far bigger than she had imagined from descriptions:

He [Herbert] said to me ‘can you provide [space] to allow John to develop his ideas’. I was absolutely flummoxed and said of course not. So that is how he remained with Herbert.

Herbert actively encouraged John’s love of theatre, in whatever shape or form. When Zoë and John Wright, professional puppeteers from Cape Town, were in Johannesburg, Herbert took John to see one of their performances. Wright was well known for his marionette shows, which he presented all over Southern Africa; he was also in demand as a stage director for drama and ballet productions.

Herbert asked the Wrights to his flat, where they saw John’s marionettes. Impressed, they invited him to come to stay with them during his school holidays, and Herbert duly made arrangements for the long train journey to Cape Town. There, the Wrights provided John with valuable practical advice on set construction and lighting marionette theatres; most importantly, he learned various techniques for controlling the strings of a marionette, such as allowing the limbs to follow, pendulum-like, the figure’s centre of gravity. He returned to Johannesburg even more fascinated by puppetry and theatre. This soon grew into a burning desire to choreograph dances, and his association with dancers from Cape Town would cement that ambition.*

The University of Cape Town Ballet toured to Johannesburg in September 1943 dancing there in aid of a war charity. The sixteen-year-old John went to the theatre at Witwatersrand University to ask if he could help backstage. Male aid being scarce during the war, his offer was very welcome. John made sure that Dulcie Howes, the Ballet’s director, heard of his interest in ballet and theatre. He also managed to make a stage debut during this season, walking on as an attendant to a goddess in Pastoral, a ballet that Howes set to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, no less.

Herbert Cranko, aware of his son’s serious and abiding passion for theatre and ballet, went to ask Howes if John could train with her in Cape Town. She offered him a place in her three-year Ballet Certificate Course at UCT, beginning the following August. He was still only sixteen, but she reassured his apprehensive father that John could board at her house for a short while. She warned John that his only possible entry into choreography was through greater experience as a dancer. She told him that, depending on his progress, he might get an opportunity to try his hand at staging a ballet in Cape Town. This gave John extra incentive to work hard in his ballet classes with Sturman during the months before his departure.

Johannesburg did not have a ballet performing group of its own until 1944, and this left a vacuum. A second group from the Cape, the Cape Town Ballet Club, helped meet demand for ballet with its first visit to the Transvaal in December 1943, performing at Johannesburg’s Empire Theatre. Cecily Robinson, who had recently returned from an illustrious performing career in Europe, led the dancers, several of whom also belonged to the UCT group.

The visitors all stayed at the Carlton Hotel, and John confidently went there every evening so that he could reacquaint himself with those dancers whom he already knew from the UCT ensemble, and to get to know the others. John wrote proudly to Hanns, who was away doing army service, that ‘We arranged for me to dine at the Carlton so I have been dining in style!’ Robinson remembered her first sight of John: ‘He arrived during a dinner with a pair of tights that he was knitting, much to the interest of the other diners’. John was already unafraid to flout convention. A friend spoke of his uninhibited bohemianism, and others who knew him at this time remarked on how his enthusiasms and friendliness endeared him to people.

John was to make his actual dancing debut on stage much earlier than anyone could have predicted. Someone in Robinson’s group was ill, and there was no one to replace him in a Chinese Dance (the one normally belonging in The Nutcracker but here interpolated into Aurora’s Wedding). John, helping backstage again, persuaded Robinson that he should perform the dance, a short snippet of chinoiserie. Fortunately, in this version the steps were very simple, and he carried a parasol that he was to repeatedly open and close. This, and his natural ebullience, helped John acquit himself in three performances.

Keen to discuss theatre and ballet whenever possible, John latched onto one of the leading Cape Town dancers, Lionel Luyt, six years his senior. John would keep Lionel chatting into the small hours. He invited him to Houghton Heights to inspect his marionettes and to meet the hospitable Herbert, always ready to support his son by welcoming new friends. Another dancer from the Cape with whom John forged a bond was Jasmine Honoré, a highly trained pianist who shared John’s burgeoning interest in choreography. They made a pact that they would be ‘brother and sister’.

Throughout his life John was to have close female friends, but he found that his romantic interests were exclusively homosexual. When he spoke to his father of a ‘straight’ boy at school who enchanted him, Herbert advised that he should save his love for someone who wanted to reciprocate. It was only years later that Grace learned, to her great distress, of her son’s homosexuality.

Cecily Robinson’s Cape Town Ballet Club returned to Johannesburg seven months after their previous visit, and, as before, stayed at the Carlton Hotel. The company performed two programmes, which included classics such as Swan Lake Act 2, Fokine’s Le Carnaval and Les Sylphides, as well as new ballets and several divertissements including one choreographed by John’s ‘twin soul’ Jasmine. Women danced some of the male roles in Carnaval due to the men’s absences on military duties, but all the ballets had full sets and costumes, an amazing achievement in wartime when materials were so difficult to come by – Robinson had persuaded her butcher to supply the feathers from his ducks and geese for the swan maidens’ headdresses. John, while soaking up the classic choreography of Ivanov and Fokine, also learned valuable lessons about making imaginative use of limited resources.

Before leaving Johannesburg, John needed an operation to treat a deviated septum, and, thinking of the impression he was to make in Cape Town, he asked for something to be done at the same time to help ‘improve’ the shape of his nose. His mother’s preoccupation with the family’s lineage had, perhaps, made him sensitive to a possible Jewishness of his appearance. He made an adolescent’s ribald jokes about it in his letters to Hanns, himself a Jew. He told how he had been visiting Jewish friends, and that he had heard their ‘kosher recordings of Beethoven’ and gone to their country estate to ‘ride their circumcised horses’. Although the surgeon treated the septum of John's nose without doing any cosmetic work, John happily set off for Cape Town and a new era in his life.

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*The Daniele Varé play for marionettes was Princess in Tartary (1940). John and Hanns also mounted The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Andersen) to Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro , music he was to use twenty years later in Quatre Image s.

*In 1946 John Wright emigrated to England, where he founded the Little Angel Theatre in Islington, London.

TWO

CAPE TOWN

Dulcie Howes – The Soldier’s Tale, 1944 – More Ballets – Departure

On the eve of his seventeenth birthday, in August 1944, John arrived in Cape Town. There he found a climate milder, and a light softer than in the north of the country. Describing his new surroundings in a letter to Hanns, joy shone from his words:

Cape Town is so very beautiful. There are three pines outside the house which spring tall slender and black out of the watery green grass and silhouetted against an angry battleship grey sky – wherever one looks is beautiful – Glamorgan is way up on Devil’s Peak, and the sight of misty blue clouds hovering over its rocky peaks, so low that you could feel that you can touch them is so awe-inspiring that one feels all it needs is God’s voice thundering from the sky to make you fall flat on your face and worship. Then there is the sea – the cold grey ever moving Winter sea. But you must see it for yourself!!! … I was seventeen on the 15th, Tuesday and we had sort of drinks at John’s. Here endeth the epistle of the apostle St Cranko.*

The ‘sort of drinks’ were given by Zoë and John Wright, the marionettists whom John already knew. Through them, and the renewed friendships with dancers he had met in Johannesburg, he soon got to hear the tittle-tattle of Cape Town’s theatre circles, as well as the covert gossip of the homosexual community.

Cape Town’s new-found temptations did not distract John unduly – at least, not in the first few months while he was a guest in the Howes household. The younger of Howes’s two daughters, Amelia, remembers John telling her stories as he plaited her hair. He worked hard in ballet classes, spurred on by the thought of earning the right to choreograph for his peers. He told Hanns:

Now that I am here in Cape Town I realise more than ever how vitally necessary it is to study down here. Every moment I am conscious of the little differences which, though appearing minute to the layman, to the dancer constitute the difference between amateur and that ‘je ne sais quoi’ which make him professional. Here the ballet is a vital living thing – the classrooms are where the pigments for the choreographer’s art are made …

Dulcie Howes was one of the indomitable pioneers of ballet that the post-Great War era generated. She spent three years studying with leading teachers in London, including Margaret Craske and the great Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina, and then joined Anna Pavlova’s company for a short tour in Europe before returning to Cape Town to teach. She founded a ballet school attached to the music faculty of the University of Cape Town in 1934.* This was a racially mixed institution, and Howes was able to champion the right of each and everyone to dance. Always eloquent, and dressed with flair, she persuaded the university to instigate a three-year full- time Ballet Certificate Course for teachers and dancers. In 1941, this was the first such course anywhere in the world. Howes’s academic explanations and theoretical analysis of various dance movements were, Richard Glasstone recalls, ‘splendidly clear and accurate’. This was part of her mission to make young dancers more critically observant and intellectually aware. She would require the students to define ‘in a few clear, simple sentences concepts such as poise, style and musicality’.

Both Howes and Cecily Robinson, who also taught at the school, drew on the system devised by Enrico Cecchetti. Howes took an academic approach but Robinson had danced with Leon Woizikovsky’s company and Ballet Rambert as well as Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes – the distinctly different teaching styles of Howes and Robinson made a potent combination. The chief goal for almost every dancer was to join an English ballet company, and a disproportionate number from the Howes-Robinson stable did so: Patricia Miller, David Poole, Pamela Chrimes, Alfred Rodrigues and Johaar Mosaval all graduated to make impressive careers with Sadler’s Wells Ballet.

Although John never had a burning ambition to be a professional dancer, he knew he had to become proficient if he was to seek choreographic opportunities in England. Much as Howes might have warmed to the ideas with which John pestered her when a guest in her house, she maintained a fearsome presence in the studio. She taught, as Mosaval recalled, ‘very strictly indeed’. John took full advantage of the classes in repertoire, stagecraft and lighting, history of ballet and ballet music, and Yvonne Blake’s pas de deux technique classes helped him become accomplished as a partner. Several women were to actively encourage John in his early career as a choreographer, but it was Howes who ensured that he took a sound practical approach.

Howes’s eye for a choreographer in the making led her to allow him to start work on his first ballet only three months after his arrival in Cape Town. Aware of John’s precocious nature, she reiterated her strict rule that he was to submit all plans and designs to her committee for approval. While still in Johannesburg he had discussed with Hanns ideas for a stage production of The Soldier’s Tale. Hanns had even drawn up a preliminary set design. Now, John wrote to his friend dramatically:

The task of writing Soldier’s Tale looms so large in front of me – I hear voices calling ‘No No you can’t cast her!’ ‘How many yards of Red?’ ‘The setting is disgusting.’ ‘Will you be able to finish it in time?’ ‘Who is this John Cranko, anyway?’ ‘Work, John – 12 hours a day is not good enough!’ It’s maddening – like voices in a film, I can’t sleep at night, they taunt me.

‘You’re so inexperienced!’ ‘Those steps don’t fit.’ ‘Who is your designer!’ until I want to go away, but I can’t, because I have to do my job, as well as things I have to remember.

‘Eat regularly, you cannot dance on an upset stomach’. ‘Keep your back up!’ ‘Don’t flap your arms!’ ‘Keep your hips square!’ Until I just think suicide is the quickest way out.

No – do not change the lovely almost dreamy life we had in Jo’burg – I haven’t been to any real parties since I’ve been here – had no fun, but even so, I have lost the desire for them I am alone here with a task I must carry out! … I feel that never can I join you for I have found that I have left my training so late that it is ‘Work or else!’

This all (this morning) seems a highly coloured raving – but I hope it lets you see how dazed and alone I feel just at present. What I really wrote to tell you that the Ballet Club committee says that Scarlet Woman must be changed – so please do two new designs for me to choose from – and help me! (send as soon as possible).

All my very deepest love to you,

John

PS After reading this through I have come to the conclusion that I am a racehorse.

The ‘Scarlet Woman’ was a character