FINDING THE ARCHIVE FOOTAGE
Several years ago a friend found a trunk full of 16mm film footage in the junky space beneath his families house in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia. Much of the film was too damaged to repair but around three hours survive, some covered in a beautiful vinegary texture. The rest, both black and white and colour, is clear and well preserved. It is almost exclusively home movies of dancers from the Ballets Russes.

The Ballets Russes toured Australia for the first time in 1936 and again in 1938/9, 1939/40. An amateur cameraman, Ewan Murray-Wills, in real life a Sydney dermatologist, filmed several of the Ballet’s leading soloists - unguarded moments, dancing on the beach, picnics and visits to the zoo as well as many different scenes from stage performances. He often used early 16m-colour reversal stock, sometimes experimenting with slow motion. The dancers move loosely for their friend behind the camera, often smiling directly at him. They are without the traditional heavy make up and costumes we expect from classical ballet. Hair flies all over the place. They frolic in their swimwear, playing and laughing. The beach and sea give them an energy and life that is quite different from a stage performance. We see a group of young people having fun with a new toy. The scale of the beach allows them to run and leap with immense freedom. Behind them the sea swells and breaks in slow motion. One man in particular smiles a little too often at the man behind the camera

Tiny figures of other bathers occasionally flit across the sand or bob in the surf. To dance on sand is not easy. The myth of the Ballets Russes is enormous. Here we see the energy of the dancers but also a carelessness in their technique, which we don’t expect.

BACKGROUND - THE BALLETS RUSSES
The early years of the Ballets Russes under Diaghilev and in the days of Nijinsky are the best known. The company started in 1909.

After Diaghilev’s death the company went through various crisis and splits appearing under different titles.
The footage I am concerned with is from De Basil’s Ballets Russes, a company that ran from 1931 –1952.
DE BASIL’S BALLETS RUSSES by Katherine Sorley Walker provides a detailed history of this branch and period of the Ballets Russes

Other names of the de Basil Ballets Russes are the Montecarlo Russian Ballet and the Original Ballets Russes. And there are more, as the complications of finance and legal actions meant forming and reforming, dancers going from one company to another.
The Ballets Russes, in all it’s forms, and many of its dancers have acquired mythical status. Descriptions of their performances have been handed down. We can rarely see them and by seeing them verify them. There is performance footage of the de Basil Ballets Russes shot by another surgeon in Australia, Joseph Ringland Anderson. This footage has been in the public domain for many years.
The Ewan Murray Wills footage surfaced only 10 years ago and is now in an archive in Canberra. There is a lot of history and useful detail about the Ballet Russe, tours, profiles of the dancers and photos on their website www.australiadancing.org

The performances on my footage are rough, full of energy, youthful and passionate. There is emotion and sometimes silent screen type gesture and exaggeration that we see less often now. The women are strong and rounded. No hint of anorexia here.

Before I knew the identity of any individual dancers I showed some of the film to Bill Forsyth ( leading contemporary choreographer) and Dana Kasperson ( leading contemporary dancer) They were delighted and entertained by it. They thought the dancers must be corps de ballet at the most. It turned out later that all the dancers I’d showed them were soloists, among them one or two of the Ballet’s most prestigious ballerina’s.
The dancers were dancing on sand which would account for some of their technical difficulties but I think it also shows that expectations of dance technique has changed considerably, as has the preferred shape of a female ballet dancer. In spite of this, the film offers up some exhilarating and beautiful moments.

I decided to try and trace any of the dancers who were still alive, to talk to them and show them the footage.

THE FILM I THOUGHT I WANTED TO MAKE
I had just finished a film for the BBC called ALBUM in which I traced the descendants of the owner of an old photo album dating from 1900 that I’d bought from a secondhand bookstall in Farringdon Road, London in the late 1960’s.

My Australian friends saw ALBUM and imagined a similar journey using the Ballets Russes footage. I loved the idea, loved the archive and have had a long association with dance.

Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing now?
I would find the dancers, show them the footage, listen to their stories and film all of this along with showing what they do now in their later years. I would ask how they now see their younger dancing selves.
So I started the research.

I found a few of them and talked to them, scattered round the world in the UK, Brazil, Australia and the US.