The fifth department of Arnold Haskell’s activities, educator, is the one on which he is today most successfully and conspicuously engaged. As the active head of the Sadler’s Wells School, established in its own building in Colet Gardens, Kensington, Arnold Haskell is in his element, continuing his sound advice directly; he is acting as wise and discerning mentor to a rising generation of dancers, who live together in the same atmosphere for at least eight years.
I have a feeling of warm friendship for Arnold Haskell, an infinite respect for him as a person, and for his knowledge.
The School of which he is the head, like all other Sadler’s Wells activities, is carried on in association with the British Arts Council, thus carrying forward the Council’s avowed axiom that the art of a people is one of its signs of good health. So it has always been in the world’s history from Ancient Greece to France at the time of the Crusades, to Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England. Each one of those earlier manifestations, whatever its excellence, was confined to a limited number of people, to the privileged and the elect. The new renaissance will inevitably be the emergence of the common man into the audience of art. He has always been a part of that audience when he has had the opportunity. Now the opportunity must come in such a way that none is overlooked and the result will be fresh vigour and self-confidence in the people as a whole.
The Sadler’s Wells School is, of course, under the direct supervision of Dame Ninette de Valois, D.B.E. Its Board of Governors, which is active and not merely a list of names, numbers distinguished figures from the world of art, music and letters.
The School was founded by the Governors of the Sadler’s Wells Foundation, in association with the Arts Council, in 1947, to train dancers who will be fitted to carry on the high tradition of Sadler’s Wells and generally to maintain and enhance the prestige of British Ballet. Over eighty-five per cent of the members of the ballet companies at both the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre are graduates of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. The School combines a full secondary education and a highly specialized vocational training. Boys and girls are taken from the age of nine. Pupils are prepared for what is the equivalent on this side of the Atlantic of a complete High School education; in Britain, the General Certificate of Education, and the curriculum includes the usual school subjects of English language and literature, French, Latin (for boys only), history, geography, Scripture, mathematics, science, handicraft, music, and art work. The dance training consists of classical ballet, character dances, mime. Importance is attached to character formation and to the self-discipline essential for success on the stage.
There is also an Upper School, which is open to boys and girls above school-leaving age. After taking the General Certificate of Education, the American equivalent of graduation from high school, students from the Lower School pass into the Upper School if they have reached a standard which qualifies them for further training in the senior ballet classes. The Upper School is also open to students from other schools. Entry is by interview, and applicants are judged on general intelligence, physical aptitude, and standard attained. Entrants are accepted on one term’s trial. Here the curriculum includes, in post-education: classes in English and French language and literature, history, art, music, lecture courses, and Dalcroze Eurhythmics. In ballet—the classical ballet, character dances, mime, tuition in the roles of the classical ballets and modern works in the repertoire of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Companies. It is important to note that all ballet classes for boys are taken by male teachers.
The School is inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, and is licensed as a first-class educational institution. The pupils number about one hundred ten in the Lower School, with about thirty in the Upper School.
So splendidly has the School developed that now a substantial physical addition is being made to the premises in Colet Gardens, in the form of a new building, to provide dormitories and living quarters so that it may become a full-time boarding school, as well as a day-school; and thus obviate the necessity for many students to live outside the school, either at home or, as so often the case if the students come from distant places, in the proverbial London “digs.”
One of the most interesting and significant things about the School to me is the number of boys enrolled and their backgrounds. Such is the feeling about male dancing in our Anglo-Saxon civilization that many of the boys have had to be offered scholarship inducements to enroll. The bulk of the boys come out of working-class families in the North of England and the Midlands. They are tough and manly. It is from boys such as these that the prejudice against male dancing will gradually die out, and the effeminate dancer will become, as he should, a thing of the past.
MOIRA SHEARER