Visit to Lowry gallery-Thursday 2nd December 2010

Welcome to the ballet


When Margaret and I arrived at the gallery with our driver Alan, we were greeted by the gallery manager Ed Daniels who escorted us to the seating area in the bar to wait for the rest of our group to arrive.
We started our tour with Brian Dunk, a gallery assistant, telling us the story of the beginnings of the Royal Ballet which received it's charter in 1956. Ninette DeValoire started the formation of a ballet in 1920; she had joined a ballet school at the age of 12 in County Wicklow and went on to devote her life to the formation of our national ballet. There were many photographs showing the history of the development, and there were many photographs of the ballet touring in Europe. They had to make a hasty retreat from Europe in 1940 at the onset of the Second World War.
In 1950, Lowry submitted some portraits to the Royal Academy, and amongst them was a portrait of a young woman whom he called Ann Hilder. This portrait was so uniform that it could have been the face of a puppet. Possibly Lowry, with tongue in cheek, showed this young woman as his measure of poking fun at the public's unwarranted interest into his personal life and he told various stories about who she might be and what his association with her may have been.
There were three portraits of young women shown in a puppet style with a slightly pornographic edge to them, and I feel that this was Lowry, again, poking fun at the courts of Europe's initial titillation by ballet performances showing young women scantily dressed and male dancers in exceedingly tight trousers.
We moved on to look at the mock up of what Margot Fonteyn dressing room might have looked like; there were a couple of photographs of her and the various paraphernalia you might expect to see in a ballet dancers dressing room: various ballet shoes, shawls, a mannequin dressed in a beautiful tutu and headdresses. In fact, quite a messy looking room. There was a considerable display of costumes from various well known ballets; for example some headdresses from the ballet 'Check Mate'. We were given the opportunity to handle some of these beautiful costumes and I was surprised at the weight of some of these which the stars would have had to perform in.
At the end of the tour we went back to the restaurant area where we had a hot drink and the choice of a selection of biscuits. I had to send for the cavalry to gain access to my very nice banana flavoured crunchy biscuits.
We then braved the icy elements to make the journey back home.
Our thanks to Anne for her usual, very detailed, descriptions of everything that we saw, and her very skilled description of the mildly pornographic portraits by Lowry. Brian Dunk had taken a lot of trouble to sketch and emboss the portrait of Ann Hilder and had given us a very detailed history of the formation of what finally became the Royal Ballet.
Mary, as usual, came up trumps with her dedicated volunteer drivers to take us to this very interesting visit and return us safely home in the very adverse weather conditions.
Our thanks to everybody involved.