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Dance school founder Patricia Deane-Gray turns 90

Patricia Deane-Gray with a photograph of herself dancing as a young woman (Photograph by Jessie Moniz Hardy)

Veteran dance teacher Patricia Deane-Gray thought that when she retired at 80 she would not be needed much any more.

Ten years later, though, Ms Deane-Gray has found she is still sometimes needed.

“People keep pulling me out of mothballs to ask me a question about dance, or suggest I do some project,” she said.

She celebrates her 90th birthday on Thursday.

“I’m not planning to do anything for it,” she said. “My kids might be planning something.”

The Devonshire resident believes the ballet training and conditioning she has done throughout her life could be one reason she has reached nonagenarian status.

“It must have something to do with it,” she said. “All my contemporaries have passed away.”

She created the School of Russian Ballet in Bermuda in 1955 and was a founding member of the Bermuda Civic Ballet in 1972. One of her final students was Ravi Cannonier-Watson, who entered the prestigious Royal School of Ballet in London in 2016 at age 11.

Now 20, Mr Cannonier-Watson received a lifetime contract with the Royal Ballet this month. Ms Deane-Gray also taught his mother, Sophia Cannonier.

The first advertisement for the School of Russian Ballet placed in The Royal Gazette in March 1955 (Photograph supplied)

Nowadays, Ms Deane-Gray has some challenges with her vision and does not get out to many recitals. However, she made a special effort when Mr Cannonier-Watson performed on the steps of City Hall in August.

She worked hard to give her students not just an appreciation for dance, but also the music that went with it.

“Dancers look at music in a very different way than the average person would,” she said. “When I was teaching I would play a piece of music for my students. They would learn it by heart, and then they would learn the dance steps.”

She thought a good ballet teacher must be physically fit and able to do the dance steps they are teaching to their students, so they can properly demonstrate them.

“As a ballet teacher you are essentially giving your students physical education training,” she said.

She admitted to possessing no enthusiasm for sport while a student at the Bermuda High School for Girls; her first love was always dance.

“I did not like running,” she said. “I let the girls who could not do anything else run the race. Why should I huff and puff? I might have sprained something if I pushed myself too hard. It was much better to do ballet exercises.”

Her love for dance has been lifelong. Some of her earliest memories are of dancing for her grandfather in the garden when she was 2. Two years later she made her first public appearance on stage at Dockyard — as an accidental soloist.

“I was a student of Trixie Hallawell’s ballet school, and I was supposed to be one of four dancers, but the other children were afraid to come on,” she said.

School of Russian Ballet founder Patricia Deane-Gray as a young woman (Photograph supplied)

At age 10, her elocution teacher at BHS, Eleanor Brass, asked her to perform in a Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society production of The Patchwork Quilt.

“It was at Trinity Hall, which was on Cedar Avenue,” she said.

She acted in that production with a group called The Young Players.

Ms Deane-Gray took classes in just about every dance school on the island, but did not see their inadequacy until, at age 15 in 1950, she entered the Legat School of Ballet in London, founded by famed Russian dancer Nicolas Legat.

Her ambition was to become a professional classical ballet dancer.

“I did not know anything,” she said. “I was a copycat dancer.”

She could dance to any choreography she was given, but did not understand the fundamentals behind it.

“It was not necessarily embarrassing,” she said. “We were all senior dancers. It was my own problem. I don’t think the others knew that I was in a fog. Some of them also might have been copying.”

She confessed her challenges to Croatian ballet dancer Ana Roje, a protégé of Mr Legat who taught at the school for three months.

“She started me again from the beginning,” Ms Deane-Gray said.

Teacher and student became very close.

Years later, Ms Roje would often come to Bermuda to teach and, in turn, Ms Deane-Gray would instruct with her at the International Ballet School in Split, Croatia, in the summer months. She would take talented Bermudian dancers with her to take classes there. In 1959, Ms Roje founded the Bermuda Ballet Festival and danced her last public performance here the next year.

“Madam would have complete control of the audience,” Ms Deane-Gray said.

She remembered one occasion where Ms Roje performed the role of the dying black swan in Swan Lake at City Hall.

“When she died on the stage, the whole theatre died with her, even the stage crew,” Ms Deane-Gray said. “No one breathed. Nothing happened. They didn’t pull the curtain. They didn’t turn on the lights. Then someone hissed ‘curtain!’, and it finally came down.”

She firmly believes there is dance, and then there is dance.

“With one type, you throw yourself about with music,” Ms Deane-Gray said. “You feel good and free, and that is fine. The type of dance where you are learning steps is a whole different ball game.”

Ms Deane-Gray has won numerous accolades for her contributions to dance in Bermuda, including the Performing Arts Founders Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bermuda Arts Council. She was also made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1984.

In 1992, Sir John Swan, then the Premier, wrote a letter to her saying: “The recent Bermuda Civic Ballet production of La Sylphide at Government House represented the latest in a long line of splendid artistic triumphs. Everyone to whom I have spoken has indicated how much the production was enjoyed and, moreover, that it was one of the year’s best cultural events.”

Her advice to young people is to take whatever art they do seriously.

“You have to really work at it,” she said.

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Published December 31, 2024 at 8:00 am (Updated December 31, 2024 at 7:55 am)

Dance school founder Patricia Deane-Gray turns 90

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