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 Maude Lloyd | |||||||
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Maude Lloyd was one of the principal dancers of the Rambert company in the 1930s, and appeared in dozens of ballets of the time, including many by Ashton. Her fame, though, rests chiefly on the fact that she created leading roles in two of the undoubted masterpieces of the century: Antony Tudor's Lilac Garden* and Dark Elegies. Add to these the Chatelaine in Andrée Howards's lovely La Fête Etrange and you can see that although her dance career was a relatively short one, she has a significant place in our dance history. Born in Cape Town in 1908, Lloyd studied locally at first and then came to London, where she joined the Rambert studio in 1927, just in time for the birth of modern British ballet. Her first recorded appearance was in some dances Ashton made for a performance of Purcell's The Fairy Queen, in an 'echo' dance with Diana Gould; later she was in the first performance of Facade, and in lost Ashton works like The Lady of Shallott, The Lord of Burleigh and Florentine Picture (in the photo above). Susan Salaman, who made a series of ballets on sporting topics, gave her a part in Le Boxing, and in complete contrast she danced in Les Sylphides, Carnaval and Aurora's Wedding. In fact the whole history of British ballet of the time, outside Sadler's Wells, is contained in the list of her roles.
It was as one of Antony Tudor's most important interpreters, though, that Maude Lloyd is best remembered. She was in his very first ballet, Cross-garter'd, and when in 1936 he made Lilac Garden, the first of his truly great works, he gave her the leading role of Caroline, a woman on the eve of a forced and loveless marriage who is desperately trying to see her lover alone for the last time. (Seen in this photo, with Tudor himself as The Man She Must Marry) The next year he chose her to dance with him again, in the second song of the tragic Dark Elegies, and in 1938 she was the Italian ballerina in Gala Performance, his comic and frequently revived piece about the rivalry between three dancers from different nationalities - completing a list of creations matched by few ballerinas in any British company. By this time Lloyd had left the Rambert company to join the London Ballet, a company set up by Tudor with Agnes de Mille and based primarily on his own works. When Tudor left for New York, Lloyd and Peggy van Praagh became joint directors of the company, but in 1940 she decided to give up dancing for the time being to work with the Red Cross, and in fact she never returned to the stage. Lionel Bradley described her as having 'a noble serenity and a deep expressiveness allied to sparkling gifts of comedy'; scraps of film in Rambert's archive only give a faint echo of what she must have been like. She made two further very important contribution to the dance world, though: she and her husband, Nigel Gosling, wrote criticism under the joint name of Alexander Bland; and together they befriended the young Rudolf Nureyev on his first visits to England, providing him with a home and earning his lifelong gratitude and love.
* Lilac Garden was created as Jardin aux Lilas and Tudor
insisted on this name when he could; but it is now generally performed under the
English name. | ||||||||
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