When I started looking for photographs of the Abbey School of Ballet (1927-1933), founded by Ninette de Valois, the Wicklow-born "mother of British ballet", I thought they would be easy to come by.
First, I flicked leisurely through books; then, a little more intrepidly, I searched through archives; and finally, getting all stirred up, I placed a letter on this very page, looking for pictures from private collections. So far, so futile.
Between the 40 or so emails, phone-calls, and letters I received in response, I got sidetracked. I whiled away dreary January listening to personal memories of the Abbey Ballet: Myrtle Lambkin on improvising leggings by cutting the fly out of men's long johns when pink tights were scarce during the 1940s "Emergency"; Clodagh Dooney on playing a snowflake to Jennifer Johnston's reluctant insect; 95-year-old Dorothy McCormack on her 1930s campaign, as physiotherapist at the Swedish Ling Institute, to have a playground installed in every school in Ireland; and occasional references to "The League of Health and Beauty" - whatever that was all about.
But the icing on the cake came when Percy Lovegrove called, introducing himself as the husband of Doreen Cuthbert, and putting her on the line. Yes, the same Doreen Cuthbert who, according to my photocopied version of the Abbey Theatre programme for January 10th 1928, danced "Pastoral", to music by Schubert, in the "First Performance of the Abbey Theatre Ballets". It was a revue-type affair comprising 10 little numbers after Barry Fitzgerald, F.J. McCormick and Arthur Shields starred in The Eloquent Dempsey. A notice in the programme read: "Ladies sitting in theatre requested to remove their hats." How amazing, now, to sit in Doreen's sitting room in Sutton, with its panoramic view of Dublin Bay, hearing her recall with a chuckle the difficulty she had finding the opening in the curtain to come out on to the stage that Monday night.
It bothers Doreen that the Abbey School of Ballet, of which she was a part from its first intake of breath in 1927 to its final exhalation in 1933, has left no trace in history books, in idle conversation, or even in last year's Abbey centenary celebrations.
She recalls only two photographs ever being taken of the forgotten school, in the days when a container full of powder exploded at the top of a long stick to make the flash. The photographer, who, Doreen recalls, sported a waxed moustache, told Ninette de Valois that she and her dancers looked "too sausagey". He got his comeuppance when he fell off his makeshift plinth in the auditorium while taking the photograph. Where did those photographs get to? Doreen presumes they went astray in her 1952 family move to Nairobi.
Doreen and her mother, who made the costumes for the Abbey, were terribly fond of Lennox Robinson, who "used to talk as if he was in a dream". She relates how one day "he came over to the ballet room saying, 'I am looking for a vision'. Pointing at her 14-year-old self, he pronounced: 'You're the very girl.'" Soon enough she was dancing before F.J. McCormick as he played the recorder in T.C. Murray's 1927 play The Pipe in the Fields.
Doreen performed in many Abbey productions, from Molière's The Would-be Gentleman to the very first production of Yeats's The Dreaming of the Bones in 1931, to starring as the eponymous Fedelma in Ninette de Valois's 1931 "mime ballet in one scene" with Victor Wynburne as the Son of the King of Ireland. She recalls getting a splinter in her foot from dancing on the brand new dance floor at the opening of Oliver St John Gogarty's Renvyle House Hotel. Unfortunately that's as far as the company got to realising De Valois's aim of being a miniature Ballets Russes, touring the country.
In 1930, aged 17, Doreen opened her own "Doreen Academy of Dancing" in Beresford Place. After the original Abbey School of Ballet closed in 1933 ("the fees were too high, and we didn't get on with the Abbey Players"), pupils Muriel Kelly and Cepta Cullen also opened schools. These, according to my respondents, carried on (supplying dancers to the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Societies) until the early 1960s. Luckily, this nebulous area is being documented by Victoria O'Brien of the Daghdha Dance Company.
In the meantime, Doreen added ballroom dancing to her teaching repertoire. Through giving private ballroom classes she met the aforementioned Percy Lovegrove. Before you could say "foxtrot", the couple were giving demonstrations at dances around Dublin. They married in 1946, their son David was born in 1947, and in 1952 they moved to Kenya, learning Swahili, when Percy got a job as administrative assistant to the general manager of the transportation system.
There, the Doreen Lovegrove Academy of Ballet was born, introducing the Royal Academy of Dance syllabus to Kenya. Doreen taught children of ex-pats in the Valley Road Loreto Convent and the Goanese Convent, and drove to far-flung schools up-country across the Rift Valley and Mau Mau territory to Nakuru. She taught in a Nairobi suburb called "Karen", after its former resident Karen Blixen. She staged ballets at the National Theatre in Nairobi and broadcast shows on ballet on the British forces' radio station.
Upon her return to Ireland in 1963, Doreen took up watercolour and oil painting. More recently she has turned to pastels.
As for those photographs of the Abbey School of Dancing, no sign yet; but look at what I have stumbled upon by the by.
* Deirdre Mulrooney is writing a book on the history of dance and physical theatre in Ireland.