Camargo Society

The Camargo Society was a London society which created and produced ballet between 1930 and 1933, giving opportunity to British musicians, choreographers, designers and dancers. Its influence was disproportionate to its short life. Dame Ninette de Valois, founder of The Royal Ballet, saw it as "having done much for the cause of English ballet", and Encyclopædia Britannica Online credits it with "keeping ballet alive in England during the early 1930s". The society was named after the eighteenth-century French dancer Marie Anne de Cupis de Camargo.

Ballets Russes had held a London season most years but when Sergei Diaghilev died in 1929 the company collapsed, heavily in debt. Its successor company had not yet been formed. Pavlova's company had given its last London season ever, as it was to die with Pavlova herself in January 1931. Marie Rambert only started the small scale Ballet Club (later Ballet Rambert) in the autumn of 1930 with its first performance in 1931, and Ninette de Valois was to found the Vic-Wells (later the Royal Ballet) in 1931 with 6 salaried dancers. International Ballet and the Festival Ballet were years away. Britain's best known dancers Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin had been in England since the collapse of Ballets Russes but had no large scale company to dance for. In 1930 serious professional ballet in London was at a low point and in the rest of the country was non-existent.

The Camargo Society was conceived by Arnold Haskell (ballet critic and prolific author) and Philip Richardson (editor of Dancing Times), and named after the 18th century ballerina Marie Camargo who first shortened her skirts and wore dancing slippers without heels. Its aim was "to perpetuate the principles on which Diaghilev had run the Ballets Russes, as a fusion of dance, music and decor", encouraging British talent to create ballet on a scale that could not be attempted by the Ballet Club or the fledgling Vic-Wells. The society intended to put on several Sunday evening and Monday afternoon performances each season at a West End theatre, commissioning the choreography and decor for each ballet and hiring an orchestra for each performance. The necessary funds would be provided by a subscription audience. The committee included the young composer Constant Lambert as resident conductor, the semi-retired ballerina Lydia Lopokova as choreographic advisor and her husband the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes as treasurer. Haskell himself described the society as “a management without a company”.

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Wikipedia