Faith de Villiers

Faith de Villiers (21 October 1920 – October 2001) was a South African dancer, producer, choreographer, teacher, company director, and adjudicator. Active primarily in the northern province of the Transvaal (since divided into Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and Limpopo), she is recognized as one of the most influential pioneers of ballet in South Africa.

Faith de Villiers was born in Johannesburg, the largest city in the Transvaal and the center of gold mining and industry in South Africa. Her father was a descendant of French Hugenots who had come to the Dutch Cape Colony in the days of early settlement. Most such families learned Afrikaans and were assimilated into Afrikaner culture, because of similarities in their Protestant religious beliefs, and most had stayed in the Cape Province. Faith's ancestors had moved north to Johannesburg, however, and had become resolutely Anglophonic and Anglophilic, speakers of English and lovers of all things British. She began her dance training at an early age, with Delphine Thompson, a pupil of one of the founders of the Cecchetti Society in South Africa. At age 12, she entered the Johannesburg Cambrian Society National Eisteddfod and was judged best all-around dancer in the 11- to 13-year-old category. The gold medal, presented to her by Dulcie Howes, the adjudicator and a national celebrity, was accompanied by a bursary that started her off on her career in dance.

At age 18, de Villiers got a temporary dancing job with the Carl Rosa Opera Company when it toured South Africa for three months in 1938. Her earnings allowed her to travel to London, where she studied under Margaret Craske, a teacher of the Cecchetti method of ballet training, and Igor Schwezoff, a Russian who had trained at the Leningrad Choreographic School. At the time, war clouds were gathering over continental Europe, and it did not seem prudent for her to remain much longer in England.

De Villiers returned to Johannesburg in 1939 and became ballet mistress, choreographer, and ensemble director for African Consolidated Theatres. After some years, she formed her own performing group, Ballet Theatre, with Joyce van Geems, in 1947. It was the first of several such troupes that she would initiate. The next year, she married and moved to Cape Town, where she began teaching at the school of the South African National Ballet, producing ballets, and touring the group to nearby Stellenbosch and Paarl. She returned frequently to Johannesburg, despite the great distance, to continue her work with African Consolidated Theatres. With her husband and child, she moved back to her home city in 1952 and continued producing ballets for performances in cities and towns throughout the Transvaal and in neighboring Mozambique. When Yvonne Mounsey returned to South Africa from New York in 1959, de Villiers joined her in founding the Johannesburg City Ballet, of which she became artistic director in 1961. The company was renamed Ballet Transvaal and then, in 1963, PACT Ballet, so called for the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal and known in Afrikaans as TRUK Ballet, for the Transvaalse Raad vir die Uitvoerende Kunste.

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