Maude Lloyd

Maude Lloyd (16 August 1908 – 26 November 2004) was a South African ballet dancer and teacher who immigrated to England and became an important figure in early British ballet. She had a significant second career as a dance critic, writing with her husband under the nom de plume Alexander Bland.

Maude Lloyd was born in Cape Town, the southernmost city and legislative capital of South Africa. Located on beautiful Table Bay, it had long been one of the most multicultural cities in the world, having attracted emigrants and settlers from many nations. Among them was Helen Webb, who had arrived from England in 1912, opened her own school of "fancy dancing" (i.e., classical ballet), and then introduced dance into the curriculum of the South African College of Music. Having been a pupil of famed maestro Enrico Cecchetti in London, Webb employed the Cecchetti method of instructing her students in Cape Town, including the young Maude Lloyd. After some years of training with Webb and performing in recitals staged at the town hall, Lloyd went to London on a scholarship from Webb, armed with an introduction to Marie Rambert, an old friend of Webb's and a well-known teacher of ballet at her school in Notting Hill. Lloyd arrived in England sometime in 1924 or 1925, when she was 16 or 17, and promptly enrolled in Rambert's school. After a period of concentrated study there, she returned to South Africa in 1927 and taught at Webb's school for three years before deciding that her future lay abroad.

On returning to England in 1930, Lloyd was among Rambert's students who became founding members of her Ballet Club, the performing group from which Ballet Rambert was to evolve. She danced with this group at several West End theaters and on tours outside London, as well as appearing in repertory works with the Camargo Society. From 1930 onward, she was a leading dancer in the regular Sunday performances of Rambert's Ballet Club at the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate. Other members of the club included emerging choreographers Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, and Andrée Howard, each of whom would respond to Lloyd's technical ability, as well as her intelligence, elegance, and sensitivity, by creating roles for her in their works. With occasional brief absences—to dance with other British companies and to visit South Africa once more, in 1932—Lloyd remained with Ballet Rambert until 1940. She followed Pearl Argyle and Alicia Markova, the company's first ballerinas, in many of their created roles but soon had new roles of her own.

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