Olga Maynard

Olga Maynard (January 16, 1913 – December 26, 1994). Writer and educator on theater arts, author of articles and monographs on dance and dancers. Her published books are on ballet, modern dance, opera and the integration of performing arts into general education. She lectured widely and was active internationally as dance historian and liberal arts educator—also as critic, jurist and consultant. She published hundreds of articles, reviewing most of the leading figures and institutions of the ‘dance boom’ of the mid 1960s into the 1980s, interacting with leading figures and institutions in the arts, notably dance.

Born in Belém do Pará in the Amazonia part of Brazil, as Myriol Olga Gittens, eldest of six children of Frederick Morton Gittens and Jeanne Arsenne Borde. The family resettled to their home in Port of Spain, Trinidad, of which an ancestor, Pierre-Gustave-Louis Borde, had published a history in 1876. Precociously active in the burgeoning literary and arts scene of that city during the 1930s and 1940s, she published journalism, poetry, fiction and criticism in periodicals, notably the Trinidad Guardian newspaper. She married at nineteen and had four sons with two husbands, including future novelist Leonard Wibberley. She joined Wibberley in New York City in 1943.

In New York City she began ballet research as well as a long career as an educational reformer, particularly with regard to integration of theater arts into existing systems. In 1947 she left New York and Wibberley, to settle in Yuma, Arizona with E. R. Maynard, with whom she had two more children. Absorbed by domestic matters in confining economic and cultural circumstances, she drew support and inspiration from friendship with dance teacher Merlyn Legge. Her family moved to La Mesa, California in 1955, where she wrote reviews and feature articles for The San Diego Union, and completed The Ballet Companion. Its success marked the beginning of her publishing career.

Following its delayed starting point, Olga Maynard’s career soon had its turning point. By the time of that first book publication (1957), she was already well into research for her major work, The American Ballet, which had been in the planning since her arrival in New York. Rather than a “how to look and how to listen” aid for beginners, or a collection of critical essays, this constituted a bold attempt to conceptualize all dance in America, from its native and colonial roots to its present, for its practitioners and its audience, and so to encourage its future. Of it Ted Shawn wrote that “what has lain, unformed in words, in the dance artists’ consciousness is made explicit here”, yet it was written from the point of view of an audience that she argued was distinctively American. With Agnes de Mille recommending the first book by an unknown as "a key, a talisman" for young dancers, and Shawn hailing the second as "an ideal catalytic agent between stage and audience", she was well-positioned for the beginning of the 'dance boom'.

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