1. Mona Inglesby, was a British ballet dancer, choreographer, director of the touring company International Ballet, and saved the Sergeyev Collection for posterity.
17 Facts About Mona Inglesby
1. 2.
Mona Inglesby was born in London of a British mother and a Dutch businessman father, Beatrix Anne Inglesby and Julius Cato Vredenburg.
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Mona Inglesby started dancing very young, according to one of her early biographers, appearing on stage for the first time at age five at La Scala.
4.
Mona Inglesby was appearing with the Ballet Club at the Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate and at 15 she danced the part of Papillon in Mikhail Fokine's Carnaval, alongside actors Frederick Ashton as Pierrot, Harold Turner as Harlequin, Alicia Markova as Columbine and Antony Tudor as Eusebius.
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Mona Inglesby spent the rest of her dancing career as a principal dancer with International Ballet.
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Mona Inglesby persuaded Constant Lambert to do some rearranging of the music and Sophie Fedorovitch to design the set and costumes.
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Mona Inglesby later choreographed 4 more new ballets, listed below.
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Mona Inglesby started with a small orchestra, but larger than Sadler's Wells could muster, and 21 dancers, with herself, the experienced Ballets Russes dancer Nina Tarakanova and the virtuoso star Harold Turner at the head.
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Mona Inglesby continued to make extensive UK tours followed by 6 or 8-week London seasons on Shaftesbury Avenue.
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Mona Inglesby directed the company throughout its 12-year life, as well as dancing at its head.
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In 1942 Mona Inglesby hired the Russian emigree regisseur Nicholas Sergeyev to stage the company's first classical ballets using the notations he possessed of Marius Petipa's stagings at the Imperial Maryinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, before the Russian Revolution.
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However he became dissatisfied with de Valois's policy of editing his classical stagings and in 1946, after Sadler's Wells Ballet reopened the Royal Opera House after the war with a new Sleeping Beauty staging, he moved full-time to International Ballet, where Mona Inglesby had pledged to stage the imperial classics untouched.
13.
Mona Inglesby frequently dealt with American collectors and in 1967 arranged the sale to the Harvard Theatre Collection at Harvard University of the Swan Lake notation from Sergeyev's collection.
14.
In 1969 Mona Inglesby sold the remaining papers to Harvard, where they are known as the Sergeyev Collection.
15.
Mona Inglesby instituted the education programme, consisting of lectures, workshops and special school performances.
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Mona Inglesby died at Bexhill-on-Sea on 6 October 2006 aged 88.
17.
Mona Inglesby received no honours during her lifetime, but in 2012 a plaque was put up inside the artists' entrance of the Royal Festival Hall commemorating her achievements and those of International Ballet, as the company which had inaugurated the Festival Hall's opening season of 1951.