John Gilpin
Dance and Dancers, in 1982, described John Gilpin as 'arguably the finest male dancer England has yet produced, the most purely classical': yet many people who have come to ballet in the last ten years or so don't even know his name. The main reason is that he was one of the handful of British dancers to have made an international reputation outside the Royal Ballet organisation. Starting his career - like so many others - with Ballet Rambert, he became one of the founder members of Festival Ballet (now English National), rapidly rose to become its brightest star, and led the company until his retirement twenty years later. He was a supremely stylish virtuoso, renowned for his musicality and fluency, and a great partner of ballerinas - ranging from Danilova to Sibley. He saw 'simplicity, musicality and line' as the qualities that made a dancer, and he had them all in abundance. Gilpin was born in 1930, one of twins. (His brother Anthony eventually became LFB's stage manager). He started his dance training at the Cone Ripman school, winning the Adeline Genée Gold Medal when he was 13 - astonishingly young, particularly for a boy. (The photograph on the right, taken when he was 11, gives some idea of his quality at that age.) His first stage appearances were actually as a child actor, but when he had to choose between this and ballet he had no doubt that he wanted to be a dancer. Marie Rambert took him on when he was 15, and despite being 'worked to exhaustion', Gilpin was always grateful to her for giving him his first soloist opportunities. He left Rambert after their famous 18 month Australian tour and joined first Roland Petit's Ballet de Paris and then the Marquis de Cuevas's company, in search of wider experience, coming back to London in time to be recruited for Festival Ballet's first performances in 1950. Festival Ballet's existence consisted of tours both in Britain and worldwide, so that Gilpin was seen by a far wider audience than any of the Royal Ballet's stars: the downside was that it was not an outstandingly creative company, so that the opportunity to create new roles was limited. He danced the leads in the classics, taking over from his lifelong friend Anton Dolin, but his most famous roles were in the virtuoso Etudes (in which the cast of Gilpin, Flemming Flindt and Toni Lander has probably never been surpassed in a British company), and in Jack Carter's Witch Boy, which gave him a relatively rare opportunity to show his dramatic capabilites. Gilpin's dancing career ended sadly, with illness and injury leading to alcoholism: his fight back and recovery are movingly described in his autobiography, A Dance with Life. He was establishing himself as a teacher and producer, and had recently made an evidently very happy marriage (to Princess Antoinette of Monaco) when he died in September 1983. And was he 'the finest male dancer etc'? Well, maybe not quite - but he'd certainly be on my list of the top five; and it is sad that, having been better known around the world than any other, he is now so little remembered {top}
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