The Chronicle January 2020

22 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Backstage at the Ballet: Photographs by Colin Jones

Next month, The North Wall will host an important exhibition featuring work by ballet-dancer-turned-photographer Colin Jones (b. 1936). Colin has been taking photographs for more than six decades and is one of Britain’s most significant post-war photojournalists. His ballet photography reveals the emotional intensity and beauty of ballet as well as the physical exertion and discipline of a dancer’s life. Drawn from the archive of TopFoto and Colin Jones’s own collection, the exhibition features over 50 images, many of which have never been on public display before. Taken while Jones was a dancer, then photographer in the 1960s, and again in the 1990s, the prints include images of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, as well as Ninette de Valois, Kenneth MacMillan, Lynn Seymour and Tamara Rojo. With The North Wall Gallery situated next to the School’s Dance Studio, the show will be hugely inspiring for our young dancers. The exhibition is free of charge and runs at The North Wall from 11th February – 7th March.

Clockwise from above: Self portrait of Colin Jones taken in costume in the dressing room of the Empire Theatre, Sydney, on the Royal Ballet’s tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1958; Margot Fonteyn rehearsing Beauty and the Beast in the early 1960s; Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev at a class before performing Swan Lak e at the Nervi Festival in Italy in 1962; Rudolf Nureyev rehearsing his new ballet, Tancredi , at the Opera House in Vienna in 1966; Kenneth MacMillan rehearsing Desmond Dole and Lynn Seymour at the Baron’s Court Studio, West London in 1963; ballet dancers resting on the stairs; and HRH Princess Margaret at a party on stage at the Royal Opera House with ballerinas Georgina Parkinson and Antoinette Sibley in the 1960s.