Contents
- 1. Transcript
- 1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE I MARCH 11, 1997
- 1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE II MARCH 11, 1997
- 1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE I MARCH 21, 1997
- 1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE II MARCH 21, 1997
- 1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE I MARCH 31, 1997
- 1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE II MARCH 31, 1997
- 1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE I APRIL 11, 1997
- 1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE II APRIL 11, 1997
- 1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE I APRIL 25, 1997
- 1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE II APRIL 25, 1997
- 1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE I APRIL 30, 1997
- 1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE II APRIL 30, 1997
- 1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE I NOVEMBER 18, 1998
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE I MARCH 11, 1997
- GUERARD
- Well, Margaret, I think a good place to start would be where you were
born and when you were born.
- HILLS
- Okay. As you can tell by my accent, I was born in England in a place
called Melton Mowbray, which is in Leicestershire, on the east side
about the middle of the way up from London, on July the 25th, 1928. I
was my parents' first child and was an only child until my brother [John
Hampson] was born when I was nine, so I had a long time of total
immersion in parents without any opposition . We stayed in the first
house until I was three and then we moved to another house in the same
town when I was three. We stayed there till I was five and a half, which
helps me to pinpoint some times in my life. Because of that move, I
remember one house and I remember another house and the journeys to
dancing classes from those two houses. Then we moved town from the east
side of England to a place called Shrewsbury, which is on the borders of
Wales, about up the middle again, where we stayed until-- Well, my
parents stayed there until they retired and I moved out when I went to
London first. So again, I have places to remember events at, which I
find quite helpful in remembering things .
- GUERARD
- Right .
- HILLS
- My parents were in their late twenties when I was born. My father [Ellis
Hampson] was a company accountant and my mother [Ida Cockshott
Hampson]-- Obviously in those days, parents didn't work. She was an
artist [who] painted and--
- GUERARD
- Oh, she was!
- HILLS
- Yes. And her father [Thomas Alfred Cockshott] had been--well, still
was--an artist at the same time, as was her half-brother [Frank Airey] .
But my father had nothing artistic in his family at all. [laughs] [On]
my mother's side of the family, there was a professional singer, also.
So we just lived and, you know, I remember odd details of growing up.
The reason I first went to a dancing class- - Well, there were two, if
you were ready for me to go on to this .
- GUERARD
- I 'm ready!
- HILLS
- When I was, I think I must have been two and a half, we went to a
Christmas show in the theater which was-- It's called a pantomime in
England. It's very complicated, but it's part vaudeville and part
transformation scenes and based on old fairy tales. This one was Aladdin. I can remember barely being able to see
over the balcony to the stage. [I] vividly remember a great deal of the
show. The funny person in the shows is always a man dressed up as a
woman and he/she was Widow Twankey. But the thing that really impressed
me was the dancing and the transformation scene in Aladdin's cave.
- GUERARD
- Ah , ha !
- HILLS
- And where the lighting was such that what appeared to be jewels in the
cave suddenly became dancers, and they danced and it was absolute magic!
- GUERARD
- Oh, how wonderful.
- HILLS
- Just something that [was] unbelievable to my little eyes and I must, I
think, have pestered my parents to be allowed to learn how to do this
magical thing because I remember one day, my mother was at the
hairdresser's with me. I wasn't having my hair done. She was having hers
done. There was a discussion that the hairdresser's daughter was going
to a dancing class and I remember my mother writing down the address,
and next thing I knew, why there I was in the dancing class with my
mother's hairdresser's daughter. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Was that shortly after you had seen the--?
- HILLS
- Yes . I know because we moved house when I was three and I know I went
to dancing class from that house. I must have been two and
three-quarters or something.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness!
- HILLS
- And was put on pointe straight away.
- GUERARD
- Oh, you were?
- HILLS
- Yes. First lesson.
- GUERARD
- Well, that's not standard practice, is it?
- HILLS
- I think it probably was then. I didn't have any pointe shoes. They
didn't make them that small, so I did it in bare feet.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness!
- HILLS
- Didn't mind a bit.
- GUERARD
- And other students in the class were doing that, too?
- HILLS
- They were on pointe. Boys and girls, both. We all stood at the barre,
which, of course, was above my head. I can remember raising my arms
above my head to reach the barre, and, of course, when I went on my
toes, the barre was easier to hold because I was that little bit higher.
I can still vividly remember the room which, of course, to me feels
enormous, but I can also see the teacher in it and realize that if I
look at it from her eyes, it probably wasn't a very big room. There must
have been ten or twelve of us, I should think.
- GUERARD
- This was in Melton Mowbray?
- HILLS
- In Melton Mowbray. The teacher, I now know-- I didn't sort of know that
at the time, but her main school was in the big town, which was a few
miles away, called Leicester. She visited Melton Mowbray, presumably,
one afternoon a week. Our class was some time during the afternoon. I
don't know when. Probably before school was out, because we were the
little ones not at school yet.
- GUERARD
- Oh, you were so young.
- HILLS
- But this is drawing conclusions of the time. I don't know exactly. We
all wore little summer dresses and the boys wore just their shorts.
- GUERARD
- Tights and--?
- HILLS
- No. Nothing like that. Just socks. When I say "bare feet," I mean pointe
work in socks, not actually bare feet. I must have gone week after week
to this class.
- GUERARD
- Do you think you took classes about once a week?
- HILLS
- Oh, I think it was just once a week because I imagine she would only
have come to the town once a week.
- GUERARD
- Do you recall her name?
- HILLS
- Queenie Green.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness!
- HILLS
- Miss Green. [laughs] I've later learned that she was quite a well-known
teacher in Leicester and I met two others of her students when I first
went to the Sadler's Wells School. There were then three of us
ex-Queenie Green dancers at the Sadler's Wells School at the same time,
which is really quite surprising, considering the number of schools
there are in England.
- GUERARD
- Yes !
- HILLS
- So I think she must have actually been quite a good teacher, in spite of
putting her children on pointe. But to go on pointe was what ballet was,
you know. I think everybody did it.
- GUERARD
- So, so much for the theory about ruining your hips and your feet if you
go on pointe too soon?
- HILLS
- Oh, I don't know. Maybe we were, most of us, ruined, and only the others
survived. I have no cross- reference to be able to tell what happened to
the others. Even when I moved and we went to another school, we were
still all on pointe, so I think it was just common practice .
- GUERARD
- To get back to your family, just for a moment, it sounds as if your
father not just tolerated it, but had an appreciation for the arts, and
your mother was artistically involved.
- HILLS
- Yes. I don't know that either of them had any knowledge of dance at all.
I just got bitten with this bug, being taken to this performance. A
little later on, we went--I must have been a little bit older--to a
movie where there was dancing in it. The dancer, the woman, was called
Jessie Matthews, and she did stage dancing with a lot of high kicks and
going down in the splits and sang, and I thought that was wonderful too
and immediately came home and swung my legs over my shoulder and went
down into splits. [laughs] Wore the carpets out at home dancing around
to every bit of music that existed. So, it was just there. Apart from
saying I would like to learn it some time or another, I did it and loved
it. But my father was the one who mostly took me to places where when
later, I used to go and take classes and perform in other places, he was
the one who took me, rather than my mother. My mother was exceedingly
shy and very, very afraid of meeting people. That sort of person. She
was the sixth of seven daughters. A very large family of women. Some of
them died young and the one who was just next in line, older than my
mother, died when my mother was two. I think every time my mother was
sick, an awful lot of attention was paid to her because they were afraid
she'd die, too. She was really somewhat of a hypochondriac, and played
on feeling ill a lot. You know, the sort of person who was a little
fragile all the time.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- Charming woman, but very, very, very, really self- centered and shy. But
none the worse for it, you know, as far as I was concerned. She was
always there. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- A good mom.
- HILLS
- Yes, a good mom. Rotten cook. [laughs] Even she admitted that. All her
older sisters did everything. She never really learned how to cope in
the house, really, until she got married. Until she was really on her
own. And most of the time, we had maids and cooks and things like that.
It was only when the Second World War came and we hadn't got any that we
really found out that she really couldn't cook.
- GUERARD
- Ah! Then she had to learn.
- HILLS
- Then she had to learn. Right.
- GUERARD
- Did you take lessons from Queenie Green for several years?
- HILLS
- Until we moved to the other town, to Shrewsbury, when I was five and a
half. I took lessons from her for [I] reckon about two and a half, two
and three-quarter years, and performed quite a lot. I don't know how it
was worked out at all, but by the time I was four, I was performing on
the stage where I'd seen the original pantomime, and, of course, just
thought that was absolutely wonderful! I can still picture myself-- I
can see myself on the stage with taller dancers towering over me and the
audience, such as you can see very little from the stage. And I can see
the curtains and the wings and the lights and Queenie Green standing in
the wings, no doubt directing us with her hands when we got lost and
that sort of thing. [whispers] It was absolute bliss!
- GUERARD
- So you loved performing.
- HILLS
- Absolutely! As you can see-- You know, I can remember it so vividly. One
of the older girls, who appeared to me enormous, of course, was dressed
as a cockerel and we were all chickens. [laughter] There was another
little folk dance that we did and I think if I heard the music, I'd
probably recognize it even now. It was just gorgeous.
- GUERARD
- What music was it?
- HILLS
- I don't know. I know the music that the transformation scene was done to
in the pantomime because I've heard that since. It was a popular song of
the time. When You Grow Too Old To Dream.
[laughs] It was a song that was danced to. We were, I think at that
time, very fortunate, in thinking about class musicians. And I can't say
that I can remember the musician that we had for class. There must have
been one. It was just at the time when silent movies had stopped and
talkies had come in and all the pianists who played for silent movies
were out of work. Of course, they were used to following the action of
movement on the screen and playing things, so they were absolutely
wonderful in playing for class.
- GUERARD
- Oh, so they didn't necessarily play classical music?
- HILLS
- No. Sometimes they did and sometimes they made things up, but it was
just perfect. They knew exactly from the movement what they needed to
do. They got the mood of the steps as well as the time signatures and
the quality and the speed and everything. They were fabulous. And masses
of them. They've died out now, of course, but for many years, they were
all ex-movie theater musicians.
- GUERARD
- Oh, that's fascinating!
- HILLS
- Yes. They were a great loss when they died off.
- GUERARD
- Well then, who did you study with when you were the ripe old age of five
and a half?
- HILLS
- Five and a half? [laughter] Well, in Shrewsbury, I studied at what was
called the Betty Woodhouse School of Dancing. It wasn't the most
prestigious school in the town, but that one was run by a lady called
Irene Hammond. She only visited the town, like Queenie Green had visited
Melton Mowbray, once a week. She had all the aristocratic children, who
came with their nannies and their nannies sat 'round and then took them
back in the Rolls [Royce] afterwards, you know, to the big country
estate. The school I went to was the one for the upper middle-class
children, but she [Betty Woodhouse] lived there, so there were classes
going on all the time. The children's classes were held in a big
ballroom. Ballroom dancing, at that time, was exceedingly popular and no
town was without two or three big ballrooms. Everybody who had a dancing
school rented the ballrooms during the day for their ballet studios.
They didn't have barres. We used the backs of chairs for a barre, but,
of course, you could get a lot of children into a ballroom and, no
doubt, made a lot of money that way. I remember rows and there were six
of us, at least, across the ballroom in each row. The rows went back and
back and back and back and back and you started at the back and as you
got better, you were brought a row forward.
- GUERARD
- Were there mirrors?
- HILLS
- No. No mirrors. Didn't have a mirror in a studio that I-- Well, there
was one in Melton Mowbray. There was a mirror in that one. But I didn't
have a mirror again, apart from one that was at the back of the room,
until I was about twelve. So I think it's probably much better not
having a mirror. You have to feel it through your body and not see
yourself doing things. So, no mirrors, no barres. Floor like glass. No
rosin, no water on it. Just learned to stand up on the slippery floor,
in your pointe shoes, you know?
- GUERARD
- Did you have real ballet shoes or real pointe shoes by then?
- HILLS
- Real pointe shoes for some of the class. We didn't have them on for the
whole class. We had soft ballet shoes at the other school, and we did
what was very usual at that time. You did your ballet exercises, but you
also did jump rope. You danced with jump rope and the rope was always
swung backwards and not forward, so that you kept your shoulders back,
and not forward. As you learned your ballet steps, you learned to do
them with a jump rope at the same time.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness. I've never heard of this.
- HILLS
- So you did little pas de basques with jump rope and ballonnes with jump
rope and little steps like Highland dancing with jump rope. This was
absolutely common at the time, so the coordination was quite something.
- GUERARD
- Let's State what that time is. You're five and a half, so--
- HILLS
- I was five and a half, so it was 1933, and it was part of what everybody
did in a dancing class. You didn't call it a ballet class. You went to
dancing class. You had balls which were about, I suppose, six inches in
diameter, which were covered in plush. Colored plush. I don't know what
you call it, but, you know, like felty stuff on the outside. You danced
with balls, also.
- GUERARD
- In your hands?
- HILLS
- Bouncing them and throwing them and catching them while you were doing
your ballet steps with your feet. And you danced with chiffon scarves,
which you twirled into and twirled out of and waved above your head and
all those sort of things. You also sometimes had ribbons, about nine
inches long, sewn onto an elastic, which you wore around your wrist and
danced with those, also. All things, I think, to make you conscience of
where your arms were, as well as what your feet were doing.
- GUERARD
- Right. And to really think and coordinate.
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes, that's right. I also learned from the same teacher [Betty
Woodhouse]-- I didn't go to school till I was five and a half because we
were moving. We knew we were moving when I was about five and my parents
said, "Well, it's not worth sending you to school, you know, when we're
just about ready to move. We'll wait till we get there." So I didn't go
until I was five and a half, and they started me off at a Roman Catholic
convent. We weren't Catholic, but that was the only private school in
the town at the time. My dancing teacher came to the convent to teach
dancing every Tuesday afternoon, so I was learning Saturday mornings
with her in the ballroom, and in the school [the convent] on Tuesday
afternoons. During the early part of the afternoon, we were not allowed
to drink any water because the nuns said [that] if we drank water before
we danced we would rattle when we danced, and it was not polite to
rattle when you dance, so we weren't allowed to drink any water. They
were very, very strict. Exceedingly strict . The mother superior used to
come into the class--not the dancing class, but ordinary class--and she
would literally drop a pin to see if she could hear it drop as she
walked in. We were caned if we did anything wrong. We learned to write,
not on paper, but on slates. I was writing something. I don't know. I
thought it was a word. I don't know if it was or not, and we were told
to put the little chalky thing down. I wanted to finish my word so I
didn't put mine down, and I was caned for not putting it down.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- I went home with some distress and told my father and he said, "It's all
right, dear. I was caned a lot at school, and if you hold your hand out
and bring it up towards the cane as the cane is coming down, it doesn't
hurt half as much." And he was right. I mean, it worked. So it was very
common, obviously.
- GUERARD
- I guess it was just accepted and that's the way things were .
- HILLS
- Yes. That's the way things were. I was there for only six months and
then they took me away. They obviously thought this was not quite the
thing. I and four other children shared a private governess from then
[on] .
- GUERARD
- Oh. Rather than attending school?
- HILLS
- Rather than attending school. It wasn't at my house. The five of us went
to the governess' house, but there we had incredible education. So from
six till I was nearly eight-- By the time I was eight, I was reading Alice Through the Looking Glass without any
problems and I knew my tables up to the twenty- five times and--
- GUERARD
- Fantastic.
- HILLS
- Just incredible. We learned how to do fractions by breaking up bars of
chocolate, which I think is a wonderful, wonderful way of learning
fractions. [laughs] She was a genius .
- GUERARD
- Did you go there every day just as you would--?
- HILLS
- Oh, yes! Just a normal school time. From 8:30 a.m. till 4:00 p.m. every
day. We took our lunch in little, brown bags, you know.
- GUERARD
- Great!
- HILLS
- Yes, it was. It was wonderful.
- GUERARD
- I'm sure you learned a lot, quickly, that way, too .
- HILLS
- Yes, because I graduated from high school very early and I put it down
to that early start in that situation. When I went to a proper school, I
was way, way ahead. Three years ahead when I went to school.
- GUERARD
- You mean they actually put you ahead three grades?
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes .
- GUERARD
- When was that?
- HILLS
- When I was nearly eight. I went at Easter when I was seven and
three-quarters, and the rest of the kids were nearly ten.
- GUERARD
- Where was that? Had you moved again? -
- HILLS
- No. We were then in Shrewsbury in this place on the borders of Wales.
And it was-- I don't know what it was called. It wasn't a private
school. It was the same as an ordinary-- You know, you don't pay to go
to school, except that my parents were wealthy and they were required to
pay a certain amount. It was a state school.
- GUERARD
- Well, how did you feel about being three years younger than your fellow
students?
- HILLS
- Didn't worry me in the slightest. I was top of the class all the time,
so who cared? The only time when it really bothered me, the school was
going to take a trip to London and I was told I wasn't going to be able
to go because I was too young. My father went-- Must have gone to see
the head mistress, and said, "You know, this is awful for her to not go.
Could you not break the rules in some way if I take out insurance?" or
something to that effect, and they did take me. So I did go, but that
was horrible [laughs] , to be the only one left behind. But still I
went, so it was okay. And, of course, I was spoiled to death by
everybody, you know, being this-- I was also very tiny for my age. I was
a tiny little mite rushing around with all these big people. [laughs] It
was fun.
- GUERARD
- And still the only child, so far.
- HILLS
- Yes. Still the only child so far. My mother, I now know, though I didn't
really sort of think what was happening at the time, had a miscarriage
when I was fiveish- -sometime around then- -and then another stillborn
child when I was around seven. I knew about the stillborn child. I only
now put two and two together and realized there was a miscarriage, also,
when I was five. So she really wanted another child, but wasn't having
any luck. But I had all the attention.
- GUERARD
- Yes. And were you thinking of yourself as a ballerina at this point?
- HILLS
- No.
- GUERARD
- Just enjoying your classes?
- HILLS
- I was loving the classes. Loving all the performances because by that
time, the school I went to did a lot of performing. I mentioned that
there were ballrooms everywhere and if there were ballrooms, of course,
there are ballroom dances going on. What would occur would be that
sometime during the evening of these balls, there would be
entertainment, and we were the entertainment. Very common that the local
dancing school put on a big show, which meant that almost every Friday
and Saturday night, we performed.
- GUERARD
- Wow !
- HILLS
- Usually at around eleven o'clock at night. So, I would go to bed and
have a rest in the afternoon and then get up and do the performance and
go home and go to bed again, which didn't worry me in the slightest
because sleep was not something I ever needed. My mother used to say
that I should have been a night nurse because if [there was] one person
in this world who needed never to sleep, it was me. I must have driven
her crazy being awake all night. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Well, apparently, she supported the idea enough to--
- HILLS
- Yes! It really is surprising that a parent would allow a child to do
that much performing. Maybe I gave her hell if she said no. I really
don't know, but she never balked at it. [Guerard laughs]
- HILLS
- We had lovely costumes which were then made for us by dressmakers, of
course. They were designed by the teacher. She had a wonderful sense of
design for costumes that you could dance in well.
- GUERARD
- Oh, that you could really, actually move in?
- HILLS
- Yes. She just knew what would work for movement and what wouldn't. She
had a collection of Edwardian costumes with bustles and parasols and all
those sort of things. She collected them. That was her hobby, and [she]
had some beauties. That's where, when I saw them, I learned how
dressmaking ought to be. You know, they were exquisitely made. All
hand-sewn and just gorgeous. But, as I say, her flair for costuming was
wonderful.
- GUERARD
- Do you remember any of the dances that you did?
- HILLS
- Well, yes. Some of them-- I mean, on one occasion, I was a tape measure
and a poppy and [Guerard laughs] another time, I was the garden rake
that somebody else was manipulating [laughs] and by the time I was
seven, I was learning tap, as well. We did a lot of tap choruses.
- GUERARD
- The same teacher?
- HILLS
- Same teacher. Yes, and we did all nursery rhymes. When we were really
little, we danced through the nursery rhymes and we did things like
little children in their pajamas- -you can imagine- -with candles going
to bed and waking up and dreaming all sorts of dreams and all these
things. She was, I think probably, quite a remarkable choreographer
considering the age range of children she had to cope with, because each
of these dances I'm talking about were put together so that they became
a whole ballet. I mean, if I was a tape measure, somebody else was a
sewing machine or a pin, so that it was a ballet about sewing or a
ballet about flowers or a ballet about making hay at hoedowns and things
like that.
- GUERARD
- So [it was] all her original choreography?
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes, all of it. Absolutely! And I don't ever remember having any
extra rehearsals other than class. So, somehow or other- -
- GUERARD
- It was incorporated--?
- HILLS
- It was incorporated into the class so that we knew it. At least, I knew
it. Whether everybody else was copying me or not, I have no idea, but I
never had any recollection of having to remember. It just seeped in from
the music. And once it was in, it was there and turn on the music and I
would do it, I guess. But it was great fun .
- GUERARD
- I think likely that's a facility that you have.
- HILLS
- I think it is because later on, I could watch a ballet and go away and
teach it the next day. So it is a facility. There's no doubt about it.
- GUERARD
- You said something to the effect of the age range of the children she
was dealing with. Was it a big range?
- HILLS
- Yes, it was, because she had older students who were going on to become
either professional dancers or teachers as well as the little ones, and
we were all incorporated into the performances, as I said, mostly in
these, quote, "ballets" that she choreographed, putting all these dances
together. But around [the] age of seven, another little girl came to the
studio who was exactly my age, called Margaret, also. I had, at that
time, what Americans call red hair, though in England it's called
strawberry blonde. It's not red, red but the other red, and she had very
dark hair. Gradually, we became an act together known as "The Two
Margarets." [Guerard laughs]
- HILLS
- We did little duets all the time. This sort of thing that we must have
looked exceedingly cute, I guess, because they all brought the house
down and we got encores and we were especially requested to do this
dance or that dance, you know, at various things.
- GUERARD
- Was this still in the ballroom?
- HILLS
- Still in the ballroom.
- GUERARD
- So the audience are people who have come all dressed up?
- HILLS
- They're all dressed up in evening dress. Yes, yes .
- GUERARD
- And paid to be able to waltz and whatever, in the ballroom?
- HILLS
- Yes. I don't know if they paid to go or whether they were parties run by
other people. I have no idea. New Year's Eve, of course, we always
danced at the-- It was always called the Caledonian Ball because the
Scots celebrate New Year's Eve much more than the English do. For that,
we always did Highland dancing, in kilts and--
- GUERARD
- Oh, you did! So you did ballet and you did tap--?
- HILLS
- Tap. And we did Highland dancing and fencing, [laughter] And then we did
stage dance, which was-- What do they call it now? They've got a new
word for it and I can't remember what it is, but just general sort of
splits and high kicks and that sort of thing, and moving across the
stage. Jazz wasn't invented then, as it's done now. It's called jazz
now. That, we didn't do. And later on, of course, I learned ballroom
dancing as well. That was just one of the required things to do when you
were big enough to do that .
- GUERARD
- How old were you when you stopped dancing at the Betty Woodhouse [School
of Dancing] and moved on?
- HILLS
- Oh, I stayed there until I went to London.
- GUERARD
- Which was when?
- HILLS
- Which was when I was fifteen.
- GUERARD
- So your family moved to London?
- HILLS
- No. I went on my own, at fifteen.
- GUERARD
- You went on your own !
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Had you graduated from high school at fifteen?
- HILLS
- Yes. I'd been graduated just before my fifteenth birthday.
- GUERARD
- Oh, because you were three years ahead already.
- HILLS
- Yes, yes. And I went on being three years ahead. At school, it was an
8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. day with-- By the time I graduated, we had four
hours of homework every night. Always two hours [of homework], from the
age of seven onwards. Because later on, I was certainly doing more than
one Saturday morning and one Tuesday afternoon. I was going to class, to
start with, two evenings a week after school, and then it built up to
every afternoon after school, I would go to class.
- GUERARD
- Well then, were you staying up till midnight doing your homework?
- HILLS
- No. I learned to be shut into the classroom to do my homework, sitting
under the desk.
- GUERARD
- I'm sorry?
- HILLS
- [laughs] Well, during lunch break-- We had lunch at school. [It was a]
cooked lunch, and we ate lunch at school. Then we were allowed to go
back to the classroom to get a book or whatever we wanted, but we had to
play out of doors, and then the classrooms were locked up. But I found
that if I went to the back of the room and hid under the desk at the
back, I could have an uninterrupted hour to do homework. I wonder now if
they knew that I did it. I have no idea. Maybe they did, but they never
let on they knew that I did it if they did know. And, of course, [in] an
absolutely quiet hour, you can get through a lot more homework than you
can at home in two or three hours . So, it was fine, and I was [a] very
quick study. I mean, I could read fast and assimilate all the stuff very
fast, so it wasn't really a chore to read and learn. I just read and it
went in. So, again, I was born very lucky. The written work took time,
of course, because we had to write legibly, and nobody was ever allowed
to type anything. In fact—
- GUERARD
- Oh, no!
- HILLS
- No. Nice girls did not learn to type.
- GUERARD
- Oh! Is that right?
- HILLS
- Absolutely, because if you learned to type, it meant that your prospects
for life were that you were either: a) going to have to work at all,
which was a little bit undignified, and if you did work, you were not
going to be a typist. You were going to be something much better than
that, so, much better [that] you never learned to type. So I didn't
learn to type until a few years ago, when we bought our first computer.
[laughter] Then I had to have a crash course. [laughs] So everything was
handwritten and I could write fairly fast, but I could not spell. I
mean, of all the things I could do, spelling I could absolutely not do.
It was a terrible, terrible pain for me. Because I could write a word
down five different ways and they all seemed to me, right. So there was
no way of guessing which one was the right one and I just used to write
down something. So all my work came back covered in spelling mistakes,
[laughter] Good material, but must learn to spell.
- GUERARD
- So you got all that done and then in the evenings, you could go to
class.
- HILLS
- Yes, and the only way of actually getting to my school, and to class,
was by bicycle. There was no bus route of any sort. You either walked or
bicycled, so I bicycled everywhere. And in the depths of winter- -we had
some very severe winters; much more severe then than seems to be now- -I
would go to school on my toboggan, because it was a switchback route to
school (you know, hills and vales) , so I would pull the toboggan uphill
and toboggan down .
- GUERARD
- And come back from school at night?
- HILLS
- Well, yes, dragging the toboggan behind me in the dark, you know. It was
perfectly safe.
- GUERARD
- I guess so! [laughter]
- HILLS
- Or cycling home at about nine o'clock. I would get to my class about
4:30 p.m. and we'd go on till 9:00 p.m. It was just how life was. And,
of course, then if I hadn't finished my homework, then I would finish it
before I went to bed. Under the bedclothes, with a flashlight, if
necessary. [laughs] It was reading. [I] always got the written stuff
done first and the reading second so that that I could fit in somewhere.
- GUERARD
- What happened if you didn't get your homework done?
- HILLS
- Never happened. I always did.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- I don't know what would have-- Well, I know what would have happened.
You had something which is called an order mark, which went against you,
personally. The school was divided into four, no, five sections, called
houses. It wasn't anything to do with a house, but they were divided
into houses, and the more order marks you got, it was detrimental to
your house result in school. So you tried not to get order marks because
it was bad for you and bad for your house, and your house didn't get
shields and all those sort of things that they got if they were top, you
know.
- GUERARD
- They made it a team effort.
- HILLS
- That's right. Exactly.
- GUERARD
- So you were responsible for your team.
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes. The school had three hundred and sixty students only, so it
wasn't very big.
- GUERARD
- But it wouldn't have effected whether you had been allowed to go to
ballet school or anything like that?
- HILLS
- No. I suppose if I hadn't been doing well at school, my parents might
have put their feet down and said, "You can't go to dance class unless
you improve." And my father said that I was not going to go to London
until I'd graduated, particularly since the war [World War II] was on at
that time and London was being bombed to smithereens, anyway, which was
another reason for him not wanting that to happen.
- GUERARD
- You know, I think we're getting close to the end of this side of the
tape, and I think that would be a great topic to start with, so I think
I'll stop this one here .
- HILLS
- Okay.
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE II MARCH 11, 1997
- GUERARD
- Margaret, we're just about to the war years, and I know that you'll be
moving to London and starting a new phase of your ballet career. Is
there anything else about your earlier years that you'd like to remember
before we go on?
- HILLS
- Yes, I think we should because we really jumped quite a bit in starting
to talk about high school. I went on performing in these ballrooms
continuously, and also at children's parties. People used to give huge
children's parties and we did our little performances at those as well,
but then in 1939, when the war started in Europe for us, people stopped
going to balls and the performances stopped. We were filled with forces-
-armed forces- -stationed in that area. Mostly air force. There were a
lot of airports around there, and we put together what was called the
Police and Civil Defense Concert Party, and this became a regular gig
that we would take to the bases for the forces. Now, officially, to be
able to go, one had to be a member of the police or the civil defense,
and you weren't supposed to be a member of the civil defense until you
were fourteen. But I wanted to dance in these shows and I was only
thirteen, so they allowed me to become what was called a messenger,
which meant that when the air raid sirens went, we messengers had to go
to a depot and cycle around with messages, presuming the telephones had
been bombed out. Now, you should realize that I was living in a small
town, in the middle of the country, miles away from anywhere except
where the force's bases were, and, in fact, we didn't have a single bomb
drop all through the war. We were in a very safe place, so the fact that
I was this messenger really sounds great, but entailed absolutely
nothing [laughs], except that I could go 'round to the air force bases,
both American and English, and perform this concert party. Of course, we
got [a] wonderful amount of exposure doing this to these thousands and
thousands and thousands of members of the forces . We did cancans and
tap solos and tap choruses and all sorts of things. We also had to sing
in some of them. Now, I cannot sing, and so Margaret was asked to open
and shut her mouth in time with the music and please not to let any
sound out under any circumstances. [laughter] So I know the words to an
awful lot of stuff, but I can't sing it. That was great because then we
were performing all sorts of nights of the week. We were bussed to the
bases and did our show, and then bussed back again. At that time, I was
studying at school and also studying for my Intermediate Royal Academy
[of Dancing] examinations and my Intermediate Cecchetti [Society]
examinations and as it happened, the Intermediate RAD [The Royal Academy
of Dancing] and the Intermediate Cecchetti examinations were in the same
week, which was not funny. The styles are very different, and I had to
try and get them sorted out. I managed it, but it was fairly horrendous
.
- GUERARD
- Were these examinations that you took in order to be able to go on--?
- HILLS
- To go on to the next examination.
- GUERARD
- Still within the same school, or where did that take you?
- HILLS
- Yes. No. Same school. I did go to the Irene Hammond School [the Hammond
School of Dancing] in Chester for coaching for the RAD examinations.
Those were the classes that started at 10:00 a.m. and we broke at the
end of the barre at 12:30 p.m. for lunch, [then] came back for center
from one o'clock till 6:00 p.m. That was one class.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness! And that was to prepare you for--?
- HILLS
- That was to prepare for the examinations. Yes. For the Cecchetti
examinations, we had a lady came to visit called Moya Kennedy, who was a
Cecchetti examiner and she coached us at our own school . The reason we
did both methods was that the teacher, Betty Woodhouse, was Royal
Academy of Dancing-trained and during the war, another teacher who had
been a professional dancer, called Wendy Everest came, and she was
Cecchetti-trained. And so from then on, we learned both methods at the
same time, depending on which of them was teaching us.
- GUERARD
- How long was the preparation process for--?
- HILLS
- Well, as soon as you passed one examination, you started working for the
next. You know, as a child, I didn't mention it, but I'd taken what were
called the graded examinations. They start at primary through grade
five- -or did- -and then you went on to elementary and then intermediate
and then advanced. The idea was, you didn't move up in your school
classes from one grade of class to the next until you'd passed your
grade examination in whichever method you happened to be studying.
- GUERARD
- So it sounds like it [taking the examinations] didn't really necessarily
mean that you wanted to become a professional dancer, it's just that you
had to do these.
- HILLS
- Yes. Everybody does, and still does. That's how England works. They do
the same thing with piano and the same thing with violin.
- GUERARD
- They want to assure that you're progressing.
- HILLS
- Yes. That's right. Yes. And, you know, people failed and nobody minded.
You did it again, whereas in this country, when people fail in
examination, as we found at Stanley's [Stanley Holden Dancer Center]
years later, the parents just stop their children going or take them to
another school. It's very sad. It's a different, different approach
entirely. When it's accepted that you do fail, you do fail, you know.
And it's the same--or was, and still is, I think, the same- -in
everything, because at the end of every term at school, you take a lot
of examinations in every subject. That's what the last week of each term
was, taking exams, which you did your best at .
- GUERARD
- Right. I guess what I was asking a little while ago was, how long did
you have to take these classes from ten in the morning until--?
- HILLS
- Oh, we used to go on Saturdays. I don't know. It's hard to remember. I
suppose about six weeks before the examination time, we would go every
Saturday for these long classes. They were grueling. Sometimes you got
so tired, you know, you'd go out and throw up and come back in again
because you got so fatigued. But [it] built stamina [to] go on and on
and on and on and on, which stands a performer in very good stead
because, you know, you'd take class in the morning, you rehearse all
afternoon and you'd do a warm-up before the performance, and the
performance. So it's very good training to be doing that amount of work,
and the barre was so long because every detail had to be right before
you moved on to the next one. So you did it time and time and time and
time again, and if somebody wasn't very good, you'd pray that they got
better soon because we were all doing it time and time again until each
person had got their fault right.
- GUERARD
- I had a question that popped up a little while ago. What sort of
facilities did they have at the military- -?
- HILLS
- Oh, they all had theaters.
- GUERARD
- Oh, did they?
- HILLS
- Yes. They had proper theaters. I don't know. I suppose they were in-- We
used to call them Nissan huts in England. What are they called here?
They're those big domed-- There was a name for them in the United
States, too. [Quonset huts] They were exactly the same. You're too young
to know.
- GUERARD
- I can picture them--
- HILLS
- Yes. And the stage was built with dressing rooms in the back and the
seats and everything there.
- GUERARD
- Did you perform just to the men who were stationed there?
- HILLS
- Oh, men and women, of course. Both.
- GUERARD
- Oh, right! Of course, yes.
- HILLS
- Yes. And it was rather nice because they gave us dinner after the show.
The food supply in Britain, during the war, was minimal, and the forces
got a lot more food than we did. And so, we had wonderful dinners
afterwards and [it was] just fabulous. During the war, we had one egg a
week, two ounces of butter a week and four ounces of meat a week.
Everything was rationed. I mean, canned beans were rationed. Everything.
So to be able to sit down and look at some food that was not microscopic
was incredible.
- GUERARD
- Was this situation even more so because you were not near the city?
- HILLS
- No. It was absolutely fair for everybody. You had a book- -a ration
book- -where the coupons were cut out at the market, and that's what you
got. That's all there was, so it was very, very carefully divided up to
everybody. I was too old to be allowed an orange when they came, but my
brother, who was nine years younger than I, John, when there was an
occasional orange, he would get it because he was younger than I was.
[laughs] Once, a sailor brought a banana and I hated bananas from early
childhood. I couldn't stand them and so my brother saw his first banana
when he was about four, I suppose. Four or five. Never seen one before.
They don't grow in England. Everything was shipped in, you know, so to
have real food was wonderful .
- GUERARD
- I bet!
- HILLS
- And rationing didn't finish completely until after my first child was
born. No, after my second child was born, in 1960. There were still some
things rationed in 1961, and the war finished in '45, so it took us a
long, long time to get sorted out. We were underfed.
- GUERARD
- Well, good thing that you were a dancer, then, huh?
- HILLS
- Yes. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Dancers like to be underfed.
- HILLS
- That's right. No question about it. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- So then, you were trained in Cecchetti technique?
- HILLS
- Yes. And The Royal Academy of Dancing technique. What I realize now-
-didn't realize it at the time, of course. One never does- -that my
teachers had an idea that I was quite good, because they would invite
friends to come and stay in Shrewsbury, away from the bombing, but they
also, when they came, gave me private lessons. I had private lessons
from various people, including a woman called Mary Skeaping, who later
became ballet mistress of The Royal Ballet and then ballet mistress of
the Swedish National Ballet [Royal Swedish Ballet] . She was one of
them. And, Lydia Kyasht, who is a Russian ballerina. She had me dance
with her little company when I was about thirteen, I think, through one
summer. She was just based in that area, so that was when I got to dance
the lead in Les Sylphides and things like that,
which was wonderful experience . She was a tiny, little, old lady who
taught class, sitting right on the edge of the stage. One always felt
she would tipple over backwards. She sat on a chair with a long pole.
Beat time with this long pole, and would wave it at you if anything' s
wrong, you know. She was sweet. [She] gave me some nice opportunities. I
danced Carnaval, which is another [Michel]
Fokine ballet, for her. It was an exciting little summer interlude
there.
- GUERARD
- That was her own company?
- HILLS
- Yes. She had a little company of her own, which had-- I don't know who
the dancers were anymore. I just went in and did this and then went back
to school when school started again. It was just a little six-week
period. It was fun.
- GUERARD
- How old were you then?
- HILLS
- Thirteen.
- GUERARD
- Thirteen. Do you want to talk a little bit about Cecchetti and the Royal
Academy--?
- HILLS
- The differences? Yeah!
- GUERARD
- Were they competing, or was it something that people felt you need to--?
- HILLS
- I think you need [to] know how they evolved. There was a Danish
ballerina called Adeline Genée, who went- -and this is all in the
history books- -to London, sometime in her career, on a one-season
contract, to dance in a ballet which was in the middle of a vaudeville
show, I think at the Lyceum Theatre in London, but I'm not absolutely
sure. I'd have to look it up. And it was an enormous success. She stayed
on year after year after year, and she wanted to have a company of
dancers around her. She was appalled at the standard of ballet in
England, and if my memory serves me from reading it, she decided that
there ought to be a way of training teachers to teach the children
better. She started what was called The Operatic Society. Now, operatic,
you'd think, had to do with singing, but no. It was operatic dancing.
That grew and sometime or other, I don't remember when, got a Royal
Charter so that they could use the word royal and became The Royal
Academy of Dancing. [The Royal Charter was awarded in 1920.] [Margaret
Graham Hills added the above bracketed section during her review of the
transcript.] Dancing, in that context, meant ballet only. It got an
examining board of examiners who set up these graded exams for the
children. That grew into this now worldwide and vast organization called
The Royal Academy of Dancing, which has examiners going to-- I think
it's sixty-four or sixty-five different countries in the world now, all
the children taking the same examinations. On the other side, there was
a famous teacher called Enrico Cecchetti, who had his own method of
teaching. One of his students was a woman called Margaret Craske, and he
and Margaret Craske got together to write out his method of teaching,
which is called the Cecchetti Method. That was incorporated into
another, in England, society, called the Imperial Society of Teachers of
Dancing. Now, in that context, dancing didn't mean just ballet. It was
principally for ballroom dancers and folk dancers. The Cecchetti branch
of that society started the examinations in the Cecchetti Method, and
his method was-- They were all arranged to make good dancers, but the
Danish, which was what The Royal Academy had come from, had a lot of
different names for steps, different numbering of the arms and a
different style. And so, doing the two side by side meant a little
mental juggling, to remember that what was first position in The Royal
Academy of Dancing was fifth en avant in the Cecchetti Method. And the
way of using the head was different. And the way of executing an
assemblé was different. And what in one method was called a sissonne
ordinaire devant, was called something else- -and now I forget --in the
other one.
- GUERARD
- That must have been really confusing!
- HILLS
- Yes, and in an examination, the examiner doesn't get up and demonstrate
a step to you. You've learned a lot of them by rote, but they also each
set unseen combinations, which they just say to you.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- And you work out what they've said, and then you do it, so you did have
to remember the terminology very carefully, and which was which, and not
make a mistake.
- GUERARD
- Now I understand what you mean about the difficulty of taking the two
exams within a week of each other.
- HILLS
- Yes, yes . It was a little bit of a pill. [pause] It was okay.
- GUERARD
- You said they wrote up the Cecchetti Method. Do you know how they wrote
it up?
- HILLS
- Yes. They published a book. It's called The Manual
of-- Everybody refers to it as The Bible,
so I can't remember its proper name. They did one for the barre and
adages and then another smaller one afterwards, for the allegro. Some
committee, including Margaret Craske and some other people, divided that
method up into a sequence of training, which you could take an
examination at the end of shall we say a year, but it [was] building
towards his total product at the end. And that still goes on. Of course,
both The Royal Academy syllabus and the Cecchetti syllabus have been
modernized. They're not now the same as they were, but in the days when
I did them, they were very much what the original people had set up.
- GUERARD
- Did they describe the movements with words and pictures of bodies, or--?
- HILLS
- Words and drawings.
- GUERARD
- There wasn't any notation or anything like that?
- HILLS
- There wasn't. No. Notation hadn't been invented yet and we'll get to
that, I think, later on. I don't want to jump the gun here and talk
about it yet. But it was written in words, with the time signature and
the steps and the arms in columns. You got very used to it, you know.
When I first started to write a dance down with any thought, I used that
method, and still would. To me, it's exceedingly clear and very easy.
- GUERARD
- And I think we should clarify that The Royal Academy of Dancing method
does not mean The Royal Ballet.
- HILLS
- No. It doesn't. In England, there are lots of things called royal
something. Because if - -originally the king, and then when [Queen]
Elizabeth came to the thrown, the queen- -they approve of your request
to use royal in your title (and they don't always. They sometimes say,
"No, no, no!"), then you use royal before your name . So there are royal
all sorts of things. There's The Royal Academy of Art, which is
painting. There's The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which is acting
training. There's The Royal Academy of Music. There's The Royal Academy
of Dancing, which we've just been talking about, this examining body.
And when what was the Sadler's Wells Ballet applied for a Royal Charter,
they were granted it, and so they were known as The Royal Ballet. But
it's absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with The Royal Academy of
Dancing, other than most of the dancers in The Royal Ballet have taken
The Royal Academy of Dancing examinations. So as part of their training,
they have been trained in The Royal Academy of Dancing's method, in
order that ultimately they become a member of The Royal Ballet, but
there's no connection whatever.
- GUERARD
- No guarantee that by learning one that you go on to another?
- HILLS
- Oh, no! Absolutely none. No. They're quite separate organizations. They
may have some people who are on the executive boards of both, but the
right hand doesn't know what the left hand doeth.
- GUERARD
- At this time that you were taking the exams in the Cecchetti and The
Royal Academy, did you have a vision of where you wanted to go from
there?
- HILLS
- Oh, by then I knew I wanted to dance. I mean, I'd gone through as a tiny
child wanting to own a candy store because I hated candy and I knew I'd
make a lot of money because I would not eat it [pause] , which was my
reason for having a candy store. Then I wanted to teach biology because
I loved anatomy and physiology in school. Then, with a lot of
persuasion-- The gymnastics teacher at high school wanted me to teach
gymnastics, but you have to be able to teach games. You know, field
hockey and all that sort of stuff, which I hated. And I thought,
"There's no way I'm ever going to teach those because I loathe it, so
she can go on at me all she likes, but I am not going to teach
gymnastics." Then it really became no doubt at all in my mind that what
I wanted to do was to be a ballet-- Well, a dance performer, shall we
say, to start with. And then I realized that I was actually much better
at ballet than any of the other dancing things I was doing, so that
whittled that down to ballet. You know, I did well in the ballet
examinations, so it just sort of was bound to happen if I could get to
London.
- GUERARD
- Ah, ha! If you could get to London.
- HILLS
- If I could get to London. And, of course, my parents were dead against
it when bombs were dropping and all that sort of thing. It was when I
took my- -it must have been my- - Intermediate Cecchetti exam that the
examiner, called Peggy Van Praagh (it's V-A-N P-R-A-A-G- H) said to my
teacher, "I think she should audition to go to Sadler's Wells." And she
said, "I can fix it for this afternoon, if you like." So that afternoon,
I went to the theater where, by chance, the Sadler's Wells was
performing, and stood under the stage at the end of the matinee, hearing
the second act of Giselle going on over my head.
Between performances, I did an audition with the ballet mistress, called
Joy Newton, and she said, "Yes. You should come." But I couldn't. I
mean, not then. Not that minute.
- GUERARD
- This all happened in one day?!
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Had you seen the Sadler's Wells Ballet perform?
- HILLS
- No. I didn't see a ballet performance until I was fourteen, I think.
Well, apart from with Lydia Kyasht . I'd been in that, but not actually
seen it. I saw a ballet company called the Anglo Poles [Anglo Polish
Ballet] . I think they probably weren't very good, but I thought they
were wonderful . And I saw the evening performance after my audition of
Giselle, but that was the first time I'd
seen Sadler's Wells.
- GUERARD
- So you actually were becoming a dancer before you had a model in front
of you.
- HILLS
- Absolutely! Yes. Yes, completely. I just loved doing it. I think that's
all there was to it. Hyperactive child. I'd probably been given-- What's
it, Ritalin they get? [laughter]
- GUERARD
- You had dance instead.
- HILLS
- That's right. And, of course, I couldn't go then, but when the war
seemed to be running down a little bit, though there were still bombs
dropping in London, my parents finally gave in and said, "Okay. Well
[indicates hesitation in their voices], all right. You can go, as long
as you don't live in London." Because the bombs mostly dropped at night
and I lived outside of London and commuted on a train. They found a lady
whose husband had been killed during the war and she wanted somebody to
live in her house to keep her company, so I lived with her and commuted
into London.
- GUERARD
- It wasn't family? It wasn't somebody they knew?
- HILLS
- No, no. It was somebody I'd never met, actually, until I got there.
- GUERARD
- And you were around fifteen or so at this time.
- HILLS
- Mm-hmm. Yes, and I commuted up to London. After a short time, they said,
"Well, you know, you can walk on with the company. You're not in the
company, but you can walk on in a court lady's dress and be around." I
learned, as I said, the choreography exceedingly quickly and so when
somebody was sick or was off, they knew I knew it, so they put me on . I
never really had a contract. I was at that stage when I did my knee
injury, so my performing time with Sadler's Wells was very, very, very
short .
- GUERARD
- Before we get to that, did you learn the ballets by seeing the
performances?
- HILLS
- I watched every performance.
- GUERARD
- They didn't teach them in the classes, then?
- HILLS
- We did have-- Jean Bedells, who was an assistant ballet mistress came
and taught us. I remember learning the second act of Swan Lake from her. Sylphides, I knew
already, and we learned a little bit of the candy canes from Nutcracker [Casse Noisette] from her. Oh, and
some solos. We learned some of the solo from Nutcracker and one or two other odd bits. I wrote those down
as I learned them. In fact, she asked us to write them down. The second
act of Swan Lake she said, "Write that out for
me and I'll have a look at it."
- GUERARD
- Just in your own way of writing it?
- HILLS
- Yes. And so I did. I think she was quite impressed with the way I'd done
mine and it was all correct. Other people's papers came back smothered
in corrections, and mine didn't. You know, I went to every performance
before I commuted back to my place out of London and just sort of
absorbed the ballets, I suppose.
- GUERARD
- How was it, living with this woman, as a fifteen-year-old, going to
somebody's house and living there?
- HILLS
- I don't know. She had a little girl who was adopted. She was a diabetic.
I think it must have been more peculiar for her than for me, actually,
to have suddenly some teenager living in your house, feeling, I dare
say, some degree of responsibility for me. I have no idea. I just lived
there and virtually only slept there, as a matter of fact. I wasn't
there much.
- GUERARD
- And, weekends?
- HILLS
- Weekends I did my washing [laughs], darned my points shoes and sewed my
ribbons on. And that was about it.
- GUERARD
- Then, when you came to the Sadler's Wells School, was it like learning a
whole new technique?
- HILLS
- It was a little odd, because there, their technique wasn't pure
Cecchetti and it wasn't pure RAD. It was a mixture, which is really what
Ninette de Valois, when she finally wrote down her syllabus, wrote down.
Those differences. So it was a little odd, but the reason for being
there was to learn the-- How do you put it? To become "family stamped,"
so to speak. So that the head automatically went their way, that the
height of the leg was the height they required, that you moved in their
way of moving. That's why nobody ever went straight into the company,
because you had to have this imprinting of their style, which didn't
take long, but it was necessary since everybody came from different
places into the school at that time.
- GUERARD
- Was that imprinting process laid out in a standard set of years or--?
- HILLS
- No. It wasn't written down. It wasn't written down at all, and the
school was very small because they didn't take children. Their first
class was for the later teenagers, and it was at the theater- -at the
Sadler's Wells Theatre- -that we had our classes. There were two
rehearsal rooms there; one called the ballet room and one called the
opera room. The opera rehearsed in one room and [the] ballet rehearsed
in the other. All had classes. So the company was there and we were
there, and we were able to watch all the company rehearsals as well as
have our classes. So it was, you know, a place where you wanted to be
all day, watching everything and seeing Margot Fonteyn and Robert
Helpmann rehearsing and watching Frederic Ashton choreographing Symphonic Variations and-- Just a fabulous place
to be.
- GUERARD
- Was Ashton the main choreographer at that time?
- HILLS
- Yes, he was, without a doubt.
- GUERARD
- The opera company, were those the performers, and you were the--?
- HILLS
- Yes. We shared the dressing rooms and we shared the theater because
there would be alternate nights- -opera and ballet. The theater actually
went-- I'm jumping a little bit because when we first got there, the
theater auditorium had a bomb through it, and so that was closed. I
really have no idea where the opera was performing. They rehearsed at
the theater. I have no idea where they performed. I wasn't really keen
on opera. We were performing at the New Theatre in London, although we
were rehearsing at the Sadler's Wells Theatre. Covent Garden was still
converted to a great, big ballroom, where people used to go and ballroom
dance at night. It wasn't a theater at all.
- GUERARD
- Was the new theater the Covent Gardens?
- HILLS
- No. It was a theater called the New Theatre. [laughs] It was very old.
[laughs] It was known as the New Theatre. And it was in the theater
district of London. Quite tiny. I didn't know her at the time, but my
husband's aunt [Doris Napier] was one of the office workers there.
[laughs] I met her much later. She was the personal assistant to a man
called Bronson Albery, who was a big cheese at the New Theatre. I
suppose I saw her around, but didn't know who she was.
- GUERARD
- No. You couldn't have then.
- HILLS
- Very small world. And it was while we were still at the New [Theatre]
that I did my knee injury and then I started teaching after that .
- GUERARD
- How did the knee injury happen?
- HILLS
- The knee injury happened in class and-- You will understand, but the
people listening to the tape won't, but I was doing a grand ronde de
jambe sauté into a renversé en dehors, and as I landed from the jump, my
right knee fell inwards. I wasn't controlling it well enough, and I tore
the cruciate ligaments in the back of it. I mean, you could hear them,
miles off. It didn't hurt, actually, and I went on dancing. It was only
that night it swelled up to the size of a normal-- I mean, really, a
normal balloon. And then I was off, of course, for a while, until the
swelling went down and they could find out what was wrong with it. They
said, "Well, there's no surgery we can do. We can take out cartilage
when the swelling's down," which was done not for another nine months,
actually, after that. They took the cartilage out. And they said, "The
only thing we can do is to make your knee permanently straight. You'll
never be able to bend it again. It's the only surgery we can do, if we
do anything." And I said, "No way." And they said, "Well, your career's
over. Forget it."
- GUERARD
- And this was a month or so after--?
- HILLS
- Yes. I was about sixteen. Something like that. And I thought, "Well,
okay. I don't think it's over. I'm going to get lots of physical
therapy." And this is when I met the physical therapist called Celia
Sparger who's written a lot of books on dancer's injuries. [I] worked
with her extensively, and she taught me how to overcome the fact that I
didn't have any ligaments in the back of the knee and how to use the
muscles instead. The Sadler's Wells organization, Ninette de Valois,
particularly, were wonderful, because they said, "Well, you know, you
can always teach and we want you to teach for us. We want you to start
by teaching repertoire to the older students and we want you to start
the junior associate group of the school." And so, we auditioned
ten-year-olds for the first time. They came to the theater after school
and danced in what was the upstairs foyer of the theater, which had some
barres concealed behind curtains [laughs], which the audience didn't
see. I started those children's classes at that time.
- GUERARD
- So that was a first for them?
- HILLS
- That was a first for them. They hadn't taught children up till then. I
went to class. I got back into shape except that I couldn't do a full
plie anymore, and I haven't ever since. I've never been able to get down
into full plie because if I go down I can't get up, because the tendons
that enable you to do that aren't there. But it didn't matter. I was
able to manage without.
- GUERARD
- You've been fooling me for all these years. [laughter]
- HILLS
- Now, I could jump. The only thing I couldn't do at all was kneel down
because in doing the surgery to get the cartilage out, they'd cut the
surface nerves in my-- Well at that time, I had no feeling in the skin
from the mid-shin to the mid-thigh. They said, "Oh, the nerves will grow
together. Will grow about half an inch a year." And in fact, they did. I
now have just a circle on the kneecap about four inches in diameter
which has no feeling in it. But, of course, so many ballets require you
to kneel down.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- In the corps de ballet, particularly. And if you can't feel when you're
down, you go on pushing, trying to find the floor, and get covered in
bruises because you don't know you're there. And, of course, the knee
was unreliable. It did go out. The thigh bone slides forward over the
lower leg bone sometimes, and then I'm incapacitated till somebody puts
it back for me. So, I couldn't perform with a knee that did that, but I
really found I absolutely adored teaching.
- GUERARD
- Was that hard for you to accept, or, had you had your heart set--?
- HILLS
- You know, I make a fuss about how hard it was, but [voice drops to a
whisper] in fact, it wasn't. If I'm absolutely truthful, I enjoyed
teaching so much that [pause]-- You know, I wasn't suicidal as one might
think one should have been, and I think that Ninette de Valois was
really, really great in giving me a new career. Without her, I probably
might have felt much, much worse about it, but to be starting this
junior school for Sadler's Wells at this early age, was really exciting.
She'd seen me doing some teaching because-- I suppose I ' m an
instinctive teacher. When I was still a student and then doing the
walking on with the ballets and that sort of thing, if somebody couldn't
get a step, I couldn't help but take them on one side at the back and
show them how to do it, so she'd probably seen me doing this and
realized I could do it. Otherwise, I'm sure, out of the blue she
wouldn't have said, "Start my junior school."
- GUERARD
- Yes! Well, it sounds like you were really fortunate in that people
recognized particular talents that you had in many areas .
- HILLS
- Yes, which I didn't really even know I had, myself, I think. I was
incredibly lucky. You don't know how much-- You know, I might never have
gone-- All these things. So much in one's life is just being at the
right place at the right time. There are so many other people that you
see walking down the street who've never had that luck and what a
difference it makes to your life! You see it in your own children later.
You try and encourage them to take hold of opportunities and not let
them slide by, if you possibly can. One's good fortune is unbelievable
[pause] and I just loved teaching. I was a little surprised, sometimes,
when I was teaching repertoire class that I got some sideways looks from
some of the students who-- It was only afterwards I realized, as usual,
that they were a lot older than I was. [laughs] I'm surprised that some
of the parents of the children didn't look sideways at somebody as young
as me teaching their children at this prestigious place where they'd had
to audition to go, there was this kid teaching them. Maybe I looked,
old. I don't know.
- GUERARD
- Well, it is an interesting phenomenon in the world of dance, and
especially in ballet, that you have to become this polished, finished
professional- -
- HILLS
- Very young.
- GUERARD
- At such an early age.
- HILLS
- You do, and people are always saying, "Didn't you miss your childhood?"
Who gives a-- Sorry. We're taping. Childhood was this joy of doing what
I wanted to do. What I could do. I didn't care about playing silly games
and giggling with other girls, you know? [The] last thing on my mind was
wanting to do that sort of-- I didn't miss anything. I had a lot more
than they had, so it's not a deprivation of any sort. And one learned
this wonderful discipline, of having your life completely to be
organized by yourself. I mean, you were going to a performance and in
later times, one made one's own costumes, you made sure they were clean,
you pressed them, you mended them, you packed them. You took everything
with you to the show, you packed it again afterwards and you brought it
home. You looked after it and you prepared it and got it ready for the
next show. That sort of degree of discipline lasts you through life. I
mean, my closets at home are-- Here are all the sweaters in color order,
here are all the shirts in color order, you know. And before I go to bed
at night, the table is laid for breakfast, and my clothes are all laid
out for the next morning. I couldn't live in any other way, because it
started off [during] really early childhood, doing that.
- GUERARD
- A lot of young people during the war had to sort of grow up fast--
- HILLS
- Oh, very fast. Yes.
- GUERARD
- And have jobs, anyway, but you were doing what you loved.
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes. They didn't have jobs, actually. Girls didn't, because girls
were called up into the force, also, so the girls older than me really
didn't think about a job because they knew they had to do their military
service first. I was right on the brink. I registered for service, but I
was never called because they stopped calling girls up. They went on
calling people up into forces after the war was over. I don't know if
they felt something else might break out. I really don't know why they
did, but they did. Stanley Holden, who is exactly my age-- Well, he's
six months older, but virtually the same age. He was called up after the
war and he did serve two years in the forces. But they didn't call the
girls up, so I missed it. And, you know, you went on planning your life
up to graduation from high school, presumably, into what you were going
to do . I know that there were girls at school who were planning to be
doctors and that sort of thing, and they went through school planning to
be doctors . Presumably, they were called up and then went and did their
doctor's training afterwards. I don't know because I didn't keep in
touch with any of them.
- GUERARD
- Did you have the sense at all, during the war, that it made the world of
dance-- That there were more opportunities in dance or less
opportunities?
- HILLS
- Well, Sadler's Wells Ballet toured a lot during the war and they took
ballet to small theater in towns where people would never have seen it
before, so there were a lot of new audiences being built. Our shows
[were] taken to the forces, also, and other people were doing the same
thing. It wasn't just us. Ballet Rambert did the same thing. She had a
very small ballet group, which toured, and she did shows in workers'
cafeterias and things like that, during their lunch hours, to bring
ballet to them. Because it was not terribly safe to be in London, the
dancers moved out and took their performances all over the place.
Anywhere where there was a stage, people would perform. And so once the
war was over, there were vast audiences who'd seen ballet and were
thrilled by it. I think because it was so absolutely different from war,
that it was an escape sort of art. Probably it was something that they
loved because it was so different from the noise and the deprivations
and everything else. We had wonderful audiences and I don't know if I
was aware of the opportunities that might or might not be available. I
don't think anybody who wants to be a dancer really considers whether
they'll ever get a job or not, you know .
- GUERARD
- Yes. [laughter] They have to go on anyway.
- HILLS
- They go on and they go on and the few of us are lucky, and the others go
on and do other things, I guess.
- GUERARD
- We're almost to the end of this tape.
- HILLS
- Are we? Do you think this is a good moment to stop?
- GUERARD
- Yes. Is it okay for you?
- HILLS
- Yes. Fine.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE I MARCH 21, 1997
- GUERARD
- Margaret, we left off at pretty much a turning point in the world as
well as in your life, in your career in ballet. The World War [II] has
come to an end and you sustained an injury, but have gone on to a
wonderful life of dance and have begun to teach for [the] Sadler's Wells
Ballet . MARGARET: That's right. At that time, the ballet school was
actually in the Sadler's Wells Theatre, in Islington, in London. The
theater was built on top of a well which was owned, originally, by Mr.
Sadler. There was supposed to be therapeutic water in this well and long
before the theater was built--I think in the time of the late 1800' s,
when [Joseph] Grimaldi was a clown and those sort of things were going
on- -he had gardens there where people went to [a] park sort of place,
where they went and drank the water out of the well. And, it was known,
of course, as Mr. Sadler's Wells.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness! So, it wasn't a theater at all . It was- -
- HILLS
- No, it wasn't. It was a sort of therapy place, where people went to get
cured of whatever they had by drinking this probably horrible water. The
theater was built in about 1921, I think. No, it must have been later
than that. Must have been '31. Just when the Sadler's Wells Ballet
started, the theater was new. They're about to pull it down, replace it
with something else now but for it's day, it was a very modern theater.
The outside looks very modern. In the back of the orchestra, there is a
trap door which leads down to the well and we used to occasionally sort
of be treated to somebody backstage start lifting the lid of the well
for us to peer down into absolute blackness. You couldn't see what was
there at all [laughter], but it was there.
- GUERARD
- The mystery of the well.
- HILLS
- Yes. That's right.
- GUERARD
- So they built the theater on top of the well, then?
- HILLS
- On top of it. Yes. I think probably somebody decided the waters really
weren't doing anybody any good at all, but left them marginally
available if somebody really insisted on having some. I guess they're
still there. So that's the reason it was called Sadler's Wells. It was a
nice theater. It's hard to remember how big the stage was, but it was
built so that the rehearsal rooms- -there were two rehearsal rooms; one
for the ballet and one for the opera- -were the same size as the stage,
which is a very great advantage when you're rehearsing. You've got the
space that you're going to dance in and you don't have to think, "We've
got more space or we've got less space on the stage," which is really
rather nice. The ballet studio had a floor which was-- I was told it was
resinated cork. It was strange to dance on at first, but once you got
used to it, it was fabulous. You could see the little grains of cork in
it and, presumably, the other part was the resin. [I've] never seen a
floor like it, before or since, but it was really quite good to dance
on.
- GUERARD
- Then did it give a little bit?
- HILLS
- Gave a little bit. Of course, not like the sprung floors we're used to
now, but it did give a little bit. Sometimes, if you-- We used to have
to darn the ends of our points shoes in order that the shoes would
retain the rosin. People look at darning on old pictures of pointe shoes
and think [that] they were darned so they didn't wear out. It wasn't so.
It was to make a bed for the rosin to go into. And if you happened to
have done your darning with rather course thread, [you] tended, in a
pirouette, to make a little circle in the cork, which was frowned upon.
[laughter] It was a nice room. When the opera were there, they were
rehearsing in the opera room. When they weren't there, we were allowed
to use the opera room for classes and rehearsals as well, but that was a
moving feast. So the whole schedule of the school and the company were
intertwined. School classes happened when the company weren't having
company class and rehearsals and things, so you weren't ever quite sure
which room you'd be in. It wasn't that you knew you'd be in this room at
a certain time. You might be-- As I said before, last time, you might be
in the foyer of the theater, which could be converted to a classroom
space. It was really rather exciting to have all the artists there,
running around backstage, either rehearsing or going to class, and
looking in at company classes. And for the students to look in at
company classes, they learned a tremendous amount by watching.
- GUERARD
- Oh, I'm sure.
- HILLS
- It was very exciting. When a big new ballet was being choreographed-
-for instance, when Frederick Ashton was choreographing Symphonic Variations--they covered the windows
of the door so that you couldn't look through. But, of course, somebody
managed to make a little hole in the curtain so that one could peer in.
I looked in quite a lot. I was more allowed to look than the other
people, you know, being faculty. It was wonderful to see him [Ashton]
working with those six dancers- -absolutely fascinating- -to the Cesar
Franck music. But it got somewhat tedious and people started to make
songs to it. You know [sings to the tune of the music] , "Get your hair
cut! Get your hair cut!" in one place, and, "Did it hurt ya? Did it hurt
ya? Of course it did! Of course it did!" [laughter] Very stupid, silly
things, but you'd get so bored with the music after a while.
- GUERARD
- Right, but the repetition is important for perfection.
- HILLS
- Oh, absolutely! Absolutely. Alec [Alexander] Grant, who was-- I think he
was in it originally, he sang the choreography for every ballet he was
ever in. It helped. It was his way of remembering it. Where the actual
names of the steps didn't fit, he'd put in adjectives to describe them
at the same time, so could sing the whole thing. It was quite clever and
funny, of course, in some places. But I think he still rehearses people
in some of the ballets he was in and he can still sing all the
choreography.
- GUERARD
- I guess that's his own form of notation.
- HILLS
- Yes, I think so. Yes. You know [sings], "Little balance, little
balance." [laughter] They'd laugh and he'd sing. Great character!
- GUERARD
- I think people are interested in knowing how dancers learn choreography,
how they keep it in their head, and I imagine there are many different
ways.
- HILLS
- I think we're all individual. When you're learning new choreography from
somebody who's actually choreographing at that time, they change their
mind a lot, so you have to decide-- Well, at least some of them change
their minds a lot. Kenneth MacMillan didn't. He just came and had it all
fixed in his mind. He knew exactly what he wanted. But other people play
with the dances and say, "Try this. Try that. Try the other." And in
doing that, you have to partly find out what is the most flowing and--
One uses the word comfortable, but it's not the right word for the
non-dancer to understand, but where the movement flowed well from one
step to the next, that's the one you would generally finish up with. And
at that stage, if you thought the choreographer had made a serious
mistake in making the choreography flow, you'd pretend you'd forgotten
it and say, "No, no. I think you said this!" to make it easier on the
body. Easier on the flow of movement. And sometimes you could get away
with it and sometimes not, of course. And in that circumstance, you
really wait until it's definitely set before you put it into long-term
memory. You sort of have a short-term memory and then a long-term
memory. With established choreography, I think it's probably really
triggered by the music. It is for me because I can hear ballet music on
my car radio and my body responds so that I have to turn it off because
I can't drive. It's just in the whole nervous -muscular system of the
body. The body knows. I mean, I may not even recognize which ballet it
is, but my body knows the choreography. And then I have to try and
think, "What was I wearing?" And then I can think which ballet it is, so
it's definitely the music-muscular relationship, as far as I'm
concerned. But other people, I don't know how they work it. And of
course, now there's the notation- -the Laban Notation and Benesh
Choreology- -that means that it is written down, and how people work
when they've been taught something from that, whether they see the
notation in their minds and translate that into movement, I have no
idea. I didn't learn that. I was partially responsible for bringing
Benesh Notation into the company, but I never learned it.
- GUERARD
- Then, how did you bring it--?
- HILLS
- Well, this is jumping years ahead, but Joan Benesh was married to Rudolf
Benesh and together they worked out this system of notation. She was a
student in the school and knew all the ballets, and nobody could quite
understand how. And then she went into the company and she could do all
the ballets. And only when the ballet mistress, Mary Skeaping, said,
"You know, you're incredible. How do you know all these?" She said,
"Well, my husband and I have written them all down in notation."
- GUERARD
- But she had to then translate it from that notation to her body.
- HILLS
- Well, she'd done it the other way around in her case, because she'd seen
it and gone home and written it down. When you read back from
choreology, then you have to do it the other way. And, I was then senior
ballet mistress of the school and said, "You know, this is a great idea.
I think the students ought to learn how to do this."
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- So then it was brought into the curriculum of the school . That was in
1956 and we're back in ‘45, so we have jumped ahead a little bit here,
but one can't help it when it comes up.
- GUERARD
- Right, right. Well, I think that you mentioned that you had your own way
of remembering ballets at that time .
- HILLS
- Yes, I did. I could just see them and remember them, but I had my own
way of writing them down, which I did when I had to teach them and I had
to teach them to other teachers from other countries at times. And I
wanted to be absolutely sure that I didn't get anything wrong and that I
didn't say one thing in the morning and another thing in the afternoon,
so I just wrote them out in longhand in a way that has become accepted,
I think, because I did so many different things. It's become an accepted
way of writing things down in longhand for people who don't understand
the other notation. That was in 1947 when we first started what was
called a summer school for-- Wait, I should wait till we've got to the
building where that happened. I think this is a little too soon.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Well, we were at 1946, I believe.
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- And you were beginning to teach the junior company and--
- HILLS
- Not the junior company. It was the juniors in school who came to the
theater after they'd finished their ordinary education. And what you
should realize is that Ninette de Valois was planning to open a big
school with education and everything else and she was wanting to get a
nucleus of young dancers to be in that school when it opened. And so we
had what were called junior associates and they came, depending on the
level they were at- -from complete beginners at age 10 through
teenagers- -into three different classes. I really don't remember at
this time. Some of them came twice a week, some three times and some
came five times to class, after school. And some of them, many of them,
indeed did go on when we opened the big school . They formed a nice
nucleus and I was the teacher of that group.
- GUERARD
- So, it started with ten-year-olds.
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- That's quite a few years before they're ready to complete high school
and dance full time.
- HILLS
- Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Yes, they came after school from their day school and
danced for an hour or an hour and a half and then went home. And they
did quite long journeys, but in those days it was perfectly safe for
young children to go on buses and on the underground by themselves. At
ten it didn't worry anybody. It was absolutely safe. When I was little
and I would go into town on the bus when I was seven by myself [I'd] go
to a cafe and have tea by myself. Things have changed so much as far as
child safety is concerned. It's really hard to comprehend that it was
okay for those children to be there without their parents. It ' s a very
different situation. I taught them and as I said, I taught repertoire
and one or two other things to the older people. But Ninette de Valois,
again, planning her school, wanted to have a school syllabus worked out
before we opened and she wanted it to be a mixture of the Danish and the
French and the Italian and the Russian. She wanted to take what she felt
was best of those methods to be used to produce an English school
[pause], an English method, an English-- Well, she called it an English
school, the school being in quotes, I would say. And she brought
together dancers from those different disciplines and asked them to say
what they thought was best about their method and then they would all
argue and she, being the great dictator that she was, is, decided what
we would teach in the school, and she asked me to be her [pause]
secretary, I suppose, to write up the conclusions of these meetings.
- GUERARD
- Oh goodness. This was back in ‘46?
- HILLS
- '46, yes. I was just coming up-- It was early ‘46 so I was seventeen. So
I was in this incredibly privileged position of hearing great dancers
expressing their opinions about their training, about what they felt was
essential in the method they'd been taught in and hearing people talking
about the classes they'd been to with [Enrico] Cecchetti, who was a
famous teacher of the Diaghilev ballet [Ballets Russes] . And they would
say, "No, no, no. Cecchetti always said to me, 'such and such.'" And the
other one would say, "No, no, no. Cecchetti always said to me--. You're
quite wrong. He always said to me, 'so and so.'" And I would sit back
and think, "He must have been a very good teacher because he was saying
different things to different bodies." And I would look at these
middle-aged ladies and think, "But you see, I can understand. You're a
different shape from this one and so the correction he gave to you would
necessarily be different." He must have been a very, very good teacher.
Of course, they were famous dancers and so he would have spent special
attention on them, no doubt, rather than on-- People who had been in the
corps de ballet probably didn't get as much attention. But, it was
really most illuminating because I wasn't part of the argument.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- I was going to write down what they finally decided was going to be
taught in the school. And again, I used my method of writing things out,
dance out. And again, that got established because that was printed.
- GUERARD
- Oh it was?
- HILLS
- Yes. To be given to the teachers in the school. And also to any visiting
teachers from other countries. They got a copy. You've never been able
to buy it anywhere. It's sort of the sacred bible of The Royal Ballet
now. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes. So, what a privileged position to be in as a-- You were teaching
the young students and at the same time getting insight as a teacher.
- HILLS
- Yes. Absolutely. And applying each day what had been decided, teaching
it on the children, seeing if it worked and occasionally, if it didn't
seem to be being productive, going back to the meeting and saying,
"Could we go back over this decision we made because I tried it out on
the children and it doesn't seem to work?" So, that was a fascinating
thing to be doing, too.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Were these teachers who gathered together living in England at the
time or were they from other countries?
- HILLS
- Yes. They weren't all there at the same time, but there were-- There was
Tamara Karsavina and Lydia Lopokova, Mary Skeaping, a man called Harold
Turner, another one called Claude Newman, Vera Volkova from Russia who'd
studied with [Agrippina] Vaganova, Ursula Moreton who'd been in the
Diaghilev ballet as a character dancer and learned with Cecchetti. There
were Peggy Van Praagh, who was a Cecchetti- trained dancer though she
hadn't been in the Diaghilev ballet company. All-- Oh, Ailne Phillips
was another one. They were teachers of the company. I can't think of
anybody else now. There must have been others, but those come to mind.
Very famous lot of people .
- GUERARD
- And were they also teaching at that same time?
- HILLS
- Vera Volkova was teaching at that time and so was Ailne Phillips,
teaching company class and the seniors in the school. And as far as I
remember, those were the only ones who were teaching regularly. We'd
have Jean Bedells come from the company also to teach repertoire. She
taught it before I took it over. And Ursula Moreton would come and teach
ballet pantomime. And Harold Turner. He was still in [the] forces, but
when he was on leave, he'd come teach pas de deux. So, it was a floating
population of teachers as well as the nucleus of myself and Ailne
Phillips and Vera Volkova.
- GUERARD
- Did you feel that all of the teachers were working toward building an
English form of dance?
- HILLS
- No, they didn't want to be. They were doing it as, I suppose, a favor to
Ninette de Valois because she'd asked them to, but I don't think they
personally had any intention of following her curriculum when it was
worked out .
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- And they didn't. I think they were old enough to have established their
own feeling of the way they liked to teach and so would not be likely to
change. Ailne Phillips did because she'd been trained by Ninette de
Valois in the first place from her youth. She was one of the original
people who'd been in Ninette de Valois' school before it became part of
the Old Vic [Theatre] and then Sadler's Wells [Ballet], so she was a
follower of Ninette de Valois, in any case.
- GUERARD
- So, was she one of the younger ones of the group, then?
- HILLS
- Yes, yes. To me she looked old, of course. [laughter] In retrospect, she
would now be about-- If she were still alive, I presume she'd be about
eighty-eight or something like that now. So [at] that time, fifty years
ago, [she would have been in her] thirties. She looked old to me at
seventeen, as everybody did, needless to say. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Other than your ten-year-old students.
- HILLS
- Yes. To them, I must have looked old.
- GUERARD
- At that time, were you teaching the younger students the repertoire of
the company?
- HILLS
- Oh, no. The young ones just did ballet classes. They were learning the
steps. If one goes through the level system of the school at that time,
there were the three classes of junior associates who were all under
sixteen; ten to sixteen. And then there were two classes above that of
sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds, I think. Class B and Class A, Senior
School. So, there were five levels going on at that time. The older ones
met during the day and the children [met] after school. And I was
teaching repertoire to the-- Mostly to the B class. I was teaching corps
de ballet and an artist from the company would come in and teach the
variations to the A class. And of course, I was still taking class
myself, either in company class or in A class, which ever fitted in with
my schedule best.
- GUERARD
- Were you taking classes daily?
- HILLS
- Oh, yes. Every day. Yes.
- GUERARD
- And was part of your training also-- Did it also include how to teach
the classes?
- HILLS
- No. It was left really to me.
- GUERARD
- Was it really?
- HILLS
- Yes, it was. Nobody gave me any advice of any sort. Just threw me in
there and sort of, "Get on with on it." Except, of course, that I was
going to all these meetings and that was probably my training. But they
didn't tell me how to-- You know, they'd said, "Teach demi-plies now,"
and so on, but they didn't teach me how to teach demi-plies, so to
speak. That, I evolved for myself. I really enjoyed it very much, I must
say. I loved it. I got a tremendous joy from enabling other people to do
it. Something I had no idea I would enjoy at all when I couldn't really
perform anymore. It wouldn't have entered my head that I would enjoy it
as I did. It's wonderful .
- GUERARD
- Sometimes fine things come out of accidents.
- HILLS
- Yes! Yes. It was great. At the same time- -you know, I was telling you
Ninette de Valois was building up towards opening the school --she was
also preparing the company which had been performing at Sadler's Wells
[Theatre] to move to The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in February,
1946.
- GUERARD
- Now, how did that come about? Did the Sadler's Wells just get too small
or what happened?
- HILLS
- Well, it was too small for her- -for Ninette de Valois '--big ideas.
[laughs] But, I mean, she was an incredible woman. In these two years
between 1945 and 1947, she arranged for the school to move to new
premises, the day school as well as the dancing school, so they had all
their education there as well. She moved the company from Sadler's Wells
Theatre to The Royal Opera House Covent Garden, and formed another
company to stay at the Sadler's Wells Theatre.
- GUERARD
- And what was that company?
- HILLS
- That was called the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet.
- GUERARD
- And did some of the originals from Sadler's Wells stay there to teach
there?
- HILLS
- A few, but most of them moved to The Royal Opera House. A few stayed as
a nucleus for the company and, of course, masses more dancers who had
never been in the school at all, were brought in from all over the place
because it had to be a big company. [The] Sleeping Beauty was the first performance, which
was on February 20, 1946.
- GUERARD
- I'm sorry. The Sleeping Beauty was the first
performance of--?
- HILLS
- At Covent Garden.
- GUERARD
- At Covent Garden, not for Sadler's Wells Theatre.
- HILLS
- No, Sadler's Wells Theatre didn't open until-- I think it was '47, so
there was a little gap between when there wasn't a company at Sadler's
Wells but there was one at Covent Garden.
- GUERARD
- Okay. Maybe we can come back to them again.
- HILLS
- Yes. And at that time, for the opening night, I was to have been just
walking on as one of the court ladies. The court ladies were all
students and I was to have walked on with them as their sort of
chaperone, pusher-abouter or making sure they were all on and that sort
of thing. And in fact, I was actually going to have knee surgery the day
after the opening. And so, I was in the wings. I wasn't actually on the
stage, but it counted when it came back to going to the gala, fifty
years later, having been on the stage- -even on the side- -at that time.
So, that was a very, very exciting time and the company was increased--
I really don't know the numbers. I can't remember. But in that program
which you have there- -and you can do some homework for me on that --it
has the artists of the companies in 1946, but it's got the old program
in there, I think. To have that, suddenly, that enormous number of
dancers-- I worked it out. There must have been, I think, forty students
on, as well as the company .
- GUERARD
- Oh my goodness!
- HILLS
- It was huge. And there were wonderful new sets designed by Oliver Messel
and the costumes were made of nylon, which was an absolutely new fabric
which nobody had ever made costumes of before.
- GUERARD
- Right after the war.
- HILLS
- Yes. And the colors, of course, that nylon dyed to- -exquisite colors
that one hadn't been able to get before. And they were light. They
weren't heavy. The court ladies' costumes, being made with this much
lighter fabric, were wonderful to wear. [The] only trouble was that
nylon does retain odor. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes, it doesn't breathe very well.
- HILLS
- No. And that, of course, people didn't know when the costumes were first
designed. It wasn't pleasant. [laughter]
- HILLS
- But the designs were beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. And the sets were
beautiful. I regret their passing. The company, many years later, sold
the designs to the National Ballet of Canada and they've had other
designs since. And I hate the present ones with a vengeance. [I] really
dislike them intensely. What was beautiful is, to my eyes, now ugly.
- HILLS
- You know, these things-- Everything changes.
- GUERARD
- Yes. But, getting back to the move to Covent Garden- -
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Then, the company was expanded in number because of the--?
- HILLS
- The bigger stage. The stage is twice the size or probably four times the
size of Sadler's Wells stage, so you need many more dancers on it for it
to look dressed with people.
- GUERARD
- Right. And did that also attract more students to the school?
- HILLS
- Yes. The school actually moved to-- It was a church hall, a big church
hall, in Hampstead, in London. And we had all our classes there, which
meant we were not in conflict for space with the company. The company
still began rehearsing at Sadler's Wells Theatre because there wasn't a
rehearsal room at that time at The Royal Opera House. And they also, the
company, rented space in a-- I don't know what it was called. It was a
place where the military had practiced marching and things like that.
And they took a floor; a wooden floor that had been the ballroom floor
when Covent Garden was a ballroom. They took that and put it down in
this military establishment and rehearsed there. A place in London
called Mornington Crescent, which only a very few underground trains
stopped at, so you had to make sure you got on one that actually stopped
there, otherwise it went past it and came back and still went past it
and you tried again [laughter] until you got on one that actually
stopped there.
- GUERARD
- Sort of like the express.
- HILLS
- Yes, exactly. Yes, yes. So, we were then, at that moment, scattered in
various places all over London till we sort of came together again. So
it meant a lot of commuting, since I taught the seniors at the place in
Hampstead and the juniors were still at Sadler's Wells Theatre in the
evening. I had to to-and-fro from one to the other quite a lot .
- GUERARD
- So now you're teaching both age groups.
- HILLS
- Yes. Well, I did teach the older ones, you know, sometimes. I wasn't
their regular teacher, but I seemed to do quite a lot with them one way
or another, either repertoire or the character dance teacher didn't show
up so I would go and teach them character. I was the general dog's body,
I think. [laughs] If somebody couldn't be there, send Margaret, you know
[laughter], which was a tremendous advantage, really, to learn on the
spot how to do all those sort of things.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- Because I'd learned character in a hurry because the school I'd been at
before I went-- As a short time student at Sadler's Wells, I had done no
character dancing at all.
- GUERARD
- And you learned character dancing at Sadler's Wells?
- HILLS
- Yes. At Sadler's Wells, in sort of three weeks flat, you know. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Was that a special set of courses?
- HILLS
- Yes. You do a special barre in character shoes and you learn how to
mazurka. You learn how to do a czardas. You learn how to do the
character cabrioles and character bourrées and character retirés.
They're all different. And the men, of course, have a much tougher time
because they do those things going right down on their knees and coming
up with the high kicks up. You know, those things. Girls don't do that
so it's not quite as hard to teach a girl's character classes as a man's
character classes. I enjoyed doing that! It was fun. Quite different.
- GUERARD
- Were there a lot of ballets included in the repertoire of the Sadler's
Wells that were character dances?
- HILLS
- Well, all the [Marius] Petipa ballets- -Sleeping
Beauty and Swan Lake- -all have
character dances in them. They have czardas and mazurkas. And Coppélia, which is not a Petipa ballet, but that
also has, you know [sings], Ya ta da bum ba da dum, ba dum ba dum.
That's a character number in the mazurka from Coppélia. Everybody knows that music. I can't sing so forgive
me, tape. [laughter] You might have a rough idea of what I'm talking
about. So, it was a necessary part of training to be able to do that .
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- The rhythms are so different.
- GUERARD
- Was there a difference in the types of ballets that were done at the
Sadler's Wells Ballet and the Sadler's Wells Ballet Theatre?
- HILLS
- Yes, very different. Once the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet was started,
they had special choreography by young, new choreographers. They did a
lot of new ballets, some of which survived, some didn't. That was where
John Cranko, the famous choreographer, started doing choreography. He
choreographed for them. Now, the woman called Andree--and I stress woman
because you wouldn't know by her name, Andrée Howard- -she had been a
dancer with Marie Rambert, her little company, and she did some
choreography. Ninette de Valois did some choreography, herself. A man
called Alfred Rodriguez did some. Gradually, they built up a big
repertoire of ballets which required smaller space and fewer people. And
the ones that would translate to the bigger stage were taken to Covent
Garden. At that time, I don't think many ballets were duplicated in the
two companies, apart from, perhaps, Coppélia.
That was probably done by both.
- GUERARD
- But did it have something to do with-- You said they were young, new
choreographers. Did it have something to do with the more modern type of
choreography as opposed to the more classical?
- HILLS
- Not what you call modern choreography now. No, they were all classical
ballets, classically using ballet steps with no-- The modern dance was
going on in Germany, a bit. Nothing of that sort was going on in England
whatsoever. [They] hadn't seen any of it or anything, so there were no
barefoot ballets or anything like that at all. Things changed a lot
after a while. Even a ballet called Khadra,
which was, I think was based on-- It was a sort of cross between
Japanese and Egyptian. It's rather odd, but that was done on pointe,
too. It's what people expected to see. Now they might think it was
strange, but then, it was perfectly acceptable. I don't really know the
origins of that, but they wore slightly Japanese- looking costumes but
in other places looked like some of the Egyptian paintings on monuments
and things in Egypt. So it was a hodgepodge, perhaps. It was pretty.
- GUERARD
- It sounds like it's very pretty.
- HILLS
- Yes, it was. So, we got to '47 and the second company was started. Lots
of dancers came from South Africa and Rhodesia.
- GUERARD
- Why is that?
- HILLS
- Well, there had been some very good schools in South Africa and Rhodesia
and Australia. You see, those countries hadn't been affected by the
Second World War at all. They'd been well-fed, as we had not [pause] and
well- trained. There were some very good teachers there. And they wanted
the opportunity to dance in a famous place. And so they came to the
school, stayed, just as I had, just long enough to have the style
imprinted on them, and then they went into one or other of the
companies. Most of them went into the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet to
start with, but a few went straight to Covent Garden. The ones who went
straight to Covent Garden were Rowena Jackson from New Zealand, Dorothea
Zaymes from South Africa, Nadia Nerina--who became a very, very famous
ballerina- -from South Africa. She went straight into the first company
and in fact she, in fact, had the part of the nurse in the prologue,
which I should have been doing, had I not been going to hospital the
next day. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- So, her first appearance was just as a nurse in that company. She'd only
just got into the company. So, we were talking about it when we met
again a few-- Eighteen months ago.
- GUERARD
- Did this create any kind of an exchange between-- Were there students
from Sadler's Wells who then became interested in going to Rhodesia
or--?
- HILLS
- No, because there weren't any ballet companies there. They trained
dancers and they had a lot of competitions and it was much more like
gymnastics competition or a skating competition, as far as I-- I never
went, so I don't know, but the way they talked made it sound as though
it was a very competitive, but not a performing art that they studied.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- And they came to England to be performers. Later on, Australia had its
own ballet company and Canada had its own ballet company, but as far as
I know, Rhodesia and South Africa still don't. I've never heard of one.
Maybe I'm quite wrong and somebody will answer this, listening to this
tape, and say, "Yes they do!" Forgive me if that's so. [laughter] I
don't know of them. No, they were very good dancers. And we had a boy
from Spain who'd been all tied up during the Spanish Civil War or born
during the Spanish Civil War- -he came to the school- -called Pirmin
Aldabaldatrecu .
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness!
- HILLS
- And we used to call him "half a pound of treacle," [British term for
molasses.] which was the nearest thing we could get to Aldabaldatrecu.
[Guerard laughs] I gave him private lessons to start with and he was a
very, very quick learner. And within six months he was in the company,
from knowing nothing. He'd done Basque dancing and Spanish dancing, but
not ballet. In the programs, you will see him. He cut his last name down
to Trecu. Pirmin Trecu was the name he used. He became a very well known
dancer . And another person who came about the same time and shared
Pirmin 's private lessons, a man- -a boy- -called David Gill. And he
went into the company for a little while, decided it wasn't, ultimately,
for him, and he is now a very famous restorer of ancient movies. You
sometimes see a reconstruction of an ancient silent movie and you'll see
in the credits David Gill and Kevin Brownlow.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- And he is one of my original students. And, he is also now a great
friend of somebody you know, Julie May, who takes class. Her husband is
in that field and I met David again at their house here in Los Angeles,
having not seen him for years and years and years and years and years.
So, it's a very, very small world.
- GUERARD
- It sure is! I guess there are a few dancers who do go on to do other
things in their lives.
- HILLS
- Oh, yes! Sometimes in a related field. There is a dancer called Margaret
Dale who was a soloist in the Sadler's Wells company- -the part that
moved to Covent Garden- -and she became a television producer and
director mostly working with dance. She was brilliant at shooting things
from the right angle for the television audience to see it because, of
course, she knew exactly what people wanted to see, what should be seen
at various times.
- GUERARD
- Yes. It 's very difficult.
- HILLS
- Yes. She was really very good.
- GUERARD
- People are working very diligently right now on trying to learn how to
effectively videotape dance, as well .
- HILLS
- Yes! Yes. Yes, because it can be a mess, particularly if they start
trying for color effects on things. It can become a work of art in
itself, but as a viewer's view of dance on the stage, it's often very
distorted. But if you think of it as an entirely different art form,
then you add the two together and it makes a different thing.
- GUERARD
- Yes, and decisions have to made as to whether you ' re taping something
in order to hand the choreography down, as you would [with] notation, or
whether it is a work of art...
- HILLS
- Yes. The two things are quite different. Another person who was--this is
a switch back--in the school at that time, was John Cranko, who came
from South Africa and was actually not a very good dancer, but very,
very much wanted to be a choreographer, to the extent that when Massine
(Léonide Massine, who was a choreographer from [Serge] Diaghilev's time)
came to mount [La] Boutique
Fantasque and The Three-Cornered Hat on
the company- - Massine was doing a ballet to Haydn's Clock Symphony, a new one, and John Cranko desperately wanted
to be in it so that he could see Massine actually choreographing. And he
really, technically, wasn't good enough and nobody who was not in the
ballet was allowed to watch rehearsals. But Massine was very, very kind
to John. He said, "I will find you a part which will be okay. Your legs
can be the pendulum inside the clock as the clock ticks. That way, there
is no reason you can't be in watching my rehearsals." [Guerard laughs]
- GUERARD
- From inside the clock.
- HILLS
- From inside the clock. So poor John Cranko was there for all the
rehearsals, learned how Massine choreographed and never saw the ballet
from the front because his legs swung from side to side each time the
clock ticks in the Haydn symphony, but his face and body were behind the
clock face. So he couldn't actually see the performance, poor man. But,
you know, he was so absolutely bent on becoming a choreographer. Like me
wanting to learn from teachers, he wanted to learn from Massine. It
obviously served him very well. He became a very famous choreographer.
At that time, we would not have known, really, that Kenneth MacMillan
was going to turn into a choreographer. We had a little choreographic
group- -this was in 1945- -and everybody messed around with trying to do
a little bit of choreography, MacMillan amongst them. But, nothing came
of it. We didn't do any performances or anything. And then sometime
later, suddenly MacMillan turned into this incredible choreographer. But
he was a brilliant dancer. Absolutely brilliant. Gorgeous legs and feet.
One of the few really great choreographers who was also a great dancer,
himself. So he got his performing career in first before he started
choreographing, in earnest. Where do we go? To the school, I think
probably, and how it finally moved. I wasn't involved in looking for the
premises for the school .
- GUERARD
- No .
- HILLS
- But suddenly, we were told that they had bought a building in Baron's
Court in London. This building [was] a big, big, red brick building,
which I would guess was built in the early 1800' s and it had been used
during the war as a furniture repository. Now that may sound odd, but
people who evacuated themselves had nowhere to put their-- It's like a
rent space for storing stuff, a self- storage space. It had been used
for storing furniture for people who left London and closed their homes
down. It must have looked very weird, but, of course, it had a lot of
very big rooms in it. I don't know what it had been built for
originally. [It's] very hard to say because it had huge rooms that we
used for studios. One had a stage at one end and two of them had
balconies up above. So, whether they had been for military things or-- I
have no idea. Only at this moment has it occurred to me to wonder what
it was built for originally. I have no idea. [The structure was
originally built for the Froebel Educational Institute, functioning as
its teacher-training facility.] [Margaret Graham Hills added the above
bracketed section during her review of the transcript.]
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE II MARCH 21, 1997
- GUERARD
- Margaret, when the tape ended on the other side, you were saying [that]
you weren't quite sure what it was originally built for--?
- HILLS
- Oh, I don't suppose it matters to anybody anymore. Anyway, the company
bought this big building. And it had two big studios with balconies, and
another smaller studio and a playground area for the children to play in
and lots of rooms for schoolrooms. And we auditioned children. Not too
many showed up. I think the word hadn't got around sufficiently, and so
we took some children whom we regretted later. Even Arnold Haskell, in
one of his books, says that with hindsight, it would probably have been
better to start off with fewer and more talented rather than trying to
fill it up. But, of course, you know, they needed the money from people.
It was quite necessary.
- GUERARD
- Now, excuse me, this was the beginning of the time when children would
come full-time?
- HILLS
- Full-time.
- GUERARD
- And they would get their regular school training there and their
dancing?
- HILLS
- Yes. They came at 9:00 and school finished, I think, 4:00 or 4:30.
During the course of the day, they would have-- I suppose where you
would have p.e. or games and stuff in ordinary school, they'd have their
dancing classes. And the rest of the day, they were studying biology and
English and French and all the other normal stuff .
- GUERARD
- But they lived at home?
- HILLS
- They lived at home at this time. Yes. One day, they hoped to open a
boarding school, but these children lived at home. And they came quite
long distances by train. They had a school uniform which was designed by
a lady called Matilda Etches, which was a green skirt with a bib front.
Darkish green skirt with a bib front and a sort of aqua shirt
underneath, a green overcoat and a green-- It's not exactly a beret,
it's more like a sailor hat. It was a sort of a cross between a sailor
hat and a beret, in green, which they perched on top of their heads and,
of course, walked with very long necks everywhere that they were going.
We could pick them out a mile away. And the education head teacher at
that time- -she didn't survive with us very long- -insisted that
wherever these children met the faculty, they had to curtsy.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my!
- HILLS
- And you'd be walking along the underground train platform and suddenly
this little apparition in green would bob a curtsy at you as you walked
by and you'd wished the floor would open and swallow you up because you
really didn't want to see this happen, you know. That was abolished very
quickly. We really didn't like it, but she thought it was wonderful.
Unfortunately, she turned out-- And I needn't mention names, but she
turned out to be a real ballet groupie. She was a well-educated woman
and had all the qualifications for being a head teacher, but she would
go off into the gallery at Covent Garden and scream her head off in
delight at some of the performances, which, you know, if you're part of
the organization, you don't do that. [laughter] And so, after a while,
she was replaced by somebody else who was already on the faculty as a
biology teacher. [Leila McCutcheon] She was great. [She] had her head
screwed on the right way and had no sort of visions of screaming and
clapping and yelling and getting autographs at the stage door [laughs] ,
which the first one had, so things changed a little bit quite quickly
after that. And there was a lady who was employed as bursar of the
school and she had to furnish it with rosin and plates and desks and all
the other things. She had been recruited because she had done a very
similar job at a big boys' school called St. Paul's School, which is
right across the street from where the Sadler's Wells was. And she'd
been doing it during wartime, filling the job for a man who was in the
forces . So, of course, when the war was over, he came back and she
didn't have a job, and it was perfect for her. Also, it turned out to be
perfect for me because she turned out later to become my mother-in-law.
[laughs]
- GUERARD
- Oh my goodness!
- HILLS
- Her name was Kathleen Hills and her husband, Frederick Hills, had been a
mathematics master at the school and Kathleen was his second wife. My
husband's mother had died when he was four. Kathleen had brought him up
from the age of seven. And through her inviting me, very shortly after
we opened the school, to go watch a television show of Les Sylphides-- Very few people had televisions
at that time. They had theirs in 1937, when television first started in
England. It started there a lot earlier than it started here . There had
been no television shows from 1939 to '45 but, of course, they came on
again in 1945 and they had their television set from 1937. And so, I had
this wonderful, rare opportunity of going to her apartment and watching
ballet on television for the-- Got to see, really, television, in my
case, for the very first time.
- GUERARD
- Who was dancing?
- HILLS
- Oh, I don't remember. Haven't the faintest idea! [laughs] I was just so
thrilled to see these people on this little box, you know. And their
son, Brian, came down from Manchester to visit that weekend and it's
been a long story since that week. We married in 1951, and we still are.
- GUERARD
- Oh my goodness!
- HILLS
- So it's very momentous for me.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- But she had no idea. She'd never seen a ballet in her life, either.
Probably the first one she saw was that [which] ran on television that
night and she couldn't even-- She was a musician, had been originally a
pianist and had understood that rosin came in [a] very small box which
you rubbed up and down a violin string or a violin bow. And being asked
to buy fifty pounds of rosin came as somewhat a surprise to her.
[laughter] She couldn't imagine what we would do with fifty pounds of
rosin. Everything was difficult to get. She talked to me a lot about it
afterwards. 1 didn't know at the time, she had to go hunting for plates
and getting food. You had to have permits to get food for the children
for lunch. All sorts of things. She had to find staff to cook and staff
to clean and a janitor who had a small apartment in the building to live
in with his wife. There was a tremendous amount of stuff going on. And
they had to appoint a director. Ninette de Valois, of course, was
director of the ballet, but they wanted a director of the whole thing.
And there was a famous writer [and] ballet critic, called Arnold
Haskell, who'd written many books about ballet and he was appointed
director and was a very, very good one. He was excellent because he knew
everybody. He had, in Paris, taken very few ballet classes himself, so
knew enough to know what it was about .
- GUERARD
- Now, how many students, about, were there in a class?
- HILLS
- I'm trying to think. There were five education levels which were divided
into three different ballet levels and there were about twenty-five in
each class, so I would say as a guess, sixty. No boys at that time,
because we didn't have a boys' teacher.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- Boys came three or four months later. We opened in September and boys
came in January. It was just a time lag, but a short time.
- GUERARD
- Remind me of the year there.
- HILLS
- 1947.
- GUERARD
- Okay .
- HILLS
- Yes, it was in September '47, so the boys came [in] January '48. And, of
course, there were the education teachers. Because normally in England--
The names are different so it's a little hard to sort it out, but if one
imagines that junior high starts at eleven, most of the children were
eleven up. But we chose to take them at ten, so they had to have an
elementary school teacher for that little group, of ten- to
eleven-year-olds. And they were separate and very special and thought
themselves super to be there at ten when everybody else was eleven. So,
that's a nice little nucleus of ten-year-olds. Some of them had never
done any dancing at all before.
- GUERARD
- Oh, really?
- HILLS
- They were auditioned by their shape and not by their dancing ability.
- GUERARD
- How was that done?
- HILLS
- You'd just look at a child. I mean, I still see children walking along
the street and think, "Ah, I wish I could get hold of that one and teach
it." And some of them were ones that I'd had as junior associates at the
Sadler's Wells Theatre, so they'd done some. Then most of them went into
the second class. Even though they were only ten, they danced with the
eleven- and twelve-year-olds. There were some very good children amongst
all of them and some whose parents were wealthy and had a little clout,
you know. These things happen when something starts anew. We had the
daughter of the Queen's surgeon, who was [a] tubby, sweet little girl,
but not a dancer. And another one whose mother was-- I can't remember
her first name. Liza Danielli, I think it was, an opera singer in the
opera company whose father was a very big cheese with Lucien LeLong
perfume.
- GUERARD
- Who was that?
- HILLS
- His name was Johnson. I can't remember the little girl's first name,
[Susan][ Margaret Graham Hills added the above bracketed section during
her review of the transcript.] but his name was Johnson. And I remember
it so well because the first Christmas he gave me- -or the little girl
ostensibly gave me- -a box of all the different Lucien LeLong perfumes.
Not eau de toilette, not toilet water, real perfume. It was wonderful
[laughs] to have this little girl who, unfortunately, wasn't talented.
And another talented little girl we had became very well known; Juliette
Mills, the actress.
- GUERARD
- Oh, yes!
- HILLS
- She was one of our early ones and I had a tremendous crush on her
father, who was an actor called John Mills. When I actually got to shake
his hand, I didn't want to wash that hand for ages and ages, [laughter]
Very star struck as far as he was concerned.
- GUERARD
- Yes .
- HILLS
- It was fun. Years later, I met her. I was waiting for my husband to come
off an aircraft from London and saw Juliette Mills standing there and
sort of walked towards her, and she said, "Don't I know from you from
somewhere?" And, I said, "Yes you do." She was waiting for her sister,
Hayley [Mills] , to come off the plane. My husband came off and he
started to say, "Do you know who I sat next to?" And I said, "Do you
know who I just met? Meet Juliette Mills." He said, "[You] steal my
thunder all the time. I sat next to Jack Palance on the plane going
back." [laughter] So we were name-dropping to each other there for a
bit. Really, the school went very, very well. We had two teachers who
were sort of on approval, so to speak. We didn't know a great deal about
either of their teaching abilities. One was Vera Savina, who had been
Leonide Massine's-- One of Leonide Massine's wives. I don't know which
or in what sequence. And another lady whose stage name had been [pause]
Vera Fredova . And she had danced with [Anna] Pavlova's company and had
come to United States in about 1918, I think, as a very young member of
Pavlova's company, and had actually stayed in the United States and
taught in Los Angeles for many, many years with a man she danced with,
called Theodore Kosloff. And they'd had a school in Los Angeles and she
had stayed in Los Angeles from, I suppose about 1920 to [1936] , when
she had to go back to England because her father died. She had to deal
with his estate. And she hadn't danced at all for a long time. You'll
see why this is pertinent in a while. She had joined the Red Cross
during the Second World War and been a nurse in the Red Cross. And then
she'd also then spent some time writing up the notes of a man who
studied bugs, all over England. And then when the war finished, she
decided she really should get back into shape and learn to get back to
teaching. And she decided--I think she was fifty--to take her Royal
Academy of Dancing examinations so she could have the qualifications to
teach in England. And she did. And she, I believe, took her Advanced RAD
[Royal Academy of Dancing examination] on her fifty-second birthday or
something like this.
- GUERARD
- Wow !
- HILLS
- And she was the other teacher who was on approval, so to speak, whether
it would be Vera Savina or the lady who we then started to call Winifred
Edwards. She changed her English name to Vera Fredova to be in Pavlova's
company, but she decide to switch back to her English name, which was
much easier for us. And Winifred Edwards, who's the one who was kept on,
was an incredible technician. Right on until in her eighties, she could
still dance beautifully. By then, we were living in Los Angeles, where
she'd come from and she wrote to me when she was ninety and said-- She
used to do her barre every morning. She said, "I find ronds de jambe á
terre a little difficult because I now have a slight bow in my left leg
and so I'm a little shorter on one side than the other. Ronds de jambe á
terre are very difficult, dear."
- GUERARD
- Oh my goodness!
- HILLS
- Can you imagine?
- GUERARD
- She just did barre by herself to the music in her home?
- HILLS
- Yes. I don't even know if she had a record of music or whether she just
sang to herself because I never saw her do it. She just would tell me
she did. She was obviously in beautiful shape.
- GUERARD
- Wow! Good for her.
- HILLS
- In 1989--in February, 1989- -Kathleen Hills, who was my husband's
stepmother and my mother-in-law died, and we had to go back to England
for her funeral . And the day of her funeral we opened the paper and
found that Winifred Edwards had died the same day.
- GUERARD
- Oh my!
- HILLS
- These two people who'd been there together- - Actually, I think Winifred
Edwards died the day afterwards, but they hadn't got on at all well.
They really didn't care for each other very much. And this day that
should have been desperately sad for me- -you know, losing both of these
people at the same time- -I suddenly couldn't help laughing, because I
thought, "These two ladies, arriving at the pearly gates," [laughter]
you know, "having died together and being destined to sort of walk
through the gates together, chasing each other's tail--" you know.
[laughs] And my husband said, "What are you laughing about? This is not
the day you laugh." [laughter]
- HILLS
- A very macabre sense of humor, to see them together. I don't really
believe in that sort of thing but, you know, it was too funny to pass
up.
- GUERARD
- That's a great image.
- HILLS
- Yes. But she was a brilliant teacher. She was really the first person
who had given me any advice on how to teach.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- After several years of being experimental-- She was very kind, because
she said, "You know, I think if you did, said, showed, so on and so
forth, you'd probably cut corners, and get your results faster." And
that was an enormous help. She was very sweet. So she really became my
mentor, and I kept in touch with her. And, of course, when we came to
the United States and she was still in England, she was thrilled to find
we were in Los Angeles and she wrote and said that she remembered when
the road from Los Angeles to San Diego was a dirt track.
- GUERARD
- Wow! [laughs]
- HILLS
- Isn't that amazing?
- GUERARD
- That is amazing!
- HILLS
- So she'd lived in an apartment. I think it probably [was in] the
Griffith Park sort of area. And she said, "Do they still have all those
ants?"
- GUERARD
- All those ants?
- HILLS
- I said, "Yes, we still have ants everywhere." [laughs] She obviously had
a terrible problem with ants in her house or apartment or whatever it
was. I never could locate where the studio [was] that they had. She
couldn't remember the address and I don't know where it was, but she was
here for many years. She taught Agnes de Mille.
- GUERARD
- She did?
- HILLS
- She taught Agnes de Mille when Agnes de Mille first started learning to
dance in Los Angeles. When Agnes de Mille came to London, she always
would stay with Winifred Edwards, not in a hotel. They were very great
friends. She had very important connections to Los Angeles . And again,
you feel how tiny the world of whatever your particular field is, you
know. Everybody knows everybody else by one step.
- GUERARD
- Yes, well, and especially when you think about the big cities of the
world. They have a real direct connection.
- HILLS
- They do. Absolutely.
- GUERARD
- I was thinking, as you were talking about the fact that she was the only
one who gave you real hands-on instruction in instructing, being part of
the syllabus development, did you see that as kind of a training in
teaching, also?
- HILLS
- It was training in what to teach but not how to teach it.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- That was the difference. Although the syllabus was- -the nucleus of the
syllabus- -done before we opened, we went on working with it for years.
- GUERARD
- Did it have a name after it was--?
- HILLS
-
Sadler's Wells School Syllabus. I have a copy
of it at home, of course, but there are very few copies left, I think
they have one in the archives at The Royal Ballet School, and I have
one. I don't know how many more there are. Some people must have them
somewhere tucked away, I 'm sure . We did all the barres first. So we
had an elementary barre and an intermediate barre and an advanced barre,
but no center, which was, perhaps, a logical way to do it. It seemed odd
at the time. And before we actually had opened the school at Covent
Gardens, we had what was called an International Summer School for
Teachers. And teachers came from all over the world to learn the
Sadler's Wells syllabus, but we only had the barres- -elementary barre,
intermediate barre, and advanced barre- -and I think they must have felt
cheated. Nobody complained and they all seemed thrilled to be in that
ambience. You know, we taught them dances from the ballets and we taught
them the choreography for Les Sylphides- -at
least I did- -and wrote it all out and drew diagrams of where all the
patterns of everything went. And we taught them the Fiancee's dance from
Sleeping Beauty and some of the solos from
Coppélia and Red Riding Hood from Sleeping Beauty, with some of the people from
the company demonstrating. We had Annette Page doing elementary barre,
David Blair doing the intermediate barre and Anne Heaton doing the
advanced barre. Just the three of them. And then Celia Sparger, of whom
more anon, talked to them about dancers' injuries and how to prevent
them. And Ninette de Valois, herself, talked about teaching, which is
the first time I'd ever heard her talk about it. When she taught, her
classes were so fast, nobody had the time to breathe, let alone think.
But, when she talked about teaching, she was very interesting, but she
didn't actually teach that way. You either did it or you didn't do it as
far as she was concerned, and if you couldn't keep up, too bad. Her
classes-- Some people think I set fast combinations in class. I don't.
They're very slow when compared to Ninette's. [laughs] Weight changes.
Really, really-- She ran on a different time scale from everybody
else's. I know, as I mentioned the other day, she just buzzed. We had
about sixty teachers from the United States and France and everywhere.
What was productive from that, I think, was that we got then, three,
four months later, students from all over the world. And maybe that,
although I didn't think about it at the time, was one of the reasons for
having the summer school, so that teachers would know where they were
sending their students. And I taught the class; that class of
foreigners, about twenty-five of them, all speaking different languages.
I had quite a task to try and gel all their different styles together
and make them look homogeneous and to have them even understand what I
was saying.
- GUERARD
- Yes, you'd have to say more than just the--
- HILLS
- You had to demonstrate a great deal, and be prepared to demonstrate what
was wrong without hurting yourself and this is a little difficult. You
really have to be very careful because you can injure yourself showing
somebody how they may injure themselves if they do it wrong, you know,
if you don't have all the language. I remember this girl who came, who
became a dancer and an actress- -she was in the movie Can-Can--called Tiena Elg. I can't remember
whether she was Norwegian, Scandinavian, anyway. I don't really remember
which country, but she spoke not a word of English and then one day, we
heard her reading from a big poster that was up from the street, saying,
"My goodness! My Guinness." [laughter] A poster for Guinness beer, which
was-- They were very attractive posters and she was reading it off very
carefully, "My goodness! My Guinness." Her first English words. She was
in-- I've seen her since in one of Angela Lansbury's Murder She Wrote. She crops up occasionally. She was a very
nice girl. I don't know what happened to most of the others. There was
another one called Joan Beard, who turned up at Stanley Holden Dance
Center, years later, having married and insisted on taking class
[laughs] and we went out to lunch. [laughs] I've kept vaguely in touch
with her since . And another girl called Claire Griswald, whose father
was head of the American forces in Europe, was also a student. And she
turned up at Stanley Holden Dance Center to bring her little daughter to
class many years later. So, again, one meets people from a long time
ago. Life went on from there with the education and my mother-in-law
producing food for everybody and classes going on.
- GUERARD
- Let me take you back just a little bit before we go on too far because
you had mentioned that you were about to have surgery- -
- HILLS
- Oh, yes.
- GUERARD
- When Covent Garden opened. After that surgery, were you able to
demonstrate better and--?
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Were you able to perform at all?
- HILLS
- No. I couldn't perform because they couldn't repair those nerves that
had gone, but they went in and cleaned it up a bit more. They still
couldn't repair the ligaments or anything like that, but I think they
did a better job so that when it went out it didn't lock with cartilage
stuck underneath.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- So, I was in much better shape afterwards. It was not enjoyable.
- GUERARD
- No. No, I'm sure not. I feel silly asking you if that helped you to
demonstrate things better because, from my point of view, you
demonstrate everything .
- HILLS
- Yeah. There was a time when-- You know, I had a lot more physical
therapy after that. I had more connection with Celia Sparger, who was
the physical therapist. She was engaged as physical therapist for the
school .
- GUERARD
- Oh, when the new school opened?
- HILLS
- When the new school opened. And again, doing all the jobs that everybody
did, I was to write her notes up for her- -her medical notes- -when
students came to her with injuries. And when we had auditions, she came
to the auditions and would look at the kids and say, "You know, she may
appear to have talent, but she has one leg half an inch longer than the
other one and you're probably better off not taking her because she'll
always be lopsided," which sometimes our eye didn't see. But in being
with her all that time, a lot of her knowledge just rubbed off. And she
would say, "Look, Margaret. Can't you see?" Then [she] showed me how the
pelvis would be slightly crooked or the rib cage slightly caved in if it
was a spinal curvature and that sort of thing. So I learned my
kinesiology from her, by writing up her notes and being there when she
was doing this.
- GUERARD
- So, is that what you meant when you were talking about choosing [or]
selecting students based on their bodies?
- HILLS
- On their shape, yes. Yes.
- GUERARD
- On their shape. Uh-huh.
- HILLS
- You would ask them, you know, to lift their leg up and see how high it
would go, and ask them to point a toe, just as you might in a first
lesson with somebody, and see what their insteps were like, and ask them
to go up on to the half -toe and ask them to bend their knees. And she
had a way of assessing turn out. You lie somebody on their back. You
don't have them turn out both legs. You have one bent up straight and
you see how far one will turn out and that tells you how much turnout.
If you do both, it doesn't show it for some reason I don't understand.
You can tell with one, so she could see if they had the ability to be
able to turn out. That sort of thing .
- GUERARD
- You had mentioned last time that you were very interested in biology
when you were--.
- HILLS
- I was, yes.
- GUERARD
- This must have been fascinating.
- HILLS
- Yes, it was. It brought my biology/anatomy work from high school into--
I'd taken it in high school because I knew it physically would somehow
make things clearer for me, for dancing, but I didn't know that I would
ever use it, and learn, you know, know the names of the muscles she was
talking about and the bones she was talking about and that sort of
thing. It was helpful to have done that in school, definitely. She was a
very interesting woman, too. And again, you know, people shared their
knowledge with me. I can't imagine why. [Guerard laughs] Just incredibly
fortunate!
- GUERARD
- [Perhaps because you] showed an interest in what they had to offer?
- HILLS
- I must have done, I suppose. You know, you don't think about it at the
time. It's only when you look back that you just realize how fortunate
you've been and how much time people have spent on you. It's very, very
lucky.
- GUERARD
- Well, can I draw you back to the new school?
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Around 1947, 1948, my notes tell me that shortly thereafter, you did
some mime performance?
- HILLS
- Yes, I did. This was at the lecture that Ursula Moreton-- Well, I should
backtrack. I mentioned earlier that I had learned ballet pantomime from
Ursula Moreton. She had learned it from a woman called Madame
[Francesca] Zanfretta and I've looked her up since and all I can find is
that she was a dancer on the stage in London who did the leading role in
a ballet called The Newspaper. I know no more
about her than that . But she must have learned ballet pantomime from
somebody. I don't know who. And she had taught it to Ursula Moreton.
Again, I don't know why. And Ursula Moreton had refined it into a
technique of how to walk in various costumes and made the gestures clear
enough to be taught well. And she did it beautifully and taught
wonderfully. She had been a character dancer in Diaghilev's company and
whether she had needed to be able to do pantomime for those and whether
Diaghilev had sent her to this woman, I really don't know. She's dead
now and I can't ask her. You know, these things-- The opportunities to
learn things and questions that you don't ask that you should have done
that you don't know the answers to. You find you want to go back and ask
them and you can't. And so, I'd learned to do the pantomime from her and
she used to do lecturing about ballet pantomime and I was one of her
demonstrators, with the David Gill who now does the old movies. He and I
did them together for her. And so, I learned all the ballet pantomime
scenes to do that. I was also walking on and doing some of the ballet
pantomime myself with the company, because although I couldn't dance, I
could do those sort of things. It was nice just to keep being in the
company part-time for things like that. And I did, occasionally dance,
because there was a girl in the company called Lorna Mossford and she
and I looked very, very alike. And Lorna Mossford was a soloist and
didn't like to be in the corps de ballet. Where she was on in the corps
de ballet, she'd sometimes call me up and say, "Would you like to go on
as me tonight?" And so, without anybody knowing officially, I would be
Lorna Mossford, occasionally, dancing in the corps de ballet, as long as
it was a ballet I didn't have to kneel down. So I did some unpaid,
elicit performances [laughter] that nobody knew about. We were the same
size, you know. It didn't make any difference and she knew that I knew
every ballet inside out and every place in every ballet because I was
teaching it at the school. So whatever it was, she knew I could do it;
would know it and not make a mistake.
- GUERARD
- Now, did you tell me that you learned the ballets by going to the
performances and simply watching them?
- HILLS
- Watching them, mm-hmm. Watching rehearsals and just-- I don't know how.
It's the same way, I'm sure, that I know people's names, you know.
- GUERARD
- That's an amazing facility!
- HILLS
- My daughter has it, too. She can just look at a class of how ever many
hundreds she has and she knows them all by the end of the first lecture,
which is more than I could do. I mean, I can do twenty- five.
- GUERARD
- It's way more than I can do.
- HILLS
- And it stays with you. People can come in, you know, twenty years later,
and their names just come into my head. I don't have to think. They're
just there. And it's the same with ballets. I have no idea what brain
connections there are or what causes that to be possible.
- GUERARD
- I mean, did you know other ballet dancers who could learn that way or
did you--?
- HILLS
- I never asked them. I don't know. No idea. I think it's perhaps unusual,
because people would remark on it.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And one knows there are dancers who struggle and struggle and struggle
to remember, so they obviously don't have that facility. Whether it's
because my mother was an artist and I'd grown up seeing things from a
painter's point of view, I really don't know.
- GUERARD
- You mean, like having a visual memory?
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes. I just don't know at all, but I know I have, even for tiny
details. As I told you, when I was a child-- I have memory of those,
too. So it's some strange quirk, which I've used to good advantage, I
guess.
- GUERARD
- Good quirk.
- HILLS
- It's very useful.
- GUERARD
- I'm sorry, have I gotten you off the track from ballet pantomime?
- HILLS
- Oh, ballet pantomime. Yes, there we were. Ursula Moreton didn't really--
She got bored with teaching her mime classes, I think, and having
trained me, she used to call up and say, "Margaret, dear, I'm really
terribly sick. Could you teach my mime class for me?" And I'd find that,
ultimately, I was teaching all the mime classes in the school. I'd heard
her lectures and found them, in some respects, unsatisfactory, so I did
a lot more research myself and I now give mime lectures, but they're
more comprehensive than hers were. That's not bragging. I mean, she
possibly didn't have the facilities for research as I've had- -the UCLA
library and things like that- -so I had that advantage. And I really
enjoy doing it, but, of course, not many people enjoy learning it. So,
if you're not going to use it, it can be quite boring and not many
ballets use it anymore. It's not being-- No new ballets have ballet
pantomime in them. It used to be the part of the ballet where, rather
than having program notes, the story of the ballet was told in the
pantomime.
- GUERARD
- Oh, sort of like a narrator.
- HILLS
- Yes, exactly. Pantomime sounds like, you know, the Marcel Marceau things
you see, but ballet pantomime is quite different. It's just sentences.
Your arms make gestures meaning words but you don't emote them in any
way. So, you know, the lilac fairy in The Sleeping
Beauty mimes to the wicked fairy, "I love that child. Why are
you going to make her die?" And Carabosse says, you know, "Nobody
invited me to the christening, so I'm furious and she's going to prick
her finger and die." And the lilac fairy says, "No, she's not. She's
going to sleep for a hundred years and the handsome prince will come and
wake her up." This is all in mime scene and presumably, years ago, the
audiences knew enough to understand it.
- GUERARD
- Well, I was just going to ask you if the audiences needed to be mime
literate.
- HILLS
- Yes, they did [pause] and now I'm sure they're not. They just see the
dancers standing around waving their arms about a bit.
- GUERARD
- So this is a dying art?
- HILLS
- Yes, it is. I went back to London in 1982 and they videotaped me doing
all the pantomime so that it's preserved on videotape in their archives.
- GUERARD
- Neat!
- HILLS
- Which is nice. It's preserved somewhere, which Ursula Moreton would be
pleased about because, although I do it and now I'm getting credit for
it, it was her refinement of the technique which made it possible. So
maybe someday it'll come back and somebody’ll find the tape and recreate
it again.
- GUERARD
- They very well could. . .
- HILLS
- They could. So, that was my pantomime bit. [laughter] Again, teaching it
by default of somebody not showing up to teach and, you know, I did it.
And went on doing it and enjoyed it. Ninette de Valois, at the same sort
of time-- I realize now that she must have seen somewhere, sometime
before the Second World War, some modern dance in Europe. There's a
modern dance choreographer called Doris Humphries or Humphrey or
Humphries. I don't know which it is. And Ninette de Valois said, "There
are some movements which will help some of the ballets. We're going to
call it plastique composition." Now I know that some of those exercises
are actually Doris Humphrey technique. Now, since I've seen it taught at
UCLA. At that time, I thought Ninette de Valois had made it up herself.
She didn't give anybody any credit for it and I went to classes and
learned that. And, of course, who taught it later? Me, which was an
advantage, having got that background. When I was asked to teach at
UCLA, I knew a little bit about modern dance technique, which otherwise,
I wouldn't have done. When I stopped teaching it, I think they stopped
doing it. As far as I know, nobody carried it on. There wasn't much of
it but it was based on, you know, straight lines and curved lines and
body weight and the things that modern dance does.
- GUERARD
- Was this at all similar to the kinds of things that you did when you
were very young with balls and ribbons?
- HILLS
- No, not at all. No, no. It was quite, quite different. Again, it took a
feeling through the body of understanding how a line looks straight to
the audience if you have your hands straight up [demonstrating hands
position], like that. Even though there are actually curves in the body,
you can convince the audience it is actually absolutely straight. And
you have a position like that [demonstrating arm position] , you know,
where it has to be at [an] absolute right angle to, I'd say, the
shoulder and the arm, and the elbow are [the] opposite way so that
you've sort of got a letter "s" with right angle curves across the body.
Those sort of things.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- It was very interesting to study and feel those different lines through
the body, but it wasn't pretty, [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Necessary for theater performance, though.
- HILLS
- Yes, yes. And there were some things-- There's a movement in Les Sylphides by [Michel] Fokine, which
dancers- -ballet dancers- -found very difficult. You sort of put your
head into the middle of your arms, which are in a circle. One of the
exercises helped that and made it much easier to teach people the Fokine
choreography if they learned the other thing first. So, one or two
places where it was useful . So by then, I was teaching ballet classes
and pantomime and repertoire and character and plastique composition,
being fairly busy.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- But young .
- GUERARD
- And how old are you now?
- HILLS
- Eighteen. [laughter] Eighteen or nineteen. In England, at that time, all
school children were forced to drink a third of a pint of milk at school
every day.
- GUERARD
- Ooh !
- HILLS
- And I had suffered from this for a very long time since I'm allergic to
milk and had to sort of try and pass mine to somebody else and not drink
it. But since I was only eighteen when the school first opened, Arnold
Haskell, who was the director, used to introduce me as his faculty
member who'd only just got over the third of a pint milk requirement.
[laughter]
- GUERARD
- Were you the youngest faculty member?
- HILLS
- Yes, and now, apart from Ninette de Valois, who is in her late nineties
and is still alive, she and I are the only two living members of the
faculty at that time.
- GUERARD
- Oh, really?
- HILLS
- Mm Hmm. So, when I go back to the reunion this July--fifty year
reunion--I'm going as guest speaker and [pause] big cheese [laughter],
which will be fun. Really not very much changed, apart from getting
dance uniforms sorted out. When we started, all the children came in
black leotards and black tights and the little ones looked a little
dreary in that, you know. And it was Winifred Edwards who decided that
they should wear white .
- GUERARD
- [gesturing to Ms. Graham Hills to indicate that time is running out on
the tape] It's-- No, I'm sorry. It's okay. We're getting close to the
end of the tape.
- HILLS
- Uh-huh. The children should wear white with colored bands around their
hair and colored belts and she organized the dressmakers to make those.
And she had the little ones wear socks and not tights, which does look
much nicer.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And got them all tidied up and looking good because the dressmakers made
the tunics for them and they looked very pretty. And then, when they
started getting a little bulgy as teenagers, they went into gray. When
they got bigger still and older still they went into black. But each
class had its own class color, so when they were walking by, you could
tell which class they were in. And they looked lovely when they were all
dressed the same, you know. And no leg warmers and no sweaters. Nothing.
[Guerard laughs]
- HILLS
- Finally, when we had one very cold winter, they were allowed to wear
white crossover cardigans, but that was a concession for the cold winter
days.
- GUERARD
- Because they didn't want any extra layers of--?
- HILLS
- No layers and teachers had to be able to see every muscle. And I must
say, it really is very helpful if people don't cover themselves up.
There are people who have taken my class here, you know, for twenty
years and I have no idea what shape their legs are. Don't know they have
legs inside. [laughs] There was one girl who took-- She doesn't take
anymore, but she took for a long, long time with big, baggy sweatpants
on. And I once went to a restaurant and she was the hostess, you know,
that seats you at your table, and I suddenly saw her legs for the very
first time. [laughs] I was quite glad I hadn't seen them before.
[laughter]
- GUERARD
- You know Margaret, I think we're going to have to stop here.
- HILLS
- We haven't done a great deal today. I've been talking far too much.
- GUERARD
- No! You've been talking just perfectly. We'll pick up next time.
- HILLS
- Okay.
1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE I MARCH 31, 1997
- GUERARD
- Margaret, I know that in 1947, Ninette de Valois was invited by the
Turkish government to go over there and study the possibility of setting
up a school of ballet and I'm really looking forward to hearing about
your involvement with that great adventure, but before we go on, I
thought I would like to pick up on a couple of points that were touched
on last time.
- HILLS
- Mm hmm.
- GUERARD
- Regarding the desire of Ninette de Valois to set up what she thought was
an English method of dance, I know that Ninette de Valois was not her
real name. It was Edris--?
- HILLS
- Edris Stannus .
- GUERARD
- Thank you for pronouncing that.
- HILLS
- She was born in Ireland. And when she was quite a small child, she
started to dance professionally on, as she says, "on the ends of piers
in the summer." [de Valois, Ninette, Come Dance With
Me: A Memoir 1898-1956. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1957.] And
I can't remember why she said she changed her name. Presumably because
nobody could pronounce the other one. Anyway, then she changed it to
Ninette de Valois and kept that, even when she went to the Russian
ballet [Ballet Russes] with [Serge] Diaghilev. She was known by that
name, already.
- GUERARD
- When she joined them?
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- And also, another person you mentioned, Vera Fredova, her real name was
Winifred Edwards.
- HILLS
- Winifred Edwards.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- And I might have even slipped in occasionally calling her Freda, which
was another name that I knew her by. She was English and had been in
[Anna] Pavlova's company and from Freda- -from Winifred Freda- -she got
Fredova .
- GUERARD
- Ah , ha !
- HILLS
- And that's how that Russian name evolved.
- GUERARD
- And, were there many at the time that you became part of Sadler's Wells
[Ballet] who had adopted Russian names or was that starting--?
- HILLS
- No, they were very few. There were not many English dancers who actually
were with Diaghilev. There was a few. There was one called-- Her real
name was Hilda Munnings and, she was called-- Her last name was [Lydia]
Sokolova. I can't remember what her first name, what first name she
took.
- GUERARD
- But at that time, then, the Russian ideal had lessened, had less of an
influence, or was it ever--?
- HILLS
- It was one of the influences. See, Diaghilev hadn't been around terribly
long. And although he'd taken his company to England and some English
girls had taken classes with [Enrico] Cecchetti and some English girls
went into the Diaghilev Ballet [Ballets Russes] , it was one of the
influences. The other was the Danish influence through Adeline Genée .
And, I think she possibly had a greater influence than the Russians.
GUERARD Oh, really?
- HILLS
- Because she had set up the operatic association [the Operatic Society],
which we talked about, for teaching teachers to produce better dancers,
her influence on teaching in the country was greater than Diaghilev' s
was. But I expect that some Russian teachers did set up school in
London, but by the time I was around, I didn't know of any. Cecchetti
wasn't there and he was the ballet master of the Diaghilev company. And
he was Italian.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- But I think a lot-- When Diaghilev died, a lot of his dancers came to
the United States and Pavlova had already been to the United States and
brought dancers. So I think the Russian influence in the United States
was far stronger than it was in Britain, as it still is, I think.
Probably.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Yes, that's interesting.
- HILLS
- And even now, when the Russians-- I don't mean the stars. The stars that
defected from Soviet Russia went to England and all over the place. But
now just the run of the mill people are leaving Russia because they can
and a lot of them are coming to the United States and not getting work
as dancers, but setting up schools. There are a lot of Russians starting
schools in the United States, not in England. Whether they would be
allowed to teach in England, I doubt, because they wouldn't have the
British teaching credentials.
- GUERARD
- Yes. It ' s a lot easier in the United States.
- HILLS
- So it may well be that they can't in England and they can here. That's a
guess. I'm not quite positive, but I think that's probably so.
- GUERARD
- It's interesting. One other thing that I wanted to get back to-- When we
ended the tape last time, it ended rather abruptly and we were talking
about uniforms and also the way ballet dancers have, especially in the
United States, of wearing lots of layers of leg warmers and sweaters and
things like this. I know this is a pet peeve of yours.
- HILLS
- Yes, it is.
- GUERARD
- For a very good reason, and I wondered if you wanted to-- If you had any
more to say about that.
- HILLS
- Well, just a little bit. We did, in very cold weather, wear very
close-fitting knitted tights which we knitted ourselves. They were not
just leg warmers, but they came up to the waist and had no feet and we
wore socks underneath. And that was when it was bitterly cold because
there was a winter in 1946, '47, where we had, still left over from the
war, no fuel and no heating.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- At all. And it happened to be a very bitter winter, so we did wear more
that winter, but only things that were tight- fitting . [We] never wore
anything baggy.
- GUERARD
- And it was an even layer of bulk.
- HILLS
- Yes! That's right. Even on both legs, top to bottom, with no crinkles in
it.
- HILLS
- And the first time we saw anybody in leg warmers separated from, you
know, that would just fall down over the ankle rather than staying up
firmly, was when [Galina] Ulanova came with the Russian company in 1956.
- GUERARD
- Excuse me, Margaret. I'm going to have to stop here for a second because
of this noise. [tape recorder off]
- HILLS
- In 1956, we all went to watch the rehearsals and there was Ulanova, this
wonderful ballerina we'd all heard so much about, rehearsing Giselle in baggy, baggy leg warmers under a
chiffon skirt, and we were all absolutely horrified. But, of course, you
know, suddenly it became the thing to do. Because Ulanova was wearing
them, everybody thought, "[gasp] This is wonderful! You don't have to
have a hot body, you can just have hot legs without them attached to the
top half." [laughs] And they became the sort of thing to have for a
little bit. But, of course, students weren't allowed to wear them. The
company started to wear them, but students didn't. And, I think
students-- Well, I'm sure, at The Royal Ballet and for The Royal Academy
[of Dancing] and I'm sure Cecchetti schools, they are still absolutely
not allowed to wear anything that's, as you said, "not symmetrically
fitting." And nothing that's loose, partly because the asymmetry of the
padding makes the alignment of the body go out and the teacher can't see
the muscles and so you can't correct somebody. You can't-- You often
don't know something is going wrong if you can't see it.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And so, it's very hard to teach people who are covered up. And one, as a
teacher, if somebody comes to class like that, you assume that they are
shy about some part of their anatomy and don't actually want to be
corrected.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And so you leave them alone. You take it as a sign that they're there
because they like to be there and like to do a workout but not because
they want to improve.
- GUERARD
- Hm! That's pretty unfortunate for them because they may just be
following a fashion and not realize that--
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes. Just to digress slightly since we're on to talking about what
people wear-- As everybody knows, the height of the leg of the leotard,
like swimsuits, rises and falls with fashion. And when the leg space
starts at the hipbone, at least the top of the pelvis, as they do at the
present time, people no longer know where their legs begin [Guerard
laughs] and they think their legs begin at the top of the hipbone
instead of at the top of the leg. Whereas, when the fashion is for the
leg to finish at-- The leg of the leotard to circle the top of the leg,
people know where their legs begin and it's much easier to teach them to
move the leg correctly than when the fashions are high.
- GUERARD
- You mean the dancers in your class--?
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Move their legs differently?
- HILLS
- Yes. Differently. Completely differently. And, to be slightly vulgar,
when butts are in fashion, people stick them out at the back and it's
very hard to make them keep the front line of the pelvis vertical, when
to be fashionable, they should be sticking them out at the back.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- So all these things of fashion make a tremendous difference to how you
teach.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And people's comprehension of their own bodies. It's very strange.
[laughter]
- GUERARD
- Well, there's probably a lot to be said about fashion and trends and--
Oh, also the whole idea of super stars in dance, and I hope that we can
get into that at some point.
- HILLS
- Yes, yes .
- GUERARD
- A little bit, too. I think it's really interesting .
- HILLS
- It really is. I remember walking with my tail tucked right underneath
when, in 1948, Christian Dior decided that all ladies should have long
skirts. We'd had very short ones up to that point . And they should
droop slightly at the back. And in order for the dress to droop slightly
in the back, you tucked your pelvis right underneath and leaned slightly
backwards. His dresses sort of flowed with movement that way, very
nicely, but I remember being screamed at not to tuck my tail under so
far when I was in class because we were all following fashion .
- GUERARD
- Yes .
- HILLS
- And it does make you aware of fashion in relationship to movement- -not
just ballet, but movement itself- -as you see fashions change and come
and go over a long lifetime like mine. [Guerard laughs]
- GUERARD
- Not that long.
- HILLS
- Yes it is! [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Well, shall we jump back, then, to around 1947 and I don't know if
there's anything else that you wanted to talk about before we went on to
Turkey?
- HILLS
- Personally, I was just-- At The Royal Ballet [Sadler's Wells] School, it
was just going on much as before. Greater numbers and we were more
choosy at our auditions. We were no longer desperate to have enough
children to be a viable situation. We were also being prepared for--
- GUERARD
- I'll stop again for just a minute. [tape recorder off] The trash cans
are done now.
- HILLS
- Well I was just saying, we were working towards accredit-- I can never
remember the word correctly. I think it's accreditation, isn't it?
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm.
- HILLS
- By the local education authority, so that we could be-- The education
part of the school could be a normal school, where the children didn't
have to pay for that part. They would still have to pay for the dancing
part, but once we were accredited, they wouldn't have to pay for the
education part. That would be reimbursed from the country.
- GUERARD
- Oh, so that part of it would be like a public school--?
- HILLS
- That's exactly right.
- GUERARD
- And then the dance would be private?
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes, yes. And that was on-going and, I can't remember which year it
happened, to be honest, but, sometime along those few years, we got, I
suppose, provisional accreditation. And, it was finalized, I think I
seem to remember, in 1950, but during that time, we were vetted
occasionally and that sort of thing. And we were talking about the
children being auditioned. As word got around that you could go to the
Sadler's Wells School, particularly schools within travelling distance,
if they were a small school and they had a really talented student, they
would send that student for audition to come to us because obviously, if
the school was attached to a company, this talented child was going to
have a much better chance of getting into the company from the school .
So we didn't have auditions as often as we did later, but I suppose
about five times a year, we spent Saturdays seeing children aged ten,
four at a time, some having done some dancing, some not at all. We got
better at choosing than we were originally, because none of us had
really done that before. Ninette de Valois had auditioned older girls
ready to go into the company, but we didn't all have a perfect eye as to
what sort of-- how a child of ten would grow, and we got more
experienced as time went on.
- GUERARD
- We being the--?
- HILLS
- The faculty. All the faculty would be at these audition Saturdays and I
was the one who set the steps or showed them what to do if they'd done
nothing before. And that was quite fascinating, you know, to-- I could
then touch the bodies and feel them and feel their elasticity. Not
pulling them, of course, but just seeing if you got hold of a foot if it
would lift higher or if the instep could point more if you showed it how
and that sort of thing. It was really rather the fun. And Celia Sparger,
whom I mentioned earlier, after we had passed them or not, they went
down to her and she would look at them from the really clinical point of
view and see if they had anything that was detrimental. You know, her
eye could immediately see whether a child had one leg slightly longer
than the other that might effect her .
- GUERARD
- Did you find that your opinions coincided?
- HILLS
- Pretty much. There were odd occasions when she would come and say,
"Look, this girl appears to you to have a wonderfully straight back, but
in actual fact, she has a slight scoliosis and may have a problem later
when she gets bigger." And other times, we would look at the parents. In
those days, very few children only had one parent or a stepparent or
whatever. They were mostly two parents and mostly, because it was
Saturday, both parents came with the child. And so, you could look at
them if you were in any doubt as to whether they were going to get very,
very tall. There were occasions where you'd see a long, gangly
ten-year-old and how tall was she going to grow? Well, she couldn't get
too tall and if both parents were terribly tall, you probably didn't
take the gamble. But also, if they were very, very short, you wouldn't
take the gamble. If it was one of each, you had to gamble because you
couldn't tell which one she was going to take after.
- GUERARD
- Right. So and at this point, you were able to choose based on the
dancers, and you didn't have to rely on the income from wealthy parents.
- HILLS
- No. Not so much. And, of course, if we had an absolutely brilliant- -and
we did have one or two- -children whose parents couldn't pay, we found
the money from somewhere .
- GUERARD
- Right. Great.
- HILLS
- You're not going to turn down a future [Margot] Fonteyn, you know, just
because they can't pay. And I really, truly don't remember which ones
were in that category, but I know there were some. It was nice to be
able to do that. And they also were given uniforms, as well, if they
were really poor. So there was some fund of some sort. I don't know. I
didn't run it, so I don't know. Later on, we had auditions many more
times a year and finished up, years later, seeing at least a thousand
children a year, of which we took twenty-five.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- And now, the examiners, so to speak, actually have audition centers in
different parts of the United Kingdom to audition children. Instead of
the children having to come to London, they go, which is probably
better. But in those days, everybody had to come to London for the
audition. Tremendously traumatic for them. Of course, they also had to
take a written paper for school .
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And they also had to draw. We had a wonderful art teacher who was
related to a famous jeweler, Nigretti and Zambra, and she was called
Molly Zambra and was, in some way, related to them. Wonderful artist!
And she had them draw and she felt she could assess some of their
spatial ability by their drawings and she had a wonderful eye. She was
very good. She wouldn't ever have had the chance to say, "No, this is
not the person you want to take." But on the other hand, if we were just
doubtful and she said, you know, "Look at this drawing. This person has
no feeling of shape at all," that might just tip the balance if we were
undecided.
- GUERARD
- I wanted to ask you about this also because I believe I read in the-- Is
it Naomi Capon?
- HILLS
- Capon, she pronounced it.
- GUERARD
- I think I read in her book something about testing for intelligence.
- HILLS
- Yes, they did.
- GUERARD
- They had to be at--
- HILLS
- They had to be bright. It's no use having a dancer who is very dull. We
had one who was not terribly bright but was absolutely brilliant and has
gone on being brilliant and I'm not going to mention any names,
obviously, but on her intelligence test, she wouldn't have got in, but
she had wonderful artistry that took her way up. [She] never did very
well in school. There were a lot of D's, I'm afraid, but ballets, A
plus's all the way along the line.
- GUERARD
- Right. But that being the exception, I think that speaks highly for
dancers .
- HILLS
- Yes. It does. They need an intelligence. You know, the intelligence
tests and all those sort of things test one sort of intelligence, but I
think with all those tests, there ought to be common sense IQs and
artistic IQs and all sorts of other things because to be a whole,
productive human being, it's no use just having a one- track IQ.
- GUERARD
- That's right.
- HILLS
- There's a lot to be learned yet about how to test all those other
things, I think.
- GUERARD
- I think so, too. Yes.
- HILLS
- And the school went on, you know, much the same, really, through those
years. I was still performing mime parts with the company as well as
teaching in the school. And, as you mentioned in the beginning, in 1947,
the Turkish government asked Ninette de Valois if she would start a
ballet something in Turkey. They didn't quite know what they wanted. And
at this time, I had nothing to do with it whatsoever. Two women, Joy
Newton, who had been ballet mistress of the Sadler's Wells company, and
a girl from The Royal Academy Teacher's Training Course, called Audrey
Knight, they went out to Turkey to start a school in Istanbul, which was
just a dance school in Istanbul, which the government paid for. And they
were there-- Actually didn't go until '48. They were in Istanbul for two
years and then the government in Turkey said, "Well, Istanbul is all
very well, but [the] university is in Ankara. We want you to go to
Ankara." And very few of the children who had been in the school for two
years wanted to go to live in Ankara, because all their parents lived in
Istanbul. It's a long way away. So in 1950, the school moved to Ankara
and had to really start all over again from scratch. Joy Newton went to
Ankara, but Audrey Knight didn't want to. And so she stopped. She didn't
go. She left Turkey and went back to England. And I didn't know what was
going on. I hadn't really taken any notice of it at all. I was still
teaching in the school. And one day, I got a call to say, "Madame," as
we all called Dame Ninette de Valois, "wants to see you in her office at
Covent Garden." And I thought, "Ah no, I'm going to be fired." You know,
"What is all this? What have I done?" I was going through my conscience,
trying to think what had happened, what I'd done wrong. Shaking in my
shoes, because we were all terrified of her, I went to Covent Garden
and, knees shaking, I went up to her little-- She had a tiny little
office; minute in the big opera house, and [I] knocked on the door, and
she said, "Come in, child. Come in, child," which is the way she spoke.
And I went in and she said, "Want to send you to Turkey, dear." That's
not what I'd expected to hear and I had to sort of shake my brains back
into place and thought, "Why does she want to send me to Turkey?" She
said, "You know we've got the school, dear, in Istanbul. It's moving to
Ankara. Audrey doesn't want to stay there. [I] think it would be a great
idea if you went to Turkey and Audrey took your job for a year, here."
- GUERARD
- Just like that.
- HILLS
- And she said, "I need to know now, dear. Will you go?"
- GUERARD
- Just at that moment?
- HILLS
- Just at that moment. And I thought, "Well, it's probably a great
opportunity. I'll never get to Turkey any other way and if I don't go,
will she fire me from the school?" So I said, "Yes, I'll go." [laughter]
So just within sort of five minutes, my life was turned around
completely and I was supposed to be going off to-- I can't really
remember. I remember the dress I was wearing and it was a summer dress.
It was a gray one with white curlicues on it. It was a vivid memory of
my day that day. So, it must have been summertime. And I was to go in
September. And I was twenty. And I thought, "What do I have to do now?"
You know, "What do I have to do to prepare myself to go?" She said, "Oh,
Joy is coming back soon. I'll get Joy to talk to you and she'll tell you
all you have to do." Because Joy was coming back for--it must have been,
I suppose, August--the summer vacation. So I went away and at the call
box in the street, I called up my boyfriend [Brian Hills] and said, "I'm
going to Turkey." He said, "No, no. You can't go to Turkey! No, no, no!
No!" And was absolutely-- He hadn't, I mean, we were only just going out
together. We weren't engaged or anything. He was terribly upset. And I
thought, "Now, I don't really want to leave him but on the other hand,
he hasn't made his intentions very clear, so I'll go to Turkey." And he
was very upset. And I called my parents [Ida Cockshott Hampson and Ellis
Hampson] and they were upset. [They said], "No, no. You can't go to
Turkey. An English girl can't go to Turkey. It's a terrible place, dear.
You can't go." But I was nearly twenty-one and I said, "I'm going to
go." And then when Joy Newton came, a few weeks later I suppose, I said,
"You know, I'm going to be coming with you." And she said, "Yes, I know.
It's wonderful. I'm thrilled to pieces. I auditioned you in Birmingham
before you went to the school and I've been interested in you all the
time and you've had this knee thing and really want to have you with
me." So I told her, "Well, that's good and we'll have an apartment
together." And she said, "You'll have to get a visa and a passport." [I]
had to get a visa from the Turkish Embassy and a passport- -a British
passport .
- GUERARD
- And a work permit?
- HILLS
- No.
- GUERARD
- No?
- HILLS
- No, the visa to go to Turkey was what I needed. And I couldn't get a
visa to go to Turkey until I got a British passport and when I went to
the passport office they said, "Where do you want to go with your
British passport?" I said, "I want to go to Turkey." And they said, "But
you're not twenty-one. You can't go to Turkey." And I said, "Well, I've
got a job to go to." And they said, "No. No, no way. You can't go." And
they said, "If you only wanted to go to Istanbul, which is in Europe, we
could give you a passport to go to Istanbul. We can't give you one to go
to Ankara because that's in Asia. "
- GUERARD
- Ah !
- HILLS
- And so, I had to wait till after I was twenty-one which was in-- Oh,
then it must have been early summer because I was twenty-one in July.
No, I wasn't.
- GUERARD
- No, you must have been twenty in--
- HILLS
- I was twenty in 1950. [During her review of the transcript, Margaret
Graham Hills realized that she was twenty years old in 1948 rather than
in 1950, and that the regulations which prohibited her from acquiring
governmental permission to enter Turkey must have been related to
qualifying factors other than that of the age requirement, but she was
not able to recall specifically what that restraint was.] No, so that's
why I couldn't get one. That's right. And I-- Yes, that's it. I moved
heaven and earth. I got signatures from Ninette de Valois. I got a
letter from the- -the contract from the- -Turkish government, which I
had to sign, send back to them, they had to send back to me. And now it
was September, when I was supposed to be there, and it wasn't until
November that I got it all sorted out to go before I was twenty-one. So
I arrived very late.
- GUERARD
- And Joy Newton had already gone ahead?
- HILLS
- She'd already gone and I was thinking, "I'm never going to get there."
Also, Audrey Knight was back and she'd got my job.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And I wasn't making any money. And my parents were saying, "You know,
you've got to go get another job somewhere because we can't keep you all
this long time."
- GUERARD
- And they didn't really want you to go to Turkey.
- HILLS
- No, they didn't really want me to go anyway, but they did finally lend
me enough money to live on till I got it all sorted out and went.
- GUERARD
- So then when you did go, you had to go all by yourself?
- HILLS
- Yeah. Oh, I went by myself. Yes. And I had nowhere to live because I'd
given up my lodgings.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness!
- HILLS
- And I was living with odd people all over the place for two months.
[laughter] Living out of a suitcase, trying to get myself ready to go .
I had to get shots of various sorts for going, you know, cholera and all
the other things that you have to get. [I] also found that I had never
been vaccinated against smallpox as a child because my mother didn't
believe in it. So I had to get a smallpox vaccination which made me
terribly ill, at that age. And again, I was being terribly ill in
somebody else's house, you know. [laughs] Temperature of a hundred and
three and feeling absolutely dreadful.
- GUERARD
- The cholera [inoculation] does that, too.
- HILLS
- Yes, it does. And I had a tetanus shot, which made ray arm swell up to
three times its size and I had to have an anti-tetanus shot to bring
that down. It was horrible! It was absolutely horrible. I thought, "Why
ever did I do this?" And my boyfriend was absolutely, you know, very
supportive while I was still there, but not wanting me to go.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- But during all this mess, his firm said, "We want you to go to Canada
for six months."
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- So he felt free to go to Canada because I was going somewhere else. So
then it all calmed down. It was much, much better. He was going to
install some equipment- -telephone equipment- -in Canada that his firm
had built. So he went to a place near Quebec called Rimouski . He went
in the January after I'd gone to Turkey in November. And--
- GUERARD
- Were you staying with friends from the ballet school or--?
- HILLS
- Anybody who had a spare bed, you know. I'd move from place to place.
They were very sweet. Everybody was very helpful. And even the night
that I was-- The day that I was supposed to fly away, we got in the
plane and I was sitting next to two Lebanese gentlemen. And they were
charming, excessively charming, and I thought, "I've got this awful
journey sitting next to these two men." And we sat in the plane and we
sat in the plane and it didn't take off and it didn't take off, and it
didn't take off.
- GUERARD
- Oh , no !
- HILLS
- We were sent back home. Not get put in a hotel, but sent back home. And
I thought, "I don't have a home to go to."
- GUERARD
- Oh, no!
- HILLS
- So, I had to call up, again, another friend and say, "I didn't go. Can I
come and stay with you for one more night?" [laughs] It was awful!
Finally, we took off. Pan Am, we went on. And as I told you, food was
still very scarce in England. And we came down. We went from London to
Brussels, which isn't really very far, but they had to refuel
constantly, these big planes- -or big by those days- -and we were taken
into a restaurant in Brussels airport and for the first time for, since
1939, I saw a large pork chop, which I had-- I mean, it was two weeks
ration and I couldn't believe it. It tasted so good. It was wonderful.
And I can still see it sitting on the plate, you know, these vivid
memories of things that you haven't had for so long. After we'd
refueled, we took off again and we had to come down in Frankfurt, was
the next place. And that airport was terribly bombed. It still had an
awful lot of bomb damage around it. Then we took off and came down in
Istanbul, where I was met by somebody who put me in a hotel and left me
by myself in Istanbul because I had to fly to Ankara the next day. And I
' d no idea, you know, how to order anything in the restaurant of the
hotel. I tried to learn Turkish before I went and I couldn't even find a
book, not a Hugo, nothing. So, I knew not a
thing. [I] went down to the restaurant and gestured that I wanted
something to eat. I pointed to my mouth- -you know, not a word- -and
found my way back to the hotel room. And I was scared to death. You
know, how do you lock the door? Which is the ladies room? Which is the
gentleman's toilet? You know, that sort of thing.
- GUERARD
- Yes! Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- I sort of sat with my legs crossed, not knowing which one to go into. I
was so scared. It was really frightening.
- GUERARD
- Well, not only a different-- It was not only a different language, but
such a different culture!
- HILLS
- Different culture, yes. Fortunately, on the plane, I hadn't been set
next to the Lebanese the next day, so I was rather relieved about that.
[Guerard laughs] Finally, I had to go across the Bosporus on a ferry.
Somebody 'd picked me up the next day. A Turkish gentleman who spoke
English. I had to sail across the Bosporus to 165 get to the airport on
the other side, then flew to Ankara. By then, of course, I was a day
late and there was nobody to meet me at the airport in Ankara.
- GUERARD
- Oh, no!
- HILLS
- Because, I found out later, Joy Newton was teaching and couldn't meet me
and nobody else met me. So I had to get myself on a bus from the airport
to the city. And we'd had a terrible flight over the mountains, which
was buffeting and bouncing about in a tiny little aircraft, so I was
somewhat shaky, and finally got myself-- I used a little French because
I realized some people spoke French and by speaking French, I organized
my luggage and me onto the bus to get into Ankara. And the pilot was on
the bus and he was an enormous Turk. Every finger was covered in several
rings and he carried a cane with a jeweled handle. And I thought, "This
was flying the plane I was in?" [laughs] I'm sure he was a great pilot,
but seeing him covered in jewels was something. I really didn't know
where I'd landed, you know. It was hysterical in retrospect, but
frightening at the time. But I got into Ankara and there, at the bus
stop, was Joy Newton, whom I knew and sort of big smile and she took me
in a taxi back to the apartment that she had and I calmed down and all
was okay.
- GUERARD
- You must have had a lot of luggage with you. I mean, moving your--
- HILLS
- A year's luggage.
- GUERARD
- Moving your entire life there for a year.
- HILLS
- That's right. And the number of things she told me that I needed to
bring for the year-- I don't know who ever is going to listen to this
tape, but in Turkey, you couldn't buy Tampax, so I had to take a year's
supply.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh! Yes!
- HILLS
- Things like that, you know. And she'd asked me to bring out Angostura
Bitters because you couldn't buy them there and I didn't drink, but she
did and she wanted the Angostura Bitters. And, what else? Suntan lotion,
you couldn't buy. I can't remember what else now, but there were one or
two other things that, you know, for other people I'd been asked to
bring out.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- So I had a lot of luggage.
- GUERARD
- I imagine if you were going to do your own cooking and that would be so
different than the normal diet in Turkey.
- HILLS
- Well, no. We had a maid who did the cooking. So that was all right. We
didn't have to cook, so I wasn't asked to bring anything back from that
point of view, apart from the Angostura Bitters. There were Aspirin and
things like that, that you don't know if you're going to be able to get
and I can't really remember if we were able to get them or not. Probably
were, but I don't remember now. She'd chosen for us a very nice
apartment. You know, I began to feel settled and we had, at that time, a
nice Turkish maid who did speak a little English. She'd been cooking for
the diplomatic corps there for a long time and so, that was fine. And
the next day, I was taken to the school [Turkish Ballet School] and
started to teach straight away. It was part of the, it was called the
Devlet Konservatuvari- - I don't remember anymore how you say, "of
Turkey," but, Türk.
- GUERARD
- It was the national conservatory.
- HILLS
- National conservatory. And they had actors and musicians and I think
they had some painters and a national dance department and our little
ballet department . Joy had been trying to get some students to start
over again, you know, and finally, we got them- -some of them- -from
orphanages, because when we set up an audition, the fathers brought
their fattest daughters because in Turkey, to be fat is to be beautiful.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And so, to bring their most beautiful daughters to us, they brought the
fat ones, not the thin ones. But the orphanages had thin ones and we got
some boys from there, too. And so, we had a nucleus of-- It's hard to
remember exactly. I would think about twenty children. And they were the
only twenty children there because the others were all in their late
teens.
- GUERARD
- Now, had some of these come from Istanbul?
- HILLS
- Two or three. Only two or three. And two or three teenagers had come
from Istanbul.
- GUERARD
- So they ranged in age from ten on?
- HILLS
- Ten to sixteen, I suppose. And the rest of the students were all over
sixteen and they were thrilled to have these little toddlers coming in.
You know, they had a lovely system of looking after these little ones,
which was quite delightful. But we felt very responsible for them. You
know, they were there with all these possibly corrupting influences you
know. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Well, my goodness, tampons and losing weight and all that. It must have
been just such a shock. [laughs]
- HILLS
- It was. It was a definite culture shock, added to which, the two of us
could not eat out.
- GUERARD
- I don't imagine you were allowed to go out very much at all then, huh?
- HILLS
- No. [Kemal] Atatürk who, at the end of the Turkish independence war, had
changed the culture from Middle Eastern towards European so that women
were allowed to go not covered- -not with their heads covered- -and that
sort of thing. They could wear European clothes, though a lot of the
older people didn't. And we were allowed to go on buses and all that
sort of thing. That was okay.
- GUERARD
- During the day, right?
- HILLS
- No, it was quite safe at night.
- GUERARD
- Was it really?
- HILLS
- Surprisingly, absolutely safe. I found afterwards, it was, I think, one
of the safest countries you could possibly have lived in because men
knew that you didn't approach people, particularly not Europeans. I
mean, we got looked at and being blond, as I was, I got looked at very
much. But it was definitely a definite feeling of segregation. They
wouldn't come near you. On the other hand, if you tried to go even to
get a-- If you were hot and had been walking, you wanted to go and get a
glass of lemonade, nobody would serve you.
- GUERARD
- Oh! So you were allowed to be out, but you weren't allowed to--?
- HILLS
- Weren't allowed to be--
- GUERARD
- Mingle?
- HILLS
- Mingle. No, you couldn't sit at a sidewalk cafe and be served. If we'd
sat there, we'd just have sat there, but nobody would have come and
served us. We had to find somebody from the embassy or something like
that if we wanted to go to eat out or some male to take us, which was a
very strange feeling.
- GUERARD
- And then if a male would take you, could--?
- HILLS
- Then we could go.
- GUERARD
- Could you eat in the public places?
- HILLS
- Oh, yes! Yes, yes. As long as we were accompanied by a man. One each. It
wasn't any use one man with two women. Had to be two men, two women.
- GUERARD
- And when you did this, were there also Turkish women eating out with
Turkish men?
- HILLS
- Oh, yes! Yes.
- GUERARD
- Was that okay?
- HILLS
- Oh, that was okay. Yes. But not on your own. We found that we did,
ultimately, get invited to what are called tea parties. And Turkish
women get together in vast numbers at parties in the afternoon where
they sit and drink little glasses of tea and eat enormous quantities of
very sticky cakes. Sweetest sweet, sweet, sweet things. Nothing other
than cake. And they chatter away, who knows what about, you know. But we
got invited to a few of those, which was quite fun and becoming part of
the culture.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- The other shock we had was that-- I told you I arrived not knowing a
word of Turkish and not having been able to learn it. We found we
weren't going to be paid until we had taught a demonstration class in
Turkish.
- GUERARD
- Oh my goodness!
- HILLS
- And so, we got a teacher and I learned Turkish in two weeks flat. Joy
learned a little because she'd been there for two years, but she'd
always had an interpreter with her when she was teaching, up to that
point. And although there was an interpreter there, she didn't take part
in the teaching at all. So in two weeks, I was learning to do all the
part of teaching that I do in English, in Turkish.
- GUERARD
- Oh my goodness.
- HILLS
- With, of course, the French terminology mixed in.
- GUERARD
- Yes. [laughs] Oh my gosh!
- HILLS
- It was very pedestrian Turkish, but it was enough for the heads of the
conservatory to say, "Okay, we'll pay you." But it's an incentive to
learn a language, honestly.
- GUERARD
- Yes .
- HILLS
- Still talking about money, they had quite a good system of payment
there. You got exactly two- thirds- - Everybody in the entire country
got two- thirds of their salary. The other third went straight to taxes.
You never saw it and so you didn't have to worry at the end of the year
whether you owed or whether you'd get anything back or all these sort of
things. One-third just went and that was the entire taxes. There weren't
any others. And it's a very good idea. But, of course, a third of very
little is a lot more than a third of quite a lot. And we were quite well
paid, I must say. We weren't allowed to go beyond the ten mile limit of
Ankara. Because we were aliens, we had to stay within ten miles of
Ankara. And in April, our contracts came up for renewal and they had to
be signed by every member of the government .
- GUERARD
- Every member of the government?
- HILLS
- Every member of the government. Now, every member of the government is
very seldom-- This was because we were aliens, not-- This didn't happen
to everybody. Every member of the government is seldom in Turkey
together and for two months, we weren't paid at all. And so, we became
distressed British citizens, which meant that the British Embassy paid
us until we could pay them back. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Oh. Thank goodness.
- HILLS
- Yes, I know. By then, we knew the ambassador quite well, so it was okay.
But, you know, you do feel somewhat, I don't know, frightened, being in
a foreign country in that-- Vulnerable is the word I was after.
- GUERARD
- Extremely vulnerable.
- HILLS
- Yes. Really, we were scared. We did have fun. I'm not talking about
teaching at all, am I? This is dreadful .
- GUERARD
- No, this is really fascinating.
- HILLS
- We had great fun, though, as two unmarried, unattached English girls.
Every time that there was a big banquet at the British Embassy where
visiting men came, to make the table right, you know, you have to have
man, woman, man, woman, man, woman, all around a banqueting table .
- GUERARD
- Oh, you do?
- HILLS
- You do. And Joy and I were often invited to these gorgeous banquets
because they needed two odd women [pause] or more. You know, they'd get
any English woman. There were two others who were teaching at the school
for English children in Ankara, so they were there, too. Wonderful food.
Of course, we put on weight like you wouldn't believe.
- GUERARD
- Well--
- HILLS
- Because we were living at nine thousand feet and you can't burn up the
energy that you otherwise would if you were living at-- Your metabolism
is quite different at nine thousand feet from sea level .
- GUERARD
- Oh, I didn't realize that.
- HILLS
- You can't dance for anything like long enough. We had visiting dancers
come out from England to do performances and they had to have oxygen in
the wings .
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- It took me about three weeks to get acclimated.
- GUERARD
- I experienced that in Mexico City, also.
- HILLS
- Yes, you would. Yes.
- GUERARD
- Margaret, we're almost to the end of this side.
- HILLS
- I thought we might be.
- GUERARD
- Let's end it here and pick it up again.
- HILLS
- Okay.
1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE II MARCH 31, 1997
- HILLS
- Well, I digressed enough about the fun of being there and I should talk
about the school. As I said, we had at least twenty children. We divided
them into two classes and then there was a teenage class . And we met
every day. First class, I think, was at nine o'clock and we used to go
to work by taxi . A taxi came to pick us up and brought us back, but
there were times when I chose to walk. It was a long walk but it was a
very, as I said, a very safe place. It was okay to walk. We actually
made the clothes for the children to dance in, in class.
- GUERARD
- You did?
- HILLS
- Yes. We had a sewing machine in the apartment and there was no way of
buying anything. There weren't any little tunics or leotards or anything
like that, so we made the costumes. The tunics we made for them and
little knickers to wear underneath.
- GUERARD
- Oh .
- HILLS
- The boys were okay. They could buy a tee shirt and little black knickery
things. They were used to wearing uniform because they wore at school,
all Turkish children, a black overall thing with a white collar. Boys
and girls, the same. A pleated smock, I suppose it was, did up down the
back and they all looked identical. Very charming children, beautifully
mannered. If they did something wrong and you told them that you know
what they'd done was not really quite the right thing, they had a way of
crying without creasing up their faces or making any noise.
- GUERARD
- Oh my gosh !
- HILLS
- Tears just run down their faces.
- GUERARD
- For giving them normal corrections?
- HILLS
- It breaks your heart. Yes. And they make a sort of praying gesture with
their hands not quite closed but with the fingertips touching on their
forehead and bent forward a little. And it's their way of saying, "I'm
really deeply sorry." But you can't be angry with them when this
happens. I mean, big, big tears coming out of enormous brown eyes, you
know. [laughs] They're so sad. But absolutely charming. Perfect manners,
saying, in Turkish, when you come into the studio in the morning, a
little bow and "Good morning." And as you go out, a bow and, "Good
morning." And absolutely just so good mannered. It was wonderful . Never
ran anywhere. They always walked.
- GUERARD
- [laughs] Not like American children.
- HILLS
- No! Not like any children anywhere else. And, of course, it was
aggravating that they could all speak perfect, perfect Turkish and I was
struggling, you know. Nothing makes you feel inadequate more than a
child who can speak the language and you can't. But they were very
helpful . I was trying to teach battement frappe. For those who know
what a battement frappe is, you'll understand the story. If you don't,
then it won't. But I was trying to describe how the toes brush across
the floor and one of the little boys put up his hand and said, in
Turkish, "Like matches . "
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- And, I thought, "That's absolutely right. That's what you do with a
match across the box when you want to strike the match." And, so he
said, "Kibrit, Miss Cream!" which is the nearest they could get to Miss
Graham. They tried to say, "Miss Graham" and they couldn't. It was just
something their tongues couldn't get 'round and I was known as Miss
Cream. [Guerard laughs] It was really rather nice. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes, I like that!
- HILLS
- Kibrit is the Turkish for matches. And it just described the movement so
perfectly. It was nice to know that in spite of my difficulty with the
language, they could understand really pretty well what I was trying to
say to them.
- GUERARD
- Yes. That must have been so gratifying.
- HILLS
- It was. It was really nice. But trying to say, you know, "Point your toe
to the side," teaching a pas de bourree for instance, "Put it behind the
other one, step to the side and then close it in front," with all the
nuances of the language, was really quite hard. And the language is a
little like German in that the verb comes at the end and all the
qualifying things of the verb come at the end of that. So that you don't
know if it's positive or negative or whether it's a question or not
until you get to the end of the verb at the end of the sentence. And
you're trying to construct this in your head, translating out of-- You
know, I wasn't thinking in Turkish. And when you're trying to listen to
what people are asking you or telling you, you're listening all the time
to what's going to come at the end of this. You recognize the verb.
Finally, you've got to the verb and are they asking a question or are
they telling you something? And you don't know till you get to the end
of it. So it ' s nerve-wracking, really, trying to function and work
with that foreign language. But, fortunately, [Kemal] Atatürk had
changed the writing and so that the writing was in letters that we
understood, though some of them had different values. A C with a cedilla
is a "che" and a C without is a "J." And the "ke" sound is a K, always.
So once you understood that, it was completely phonetic, which was
helpful.
- GUERARD
- Then you just had to translate the--?
- HILLS
- Yes, what you'd read phonetically into English back in your head.
- GUERARD
- And did any of these children have any French or English?
- HILLS
- No.
- GUERARD
- No.
- HILLS
- They were learning English, but-- And I think learning French, but they
didn't have it when we were there. But they were so bright. It was
really lovely. They really wanted their eye-- They have a way of their
eyes just sparkling with interest at what you're trying to teach them.
So it was exciting to have that rapport, visually from them, if not from
their words. It was really nice.
- GUERARD
- Now, I'm assuming that this was their very first introduction to ballet.
- HILLS
- Absolutely. And they'd never seen any.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And not only had they never seen any, but there were no films, no
videotape, nothing for them to see. And so, we organized that some
dancers should come out from England to do a small performance. Moira
Shearer came and Michael Somes and-- Do you know, I've forgotten who
else. Some corps de ballet members came out and did a little performance
for them. And, of course, they were the ones who had to have the oxygen
in the wings because they couldn't survive through a performance at that
altitude. But it did help them after that because they had some picture
of what they were trying to do. And, of course, we demonstrated as much
as we could to show them and Joy and I-- We were both quite young. We
actually made ourselves [Les] Sylphides costumes and danced some of the Sylphides solos for them at a recital, which just, again, gave
them a little picture of what they were trying to do. And we had them do
little dances for each other and did a little performance. And the
president of Turkey [Celal Bayar] heard about this and he sort of
clapped his hands and said, "Bring on the dancing girls!" you know
[laughs] for King Abdullah [ibn Husayn] of Jordan, when he was on a
state visit to Turkey. We went to the president's palace with the
children to do a performance and he had some of the opera stars there,
as well. And, these little tots-- It was very, very late at night and we
were in, as a dressing room, the room next to the big dining hall and
the food was brought through our dressing room. And all of it was on
pure gold plates.
- GUERARD
- Oh my gosh!
- HILLS
- And decorated-- You know, you sometimes see pictures of decorated food
like you think, "It's never been done." It was! I mean, swans with the
necks on-- And all made out of food. And fish, all decorated on these
gold plates, carried through. Plate after plate after plate, all sorts
of different things. It went on and on and on and we weren't going to
dance till after the dinner was over.
- GUERARD
- Oh my gosh. How could you?
- HILLS
- And finally at midnight, we did our show. And when the show was over, we
were all taken into another anteroom of the palace, where the table was
laid with gold knives and forks . And gold platters for the ordinary
plate to be put on top of. And it really was-- I mean it was literally
gold. It wasn't, you know, just brass or something like that. And the
handles of the gold knives had jewels set in them. And these little
toddlers-- I mean [not] toddlers [but] ten-year-olds were sat down at
this table.
- GUERARD
- Who had come from the orphanage.
- HILLS
- Who had come from the orphanage
- GUERARD
- Ah !
- HILLS
- And were given-- Presumably, it was the leftover food, you know, the
stuff that hadn't all been eaten. But it was all nicely arranged on an
individual plate for them. Center of the table was huge baskets of fruit
and they asked if they could take some of the fruit back to the
dormitories for their friends. So they stuffed all [their] bags with all
the fruit. They took it all. The waiters with their gloves on and
everything were charming and brought them doggy bags, as we call them
here, to take the food back to their friends. They finally got back at
four o'clock in the morning.
- GUERARD
- Oh my gosh!
- HILLS
- And we were planning-- We said to the person in charge, we said, "Well,
you know, they should be allowed to sleep in, in the morning. We won't
come and teach them." They said, "Oh, no, no, no. You can't do that. It
would set a-- They can't stay in the dormitory asleep when everybody--
Oh, no, no. They must have their classes." So, we had to get up, too,
and teach them. We were very gentle with them the next day and they were
very tired little kids but so excited. A wonderful , wonderful
opportunity for them. But to go to the teaching point of view, they all
have very, very long Achilles tendons.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- And the reason-- Well, I don't know which is the chicken and the egg,
but if you tell a Turkish child to take, to sit down and rest, they
don't sit with their buttocks on the ground because that's not
considered clean. And so, they crouch onto their heels and both heels
are on the floor when they're in full plie, so to speak. So when we were
teaching them plies, we had to teach them to lift their heels slightly
so that they would look the same as other people. They had incredibly
long Achilles tendons! Now, whether they crouch because they,
hereditarily, have long Achilles tendons or whether the tendons have
elongated over generations because they don't sit right down, there's no
way to tell. But they had enormous elevation. Because of this, you know,
they bounded so high. It's wonderful!
- GUERARD
- [laughs] Yeah!
- HILLS
- And had nice-- Most of them had very nice insteps. Rather short legs
and, of course, they're short. As a people they're short, so we didn't
have many tall ones. Mostly short and very bouncy. The authorities
wanted to cover the studio floor with a wall-to-wall, virtually
wall-to-wall, Turkish carpet.
- GUERARD
- Why?
- HILLS
- Because every floor is covered with Turkish carpet.
- GUERARD
- Uh-huh. They just didn't realize that ballet is done on a wood floor?
- HILLS
- No. They thought we were very Spartan and very peculiar, not wanting-- I
mean, carpet. If we could have said, "Yes, we'll have it" and rolled it
up and brought it home, we could have made a fortune. [Guerard laughs]
They were gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. You think what a small Turkish
rug costs.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And they wanted to give us one eighty by eighty.
- GUERARD
- Oh .
- HILLS
- Feet. And thought we were very odd. We never did get rosin. [We]
couldn't find out how to get it, so we didn't have rosin, but it was a
new floor. They built the building for us, so it didn't get slippery,
fortunately.
- GUERARD
- Now, that just reminds me, did you have to bring the shoes for them?
- HILLS
- We wrote to England and they sent them.
- GUERARD
- Oh, I see.
- HILLS
- They didn't have them there. By the time we'd been there a year, we were
getting some shoemakers who were trying out how to do it. We didn't find
any successful ones in the year we were there, but they were making an
effort. They even tried to do pointe shoes.
- GUERARD
- They did?
- HILLS
- Yeah. We gave them some and they took them apart to see if they could do
them. They were getting there, but it wasn't yet success. I'm sure they
do now, but they didn't then. So we imported those, which was difficult
and very expensive. The duty on incoming things was astronomical . A
friend of mine, at Christmas, sent me just a powder puff in the
Christmas card and I went-- They didn't deliver it to the apartment
because it had something inside. I had to go to the customs place and
they wanted to charge me an astronomical amount for it. And I said, "No.
Give me the letter and keep the powder puff," you know.
- GUERARD
- Right .
- HILLS
- Is this a moment to stop again?
- GUERARD
- I think I'll stop just while this trash pick-up goes by. [tape recorder
off]
- HILLS
- I think it was the language thing which made us unable to get rosin. We
couldn't find a translation and presumably, the violinists had it for
their bows and things, but we were never able to get any. The other
language problem we had, also-- You know because you've been in class,
how one has to talk about the tail bone and the pelvis and where to put
it and that sort of thing. And nobody, but nobody, would tell us the
name for that part of the anatomy. They must have a name for it, but
it's one of those things you don't talk about
- GUERARD
- Well, they must have been very brave to even show--
- HILLS
- Uncover it.
- GUERARD
- Uncover it, right.
- HILLS
- Yes, yes exactly.
- GUERARD
- And talk about where to place it.
- HILLS
- Yes, and we just had to do it by feel, you know, and try and get them to
stand correctly by putting your hands on them, which is not what you
should do. When you're teaching ballet, you shouldn't really touch
students. You should demonstrate and talk but you're not supposed to
touch a student, really. In desperation, one does sometimes, but it's
not good practice. But we had to there. And, I still--
- GUERARD
- But it does help a person to understand how it feels to be in a certain
position.
- HILLS
- Yes. That's right. But, really and truly, the teaching of ballet is no
hands on. The rules say you don't touch. You can run a finger up
somebody's back, perhaps, or just point to a muscle, but you don't get
hold of a leg and move it because you can injure somebody. By the time
you've pushed a leg up and they've yelled, the injury is already there,
so you don't do it. But we did there . And I still don't know what it
would have been called. [laughs] Even-- We got to know a dentist very
well. Extremely well. And in my spare time, I taught his little boy
English. But he wouldn't tell us. He said [gesturing], "No." [He] just
shook his head and-- A very funny thing in Turkey, if you want to say,
by gesture with your head, "No," you nod your head.
- GUERARD
- Oh, how confusing.
- HILLS
- Yes, very confusing. So, it's more a toss backwards. Up and down with a
sharp inflection upwards but even so, it's odd. It's not your natural
instinct.
- GUERARD
- Yes. [laughs]
- HILLS
- And he made that gesture when we asked him if he would tell us what that
was called. He just wouldn't.
- GUERARD
- Just forbidden.
- HILLS
- Absolutely. Yeah. It's not something you say. I don't know what they do
in medical school. They must break down the barriers somewhere.
[laughter] The children had-- I'm hopping about between one thing and
the other. They had quite nice extensions of their legs. They went up
quite well. They were fairly loose. A pliable body in a way, tending to
slightly bow legs. Short legs and longish body. That's the same with
Greeks, I've noticed when we've been to Greece. You know, my eye looks
at shapes of people walking along and wonders if they could dance, you
know, and you wouldn't chose a Turkish body as the ideal for dancing.
I'm sure they found some but probably the audiences wouldn't like what
we like, particularly the long, thin Balanchine girl, you know, with
very long legs and short body. They probably wouldn't- -
- GUERARD
- The Turkish audience, you mean?
- HILLS
- A Turkish audience wouldn't enjoy watching that sort of shape, I don't
think. It's not their ideal look.
- GUERARD
- Were some of these children chosen to go to the ballet school because
they had done other kinds of dance?
- HILLS
- No, they were taught other sorts of-- They were taught national dance,
national dance of Turkey when they were there, but I don't think any of
them had done any. I don't think they'd done anything. One or two of the
teenagers who'd come from Istanbul had learned with a teacher, a Russian
in Istanbul, I think the only ballet school in Istanbul. [She was] a
very old lady and I don't remember her name because I never met her, but
they'd learned a little from her. We had to reteach them a little bit. I
don't know how much of a dancer she'd been, whether she was just a very
lowly member of the corps de ballet or not, but she hadn't taught them
very well. But they knew something. They knew what it was about. We were
sponsored in to be there by what was called the Ingilis Kultur Haiti
(British Council) and they sponsored quite a lot of visiting musicians
and that sort of thing. And they were very helpful if we got into
difficulties of any sort. We were also taken under the wing of the
president, President [Ismet] Inonü and he allowed us to use his state
presidential box at the opera house if we wanted to go to the theater,
which was also very special. He wasn't the president who asked us to go
and dance for King Abdullah. There ' d been a shift, a change of
government, in the meantime, so President Inonü had been-- I think he
was called Celal Bayar or something like that, the one who took over. He
was the one whom we were introduced to King Abdullah through. King
Abdullah was assassinated shortly afterwards. It was one of those,
again, exciting moments, you know, where you meet somebody very famous
quite unexpectedly. It was fun.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Was there a nice theater there?
- HILLS
- Yes, a beautiful theater called The Big Theatre. It was very new. All
Ankara was very new. It was still being built. And the big Atatürk
Mausoleum and Parliament buildings were being built when we were there
and I read recently that they are having to pull some of it down and
refurbish it. You know, it wasn't finished when we were there. It makes
me feel terribly old when those sort of things happen. I understand
Ankara is now a huge city and it was quite small then. There was an old
town, which was just a lot of shanties up a hillside. And, I never went
into it, but I understand to get to the house above you, you actually
went through the house below.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- So I was told. Whether it's true or not, I have no idea, but the only
way to the top house was through all the ones below it. Maybe there were
staircases on the side, but they wouldn't be much use in winter. Winter
is very cold there. Summer, very hot. The year I was there, we didn't
have any snow, but normally they have very, very thick snow. But we
didn't. GUEFIARD: Were you there for just one year, then?
- HILLS
- Just for one year, mm hmm. Did a lot in that year, but [laughs]-- We had
to write out a syllabus for the school because it's very bureaucratic.
You couldn't just go in and teach and leave. They had--
- GUERARD
- Did you have to write it out in Turkish?
- HILLS
- No. We wrote it in English and it was translated. We also wrote the
history of ballet for their national encyclopedia .
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- And that was translated for us. I've got a copy that they sent me in
Turkish afterwards.
- GUERARD
- Oh, how wonderful.
- HILLS
- Yeah. Joy and I did that between us, mostly from our own memory and
writing to England to say, "Would you look up so and so and let us know,
" and so forth, which is another thing we had to do. We also made all
the costumes for the recitals.
- GUERARD
- Now, did you have access to the same kinds of fabrics that you were used
to in England?
- HILLS
- Yes, actually they had wonderful fabrics, much better than in England.
Everybody makes their own clothes there. You couldn't just go into a
shop and buy clothes. There weren't any shops of that sort. You could
buy stockings, you could buy underwear, but no outer garments. So there
were fabric shops. Every other shop was a fabric shop. Of course, no
nylon because it hadn't got there yet, but cotton and pure silk and
satins and a lot of it very gaudy by our standards. Linen, beautiful
silk, gorgeous silk in, of course, what was beautiful colors, dyed
exquisitely.
- GUERARD
- I bet.
- HILLS
- And so, we were able to have enormous choice of fabrics .
- GUERARD
- And you had a budget for costumes?
- HILLS
- Yes. Well, we just bought it and handed the bill in, were given the
money back. So I guess we didn't ever go above what they thought was
rational, because we never had anything queried from that point of view.
- GUERARD
- Had you learned how to sew costumes back--?
- HILLS
- Oh, yes. I'd learned that when I was a child. I made a lot of my own
costumes . My mother was no good at sewing. And in England then, when I
was a child, again, you didn't buy clothes in shops. I mean, poor people
did, but if you weren't poor, you always had a dressmaker make all your
clothes. And so, I was very used to standing, as a child, for hours,
with costumes being fitted on me. I'd also done modeling as a child.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- And so, again, you had the clothes changed to fit you. And so, your
eye-- You learned how to sew just by seeing the dressmaker do it. And
when we didn't have dressmakers to make costumes for shows and things, I
easily made my own. It was just-- I didn't even have to think about it,
you know. I learned sewing at school, also. You know, you make
pillowcases and underwear and embroider them and all those sort of
things. You made everything by hand. You weren't allowed to use a
machine at school. But at home, I used a machine. It just seeped in by
osmosis, I think.
- GUERARD
- It's part of growing up. It's not that way anymore .
- HILLS
- No, it's not. But I can still do it easily.
- GUERARD
- That's fabulous. You must have had a ball making costumes.
- HILLS
- Oh, it was enormous fun. The kids were very wriggly when you wanted to
fit them, of course. [laughter] It was great fun. You know, you'd draw
the costume first and then decide what fabric you were going to make it
of and then buy the stuff and go home and make it in the evenings.
- GUERARD
- I'm sorry. Just one more time. [tape recorder off] Sorry for that
interruption.
- HILLS
- I was talking about the children doing recitals and making the costumes
for them. There was a surprising amount of cultural life in Ankara,
which we became part of by being invited to things. The Germans would
get together a lot and sing German lieder to each other and have piano
concerts in their houses or wherever they were renting, you know, the
part of the German ambassadorial staff. And so, I became much more aware
of that sort of music, which is something I knew nothing about until
then. And the British Council brought out George Weldon to conduct the
Turkish Orchestra with the pianist, Moura Lympany, who is still
performing. A wonderful musician! And we watched a recording that they
did for the Turkish- - For sale in Turkey, I presume. And a concert that
they did at The Big Theatre, that we were talking about before. And,
strangely, we take now, in the United States, a magazine which sends us
a CD every month and in it, it said- -there was a little tiny two-line
advertisement- -" If anybody knows anything about George Weldon, we are
very interested to hear from you."
- GUERARD
- Oh, really?
- HILLS
- And so, I sent them a photograph of George Weldon and Moura Lympany in
Turkey and they wrote back and said they were so thrilled and the only
people they'd heard from were me, from Los Angeles, and somebody else
from San Francisco, in the entire world that this magazine goes to.
[laughter] George Weldon is English. So, they said, "We are just two
ladies who were very great fans of George Weldon years ago."
- GUERARD
- Wow .
- HILLS
- So strange after all those years, you know, to have this photograph to
send them. The other person I met, whom I regret not having kept in
touch with, was an archaeologist called Seaton Lloyd. He was digging in
Turkey and came to the embassy and at one of these banquets, I met him
and his wife. And he was talking about what he was doing and at that
time, I wasn't terribly interested in archaeology. I became incredibly
more interested later and one of my children is an historian and did do
some archaeology. And my son-in-law [Jerry Podany] arranged for us, last
summer, to be taken all over the Parthenon by the modern architect who
is restoring the Parthenon. But if I'd only had my interest at that time
when I was living in Turkey, I could have gone to all these places and
seen them. While we were in Turkey this summer- -we went back- -we went
to a tour of Ephesus and the guide said, "Can you say, 'Kusadasi?'" And,
you know, when you've spoken a language for a year, you can speak it and
I could by the end, so I said it right and all the other people on the
bus said it wrong. And the guide looked at me and then without even
thinking when we got off the bus I said to the driver, "Tesekkurederus,
" which is, "Thank you very much on our behalf, my husband and me." And
then the guide said, "You speak Turkish." And, I said, "Well I did, you
know, fifty years ago." And he wanted to know how and where I'd lived
and he said, "Do you know [Rudolf] Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn?" And he
turned out to be the biggest ballet fan on the face of the earth. And
so, he took my name and address and where I lived and he said, "Next
time there is something that the Turkish National Ballet is doing, I
will write and let you know." [laughter] So after all those years, this
little guy who is a great ballet fan in Turkey, said the ballet is doing
very well in Turkey and it's quite famous in Turkey and tours in Turkey.
But, they--
- GUERARD
- So the ballet that was set up by yourself and Joy Newton at the time has
continued.
- HILLS
- It continued. We both came back to England to get married because while
I was there, Brian [Hills] , who had been so upset about my going,
finally wrote and proposed. He'd intended to telephone because he was
putting this telephone equipment into Canada and he'd meant to telephone
from Canada to Turkey to inaugurate the line that he just put in. But it
didn't extend as far as Turkey, so he couldn't. So he wrote a proposal.
And I cabled back, "Yes, please." [laughter] So I went back to get
married and Joy had actually, was already married, and her husband had
been posted to Ghana in Africa.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- Or was it the Gambia? The Gambia, it was called in those days. I don't
know what it's called now. And so, she went to join him when that year
was over. And the school went on and the company was gradually built
first by another English girl called Beatrice Appleyard, who'd been in
The Royal Ballet or Sadler's Wells Ballet. And then she married the
director of the Conservatoire, in Turkey, and remained in Turkey, but
both he and she were fired because he'd married an alien.
- GUERARD
- Oh my goodness.
- HILLS
- And so they had to find other- -
- GUERARD
- They had to find somebody else?
- HILLS
- Other work. And then they found somebody else and they got a married
couple called Molly Lake and Travis Kemp, who were Cecchetti-trained and
they went and stayed for a long, long time. They only very, very
recently came back. [They] must be very old by now. But they really
built it and carried it on to its full fruition. And anything that's
there now is really totally their company rather than ours, but it was
fun to be there, ostensibly starting it, at any rate.
- GUERARD
- Right. So did they carry on from the Sadler's Wells syllabus or--?
- HILLS
- I don't really know. In fact, I don't know at all. They were very much
Cecchetti-trained and I think it would have swung more towards
Cecchetti's training than what we had started.
- GUERARD
- You know, I should have asked you, when you were there and you were
teaching them, were you able to really stick with the Sadler's Wells
syllabus or did you have to adapt a little bit?
- HILLS
- We had to adapt it. There's no doubt about that. And the progress was
much slower. They had a facility but it was a different facility. And
yes, we did adapt it. We wrote down in the syllabus the names of the
steps but were rather cautious about what we said each year should be
doing. We did it in elementary, intermediate and advanced so that people
weren't hog- tied to get through a certain amount in one year because we
were so new and the bodies were so really rather different, that we
didn't want anybody to be so tied down. So even if Molly Lake and Travis
Kemp did do Cecchetti rather than what we were doing, the words were the
same. So they probably didn't have to change, bureaucratically , what
was set down to be done. And, of course nobody would know anyway.
[laughs]
- GUERARD
- Right. [laughs] Who would know?
- HILLS
- All these lists of French words, you know. They wouldn't have the
faintest idea what it meant. And I'm still not quite sure-- Well, I
think President Inonü was very much Europeanized and he wanted ballet as
the next step to making Turkey part of Europe, rather than part of Asia.
I think it was a big cultural thing that he wanted to have happen.
- GUERARD
- Right. That by adapting ballet, it would show that they were--?
- HILLS
- Yes, they were part of Europe.
- GUERARD
- They were European.
- HILLS
- Yes. They did an enormous change in a very short time. There's a
wonderful story by a woman called Ann Bridge, who walked across a lot of
Turkey during the time when it was changing. It's part of her
autobiography. Fascinating book. And she talks there about somebody I
met when I was there . She was the mother of a man I met who was to do
with statistics for the United Nations. It was rather fascinating to
read that, you know, they'd met each other, too.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- I love to read things like that, that fill in the culture of somewhere
you've been or something you've done.
- GUERARD
- Yes .
- HILLS
- The school really did very nicely. I think, although I said the progress
was slow, you began-- At the end of the year, we began to get the
feeling of a nice foundation having been put down, you know. We didn't
go away-- Both of us [went home] ; she to join her husband and me to get
married. I didn't go away with the feeling that we'd gone and it was
going to collapse.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- I went away with the feeling that we'd gone and it was ready to expand
and go on. It felt safe to leave it. Do you know what I mean?
- GUERARD
- Yes. Yes. I have read that the goal there was to teach in a certain way
so that eventually, the staff would be Turkish and that the
choreographers would be Turkish, rather than just becoming English or
American.
- HILLS
- Yes, that's right. And they have because in one of the pictures in one
of the books you had, there's a photograph of me with a little girl
called Oya Deliktas [Gurelli] and years later, at The Royal Ballet
School, I went back one day, by chance--It was after I'd left--and there
was a short, little woman who rushed up to me and said, "Hello, Miss
Cream!"
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- And it was Oya, who was, by then, ballet mistress of The National Ballet
of Turkey.
- GUERARD
- Oh, she did go on!
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Oh, that's great!
- HILLS
- She was a tiny, little creature and she was still very short and plump.
But it was such a joy to meet her again, you know.
- GUERARD
- I'll bet.
- HILLS
- And it was entirely by chance that I'd gone that day. One of those
things that just happens, you know. A good thing in life. You're
directed somehow to that situation and there she was.
- GUERARD
- It ' s a wonderful photograph and even though I just saw it in black and
white, I really got the feeling from it that you were sort of a big
sister to her.
- HILLS
- Yes, yes. Well, I think I was doing up her hair band or something in the
photograph. Yes.
- GUERARD
- Yeah .
- HILLS
- So, she was charming.
- GUERARD
- So, you did go back to England to get married and--?
- HILLS
- And got my job back at Sadler's Wells, thank goodness. [laughs] I went
back in July and we got married in August and I was teaching again in
September. And had made enough money, fortunately, in Turkey, to pay
back my parents, who'd subsidized me from June to November .
- GUERARD
- Isn't that nice?
- HILLS
- Yes, or whenever it was. August to November. We were allowed to bring
money back from Turkey which we'd saved, so I felt better about that.
- GUERARD
- Oh, you must have been so proud. That's wonderful !
- HILLS
- Yeah, I was pleased to be able to do it because I'm sure my father
thought he'd never see it again and he was fairly wealthy, but in his
diary when he died, it was carried on year after year, a small sum that
my brother [John Hampson] had owed him from some time or another
[laughs] , so I ' m very glad that mine wasn't there, too. My brother
was furious when he read it. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- I guess he can't pay it back now.
- HILLS
- No. No. He was very upset that my father had gone on. He never asked for
it, John said, but he just carried it on, hoped John would someday pay
up. And Audrey Knight stayed on. She was the one who'd been in Turkey
and whom I'd replaced. She had been successful teaching, so she stayed
on at Sadler's Wells School. And, in fact, she got married the week
before I did.
- GUERARD
- Oh my goodness!
- HILLS
- She'd gone back a year before to get ready to get married and I'd gone
back a month before, and we got married a week apart. And we still keep
in touch. It's nice. We later did quite a lot of stuff together. And the
Sadler's Wells School got its education accreditation, actually while I
was in Turkey. She was there then, when they had the big deal about
everybody, you know, being looked at and all the classes being vetted by
inspectors and that sort of thing. So I missed that. It was rather nice
to have missed it, I think. But from then on, the children didn't have
to pay for their education. They still had to pay for the ballet, but,
of course, it was very much better. And they were starting, then, to
think about having a boarding school for the children .
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- It took a while, but they really wanted to have the children so that
they could have them from all parts of the country and not have them
living with aunts and uncles in London, you know, away from their
parents. They wanted them to be full-time. And they were looking for
premises to do that and didn't find some for a while- -and we'll get to
that later- -but there was this thought going on that it would be great
if the children didn't have to do these vast journeys every day by train
and bus and everything else.
- GUERARD
- Right. It would also afford them a broader selection.
- HILLS
- Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yes. Because there were some children who were
talented and just couldn't come to London. We still had-- Remember way
back I said I started these children in the theater who came after
school in the evenings?
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm .
- HILLS
- We still had those. They were still called junior associates and for
reasons best known to the parents, they wanted them at schools of their
choice. Maybe they wanted them at religious schools, who knows. That
could have been part of-- That didn't occur to me until this minute. And
that is still going on. They still have junior associates who go to
other schools in the daytime and come after school for dancing, in the
evening. And that is now run by a girl called Jocelyn Mather, who was
one of my early junior associates.
- GUERARD
- Huh !
- HILLS
- So, again, you've got the school building its own faculty coming up,
just like the Turkish ones did. In fact, most of the faculty have done
that. And when I go back- -or did go back- -to The Royal Ballet for many
years after I'd left there, I'd taught the entire company at some time
or other during their training.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh.
- HILLS
- So, it's--
- GUERARD
- How wonderful!
- HILLS
- To feel that that is going on, you know, and now Anthony Dowell, Sir
Anthony Dowell, is director of the company and I taught him when he was
little and Dame Antoinette Sibley is president of The Royal Academy and
I taught her when she was little. These were enormous talents, of
course. Just really wonderful.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- You mentioned Naomi Capon a little while ago, and she did a television
documentary of the school.
- GUERARD
- When was that?
- HILLS
- I'm trying to think which year it was. My instinctive memory said it was
1954 [February 18, 1955] [Margaret Graham Hills added the above
bracketed date correction during her review of the transcript.] and yet,
I would have thought it was earlier, so I'm not absolutely sure. I can
look it up. This was for a two-hour long- -I think it was two- hour-
-documentary about the school on British television. And Naomi Capon
spent a year visiting the school, writing the script. And I had, at that
time, no idea how much research and preparation went into what really is
quite a short show on television. I'm sure she was doing other things,
as well, but she got to know us all. She lived the life of the school.
She mingled with the children, talked to them and really got right into
the skin of it. She did, I think, a great job. In those days in
television, some was actually done live. In the [television] studio were
reconstructions of the [dance] studio. And some of it was filmed at the
school, itself. And I was in charge of being at the television studios,
making sure that people got into their costumes in time and were in the
right place and that sort of thing. But I'd also been in the film part.
But as a result, because I was at this television studio when it was
going out on the air, I never saw the program.
- GUERARD
- Oh !
- HILLS
- Never saw the film part or anything. But a few years ago on television,
here in Los Angeles, they did a program- -which, I think, was made in
Europe. I don't think it was made in England, though the commentary was
in English- -about dance. And I was in the kitchen and my husband said,
"Come, quick! You're on television." And they showed a tiny clip of this
television show that we'd done with me on it, fixing a little girl's leg
or something and then they showed a picture of Cecchetti fixing [Anna]
Pavlova in exactly the same way.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- And the next shot was Stanley Holden doing the clog dance from [La] Fille Mai Gardee.
And it was just so bizarre, after all these years, to see this little
bit of it, you know? Anyway, they repeated the program, so we videotaped
it and so now I have a little tiny video of that show, a tiny little bit
of it.
- GUERARD
- Great.
- HILLS
- So, it's fun to have it. But that took a lot of preparation. And we were
not-- When we were filmed doing teaching and that sort of thing for it,
we weren't allowed to speak because we weren't part of the right union.
- GUERARD
- Oh, yes.
- HILLS
- And any of the speaking parts had to be taken by actresses. So where
they wanted the head mistress, say, to talk to somebody else, that part
was played not by the head mistress but by an actress, which was very
sad.
- GUERARD
- There are rules about words.
- HILLS
- Yes. And the live part, there were not words. It was dancing only in the
live part.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- It felt very strange. Scissors and paste sort of job of odd people doing
this, that and the other. But it was very successful and everybody, you
know, had rave notices and so forth. And we had more children coming to
audition afterwards.
- GUERARD
- Oh, you did?
- HILLS
- Yes, it was good publicity.
- GUERARD
- Good publicity.
- HILLS
- Yes, it was. And by that time, we were getting to the massive numbers
and auditioning many Saturdays in the year. So that was a shame because
we lost some of our Saturdays which we might have had off, otherwise,
[laughter]
- GUERARD
- Well, Margaret I think we're going to have to pick up next time.
- HILLS
- Okay, well this is a good place to stop.
- GUERARD
- A good place? Uh-huh.
- HILLS
- Yes. Yeah, we said we'd cover Turkey today and we more or less did, I
think.
- GUERARD
- It's wonderful. What a wonderful experience!
- HILLS
- It was. I wouldn't have done without that for anything. It was
absolutely fabulous. Such a different life.
- GUERARD
- Yeah.
1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE I APRIL 11, 1997
- GUERARD
- Well, Margaret, we've got you back in England after Turkey, and the
Sadler's Wells [School] is beginning to grow rapidly.
- HILLS
- 'Tis, indeed. Yes. Not a great deal happened. I mean, one looks for
incident to try and pin down this year from that year from the next
year, but from 1951 until about 1954 --apart from just some slight
changes in faculty and the standard of the students we were choosing
going up- -not a lot of moment happened. My life went on very much the
same, apart from having to cook for a husband and run a house, which was
a little more difficult. And we moved and lived further out of London
than where I'd lived before, halfway between his job and mine. It was a
fairly stable time. We were still doing summer schools for teachers from
all over the world every summer, which was a lovely challenge, actually.
It happened at the end of the school year. The school year in England
ends about the last week in July, and we had the [International] Summer
School for Teachers following immediately after that. And, because the
demonstrations for those teachers were done by the students in the
school, there was a lot of competition amongst the students to be good
enough to be chosen as demonstrators, and I think that was an enormous
incentive for them.
- GUERARD
- I bet.
- HILLS
- In each class, as we took two or three from each class to demonstrate
the various technical things.
- GUERARD
- Oh, what an opportunity to be seen by these teachers from all over!
- HILLS
- Exactly. And, of course, the ones that were chosen got a lot of extra
coaching in the [Sadler's Wells School] Syllabus so that they would
perform it perfectly. And they were going to be performing in front of
teachers from all over the world, the entire faculty of the school. Dame
Ninette de Valois, herself --she wasn't Dame then, but she became one
sometime around about that time- -and soloists from the company who
would drop by to watch. So they felt themselves under an enormous
pressure. And of course, we as the faculty did, because we wanted them
to be very good too, you know.
- GUERARD
- Sure!
- HILLS
- So we rehearsed them like anything. I also, each year, did a dissection
of the corps de ballet work and some solos from various ballets, which I
had to write out and get printed up with all the floor patterns and
everything else so the teachers could understand them and rehearse. In
the case of Swan Lake, I did a small version.
The company uses thirty-two dancers and I did a version with eighteen,
because we didn't think most schools would have thirty-two students good
enough to put on a Swan Lake or anything like
it. And I did [Les] Sylphides and we did solos from Coppélia
and we did the Dance of the Hours from Coppélia. That took a long time, for the
teachers to write it all down. They'd say, "What do you do with your
left arm on measure seven in so and so?" And I had to have it all
clearly in my mind. We didn't write it-- We wrote out the patterns for
them, but we didn't write out the steps for them because everybody has
their own terminology and their own way of understanding, and we didn't
think they'd probably understand, necessarily correctly, what we wrote
down. I had it written down for me so that I knew, but they wrote it in
their own words. And, of course, you always get somebody who is very
slow at picking it up and yet very pernickety about getting it right.
- GUERARD
- Well, they were leaving- -
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- So they wouldn't have had the opportunity to ask you again.
- HILLS
- Never an opp [ortunity] - - No. And, of course, this in the days before
videotape, before Benesh Notation was known to anybody and most people
didn't know Labanotation, either. So they did need to know. We
understood this. But, you can get tired. [laughs] Very tired. I'd look
at the poor students and say, "Do sit down while they're writing."
They'd be standing there with their arms crossed for hours. Then I got
wise to it and had two or three of them standing in the position while
the others sat down and alternated them a little bit. But, you know, you
actually get very fatigued standing in a position for a long time. It's
like being a model for a painter. You can only do it for so long. But
they were very rewarding. The teachers were so receptive and so excited
about being there, you know. Those were our highlights of the year. And
the other highlight of work hard time was when the students had to take
their RAD [Royal Academy of Dancing] examinations, which I'd trained
them for, also. Everybody had to take one each year. And that's hard,
because it was just-- It was different from our method. Different enough
to be awkward. And the RAD, at that time, was also very picky about
things-- Well, they still are, pretty much, [about] having it exactly
their way. So if our dancers instinctively put a head on one side, they
had to remember that for the RAD exam, it absolutely had to go the other
way.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- And in a way, it was hard for them because I was teaching them both. If
you have somebody who's only teaching one method, the sight of that
person will sort of trigger the right reaction.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- But if you forget who Miss Graham or what method Miss Graham is teaching
today, you can make mistakes unnecessarily. It was hard for them.
- GUERARD
- So, first of all, you had to take your exams within a week of each other
and then you had to teach both methods at the same time.
- HILLS
- Well, I didn't teach-- My exams were in RAD and Cecchetti. I didn't
teach Cecchetti at The Royal Ballet School .
- GUERARD
- Right. Oh, that's right.
- HILLS
- I did teach the RAD and I did teach The Royal Ballet School's own
method. It got much more similar because in 1955, I think, Dame Adeline
Genée asked three of us from the faculty at Sadler's Wells School if we
would compile a syllabus for the more talented students of The Royal
Academy method. And it wasn't, at that time, supposed to be part of the
examination syllabus. It was so that teachers who taught the RAD method
and had a star pupil who might go on to be professional, the Royal
Academy, or Dame Adeline Genee recognized that their training was for
all children and not for the future professional.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- And so Pamela May, Audrey Knight and I were asked to go meet Dame
Adeline Genée to discuss this new method of teaching for these talented
students. And Dame Adeline Genée was then in her nineties, I'm sure--she
died very shortly afterwards--and we were all scared to death of going
to meet her.
- GUERARD
- Why?
- HILLS
- Because she was so famous. And she had never been seen for years without
her leather gloves on.
- GUERARD
- Really?
- HILLS
- She always dressed immaculately in very, very expensive, fine leather
gloves. This was, you know, one of those things. She had examined me in
my Elementary and Advanced [RAD examinations], so I had seen her and
been intimidated then. But we were-- Even Pamela May, who was a
ballerina with the company, you know, and teaching in the school also,
she was somewhat intimidated. And it was an incredible honor to be asked
by Dame Adeline to go and do this, you know. And she said, "Would we do
it?" and of course we agreed. We weren't paid or anything like that, and
it didn't occur to us to ask for payment. [laughter] And we used to--
The three of us would meet twice a week and we worked out the six years
of training for the talented student.
- GUERARD
- So then, would the talented student have completely different classes
than the others?
- HILLS
- No, they would still take their RAD exams but these would be
supplementary classes that the teachers would learn how to teach these
special people. In fact, of course, it didn't really work out like that.
- GUERARD
- No?
- HILLS
- What we worked out became the RAD's new syllabus. It became their new
examination syllabus. [doorbell rings]
- GUERARD
- Excuse me. [tape recorder off] Sorry about that.
- HILLS
- Anyway, as it happened, while we were working on this syllabus that
became The Royal Academy's new examination syllabus, all three of us
became pregnant.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- So this was-- By the time we were getting towards printing, it was 1956
and Pamela had her daughter, Caroline, first. And then Audrey had a son
and I had a daughter [Sarah Hills Larson]. So the maternity clothes were
passed down very carefully from one to the other, which was very useful.
And the first three years of this six-year syllabus, the first one was
in pink, for Pamela's daughter.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- The next one was in blue, for Audrey's son. And by the time we'd
finished the third one, Sarah hadn't been born yet, so that was white
because we didn't know which one it was going to be. And then they went
on to other colors afterwards, but that's the reason, on the original
printing, those were in pink and blue and white [laughter], which I
don't suppose many people will remember nowadays.
- GUERARD
- No, and they're appropriate ballet colors, anyway .
- HILLS
- Yes, they are. That took two years, so it was quite a long spell. We
were doing that absolutely free and gratis. We didn't get a penny for
it.
- GUERARD
- And twice a week?
- HILLS
- Twice a week.
- GUERARD
- Wow!
- HILLS
- Writing it all up and getting it ready for printing and usual stuff. I
seem to have done a lot of syllabi already. [laughs] Oh, there are more
to come, but that was the next one.
- GUERARD
- You know, what you're talking about reminds me that I believe I read in
one of the books about the Sadler's Wells School that there was a
conscious effort made not to treat any of the pupils differently than
others. Did you find that true?
- HILLS
- Oh, of course. Absolutely!
- GUERARD
- So that if there was a star- -somebody who really stood out in the
class- -were they let know that they were special?
- HILLS
- No! There's a book that Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell wrote
together- -mostly photographs with a little text--and in it, Anthony
talks about meeting me here in Hollywood, and I mentioned to him that we
had been at great pains not to let him and Antoinette know how good they
were. And he said, "Well, you succeeded. We had absolutely no idea." So,
it's there. Actually, really is in black and white, his acknowledgement
that we didn't let them know. And when we did the television show we
talked about on the previous tape, there was no doubt that Antoinette
Sibley shone in that tape. And we were all told not to release her name
to the press under any circumstances.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- In case we were asked who this very super child was. So, yes, that was
absolutely the policy that nobody was to know.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- And they didn't. I mean, we obviously succeeded. They had no idea they
were better than the other people. And strangely, they didn't do
terribly well in their RAD exams. I mean, you can blame me--my
teaching--if you like, not doing it well enough. But The Royal Academy
was so, at that time, so absolutely high bound about how everything had
to be, that if you had any degree of artistry and broke out of the mold
even slightly, they took marks off. So, Antoinette Sibley, who is now
Dame Antoinette Sibley and president of The Royal Academy of Dancing,
really didn't do terribly well in her Intermediate RAD examination. She
passed, but not with the flying colors she should have done, had the
examiner had any eye for real talent. She was marked down for breaking
the rules a little bit in her port de bras and head, which is tragic.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- They're different now, but that's how they were then. And it was a short
period, because when I'd taken my RAD Advanced, they weren't anything
like as particular. I said I had Madame Genée and I had Tamara
Karsavina--real dancers--examining me. And although I didn't do
everything full out because I'd had the knee injury, I still was the
only one in the world to get honors at that session .
- GUERARD
- Because you did them exactly right?
- HILLS
- No, because then they were prepared to accept some artistry.
- GUERARD
- Oh, I see!
- HILLS
- But then, when the second generation of examiners came up who were not
all, by any means, performing dancers--they were teaching dancers--they
didn't accept the artistry.
- GUERARD
- They were just looking at technique?
- HILLS
- They were just technicians. And it went through a bad patch, as far as
seeing true dancers, real dancers. And then I think it's come around
full circle again. I think it's fine now. But just between my taking my
Advanced and-- The whole examining body changed. The old examiners
retired and the new ones came in and they didn't have that eye for
seeing a real dancer, which is a shame.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And unless you've been in that atmosphere of professional dancers, I
think it's probably very hard to see that it's okay, if you're good
enough, to have some individuality. It's so essential.
- GUERARD
- Well, that's an interesting point about performing dance, is that there
really is-- There's so much technique that's required and expected of a
really good dancer in order to perform, but if they don't have that
personality, whatever that is, then they won't be very popular on stage.
- HILLS
- No. There's an added dimension of-- It's just sheer talent, star
quality, whatever it happens to be, that people call it, that some
people have and some people haven't. And it's hard to restrict to just
technique, those people who have it. Really hard. We mentioned, I think
earlier sometime, that there's a Dame Marie Rambert, who had a ballet
company. She was one of the people who would actually take dancers that
The Royal Ballet didn't take because their technique was good but they
were not necessarily the perfect shape, but had artistry. And she would
take them into her smaller company, where the shape perhaps didn't
matter quite so much, and she brought out talents in people that we had
missed, I must confess. And amongst them was Lucette Aldus, who became--
She returned to The Royal Ballet as a soloist and then became ballerina
in Australia. And another dancer called Brenda Last, who had a wonderful
jump but her legs were a bit heavy. And she went to Rambert. And then
later, she went to Norway and was ballet mistress for the Norwegian
Ballet. And she also went into The Royal Ballet, too, after leaving
Rambert, but Rambert brought out something in them that we had not been
able to bring out. She had that genius because she brought out the
choreography in [Frederick] Ashton and in Anthony Tudor. Both are great
choreographers that she encouraged, though they were, neither of them,
great dancers. She had a flair which was quite unusual. So there were
some of our dancers going and, of course, we had at least twenty-five
out of the graduating class each year and there were not twenty- five
places, even though there were two ballet companies and an opera ballet
at Covent Garden and an opera ballet at Sadler's Wells. So there were
four groups of dancers to take them all into. There weren't places for
them all and a lot of them would turn up in other ballet companies in
England. You'd turn on your television and there would be students that
I'd taught, you know, appearing in shows and I would often sort of walk
out of the kitchen and look at the television and say, "Oh, that's so
and so that had been in my class years before."
- GUERARD
- That's fun.
- HILLS
- It is fun. It still happens here occasionally, you know, [you] see
people that have been in class and [they're] doing something entirely
different. It's very rewarding. But if they're in a commercial, you
never know what the commercial is that they're-- whatever they're
selling, because you're so focused on, "I know who that is!" [laughs]
And then you go to tell them later that you've seen them in a commercial
and you don't remember what they were selling and that sounds bad, too.
Very awkward. [laughter] Anyway, back at Sadler's Wells [School], we had
a lot of really good talent in those few years. Ninette de Valois always
used to say that every five years there is a supreme talent that
arrives. The four years in between are good but nothing like the years
when three or four people are really, really talented. And I don't know
why it should be, but it does seem to be so. Must be something they put
in the water every five years, [laughter] And it's so lovely when you
get a year like that where the front row in class is unbelievable. You
know, you don't really have to teach them. They can do it. You show them
and they can do it. And then, they add something of themselves to it.
It's a joy to teach those sort of classes. Absolutely wonderful! And I
still feel incredibly privileged that I was there and part of it. For a
total of eleven years.
- GUERARD
- Wow!
- HILLS
- It's phenomenal. Of course, all of those kids did have temperaments. You
know?
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And they had this-- Of course, nowadays I don't know how they would do
it because they had incredible insecurity. You would have thought really
just talking about it, that having got into Sadler's Wells/Royal Ballet
School, they would have felt very secure that they were so good, that
they were there.
- GUERARD
- Yes. But?
- HILLS
- But for the first two years, they were on probation.
- GUERARD
- Oh, so they really had to prove themselves.
- HILLS
- They had to prove themselves. And if, you know, it was our mistake that
they were there or their mistake that they didn't work hard enough, at
thirteen, they were asked to leave. After that, if they were kept on,
they were kept on till they were sixteen because it didn't seem right to
interrupt their education and send them to another school.
- GUERARD
- I'm sorry, I'm not quite clear. They were asked to leave at thirteen if
they didn't meet the standards?
- HILLS
- Yes, if they hadn't passed their probation for two years.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- Then after thirteen, they would still be told they weren't doing well
enough, but they were allowed to stay at the school. It's as--
- GUERARD
- I understand.
- HILLS
- You see, as though thirteen was like going to intermediate high-- From
intermediate high to high school. It didn't seem right to break that
continuity of education and send them into something that they had not
been brought up in. You know, they wouldn't know how to play hockey and
all those sorts of things that other kids would be able to do.
- GUERARD
- But if they weren't cutting it, then they would--?
- HILLS
- They were warned. They were told, but they were allowed to stay. Some
chose to stay, some left. But that was their option.
- GUERARD
- Oh. That would be really difficult to stay, knowing that you weren't
quite making it, wouldn't it?
- HILLS
- Yes. I think when the parents were understanding of the child's lack of
ability, they would take them away. If they had what would be known as a
"ballet mother, " who was perhaps a frustrated dancer herself, she might
force the child to stay on.
- GUERARD
- Ooh!
- HILLS
- And we had some unhappy children as a result of that. But even then, the
competition for getting into the company, itself, was so great. You
know, if there were twenty-five dancers and maybe only five places one
year, however good you are, you know, you may know all this time that
you're not going to get into one of the royal companies.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Very, very tough. But they, you know, they were survivors. They wanted
it. The usual question everybody asks was, always is, "But you gave up
so much for your career, so young." And what people really don't
understand is that you don't feel you're giving up anything. Your one
desire is to be a ballerina or a male principal, if you're a boy. The
worst thing would be to have to give up the dancing. That would be the
deprivation, but it's very hard to make non-dancers understand that.
They think, "But, you know, you didn't go out to play with friends. You
didn't date. You didn't do this, you didn't do that, you didn't do the
other." Didn't want to!
- GUERARD
- No, it's a real track. Real focus.
- HILLS
- Absolutely. Yes.
- GUERARD
- Attitude.
- HILLS
- Completely.
- GUERARD
- What would really be difficult, though, is when, for those who are on
the edge--
- HILLS
- To make that transition. Yes.
- GUERARD
- To want to be the dancer and then to not be able to have that life.
- HILLS
- That's right. The Royal Academy of Dancing and another school called the
Arts Educational School in England actually did something to fill that
gap, which was wonderful . They opened teachers' training courses where
these people who'd been well-trained--and not just from The Royal, but
from other schools in the country--and were not quite the right shape
for performance. You know, at the age of twelve they suddenly blew up,
grew up, got broad hips, broad shoulders. And when they were seventeen,
they were able to go, again, by audition. They had to audition and take
written examinations in school subjects. They were accepted, if good
enough, into The Royal Academy of Dancing Teachers' Training Course or
into the Arts Educational Teachers' Training Course. And that training
then continued on, on how to teach. And those are still in operation and
still excellent . And they learn anatomy, they learn music. They
actually go to a school of medicine to study anatomy. It's not just
somebody who goes there. They go and look at the cadavers and that sort
of thing. And they learn how to design costumes and how to make them.
- GUERARD
- How wonderful!
- HILLS
- They take examinations in history of dance and they learn French and all
those good things that a good teacher should be able to do. And when I
was-- It was actually before I went to Turkey that that had started. I
was asked to go and live in the boarding house of the student teachers
of The Royal Academy as somebody who was a role model . I was already
teaching and doing it, but I was their age. And so--
- GUERARD
- I keep forgetting you're so much younger than everybody else! [laughter]
- HILLS
- Because I started when I was sixteen and they were seventeen, you know,
but I think I was about eighteen when they asked me if I would be
willing to have a private room. Not one of the dorms there, but just to
show them, you know, how I got-- Just by living it, how I got my
clothing prepared for class each day and how I prepared my classes and
all those sort of things, so that I was in amongst them, writing some
syllabus up and those sort of things. And I suppose it was quite a good
idea.
- GUERARD
- Sure!
- HILLS
- For them. And it was fine for me, because I didn't have to pay rent.
[laughter] It was a good thing. So, again, I was rubbing some of me off
onto other people who later became teachers and examiners for The Royal
Academy.
- GUERARD
- That's great.
- HILLS
- It was nice. And a very cheap way of living. And it was within walking
distance of The Royal Ballet School, so I didn't even have bus fare
[laughs] because I was very badly paid, as everybody is in dance. It was
great.
- GUERARD
- And you were very young to be completely on your own.
- HILLS
- Oh, I'd been on my own for so long, it didn't worry me in the slightest.
I suppose my parents [Ida Cockshott Hampson and Ellis Hampson] must have
been very broad-minded or trusting or-- I cannot-- I really, still, I
can't understand how they let me. Still, they did, and I survived.
- GUERARD
- They must have known you.
- HILLS
- Yeah, must have. Anyway, I've gone back a year or two there, so I must
go forward again.
- GUERARD
- Well, you were having your first child.
- HILLS
- Oh, yes, but that was later. That was in 195-- She wasn't born till
1957. So, about 1954, when we were starting working on this syllabus for
The Royal Academy, Ninette de Valois was saying, you know, "All our
students to the school travel such vast distances, we really should have
a boarding school so that we can get children from other parts of the
country, not just those who were in travelling distance of London,
because we're missing a lot of talent." And I wasn't part of it, but the
executive committee or whoever they were--a lot of rich people with
famous names--started looking around for premises for a boarding school
which had places for dormitories, classrooms and ballet studios, because
they wanted to take the young ones away from seniors, to separate the
two. And in 19-- I don't know exactly when they found it, but-- I can't
remember. It was probably late 1954. They found, in the middle of a park
in Richmond, which is-- I think I mentioned this. I've said this on the
tape already. This is repetition, no?
- GUERARD
- No.
- HILLS
- They found a house where Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret had
grown up during the war [World War II], called White Lodge, in Richmond
Park. Now, parks in this country tend to be small, but if you can
picture a park which is very much bigger than Central Park in New York
with a very, very, large, elegant mansion in the middle of it, that
mansion is called White Lodge. Richmond Park is in lovely park lands
with its own grounds around it. And somehow or other, and I've no idea
how, they found enough money to buy this house.
- GUERARD
- Wow!
- HILLS
- Which had a ballroom in it big enough for a studio. It had a swimming
pool which was big enough to be closed over and made into another
studio--not kept as a swimming pool--and other big rooms, and rooms for
dormitories and rooms for school rooms and big park lands around it. It
needed a lot of repairing because it had been left without being looked
after for a long time. And it also needed altering; floors putting down,
barres putting in. But they bought it and arranged that in September,
1955, it would be open, which was fine, except that it wasn't ready in
1955. It was ready enough to be slept in, but not for classes to be held
in. So what they had to do was to bus the children from Richmond back to
London, daily, and--
- GUERARD
- So they slept there and then went to London to take their--?
- HILLS
- They slept there and went to London on the bus. But by then, they had
too many senior students, because they'd increased the size of the
senior school, to accommodate all of them into the building we had had.
So they had to rent the building next door which, fortunately, had great
big studios in it. It had been the School for Psychic Research. And it
was a wonderful old building with fantastic mahogany staircases and a
beautiful building and two big studios in it, with floors that were
marginally springy enough to dance on.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- And they got some barres hastily put 'round them and they rented that
for a year. And had to build a canvas-covered passageway between the two
buildings so the kids wouldn't get wet as they went from one building to
the other. [laughter] It was very, very makeshift. And that was the time
when I was appointed senior ballet mistress.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And so, I was responsible for arranging where they would hang their hats
and coats up and where they-- Who would be in which class and all that
sort of thing, as well. And at this time-- How old was I in '55? I don't
know. Twenty-something.
- GUERARD
- Right. Twenty- two?
- HILLS
- No, older than that. '55 and my birthday--
- GUERARD
- Oh, '55. You were twenty-seven?
- HILLS
- Twenty-seven. That's right. Twenty-seven, with this enormous
responsibility of having them in one place and sleeping in another and
goodness only knows what. But it all worked out. It was fine. But it was
for a year before the building was ready. And in September, 1956, then
we started having school and lessons in Richmond Park, which was great,
except that I had to commute, because I was still teaching in the senior
school as well as senior ballet mistress at the junior school. I had to
commute between London and Richmond Park.
- GUERARD
- And teach in both--?
- HILLS
- And teach in both places and I didn't drive. And the only way to get
into Richmond Park was to take a bus to the outside of the park,
telephone to White Lodge and have them send the school bus to pick you
up. So I was-- I spent a lot of time standing in bitter cold waiting for
buses to take me to and from. And I was pregnant by then. And feeling
sick. [laughs] Utterly miserable. Wishing I hadn't got pregnant at that
moment. [laughter] But surviving, nevertheless. And in December of 1956,
I thought, "This is enough. With three months more to go of pregnancy, I
must take leave." And I took what was going to be six months leave of
absence. I was due to go back-- Well, it would have been more than six
months, because six months took it to the end of the school year. Then
there were summer holidays, so I would have gone back in September of
1957, my daughter [Sarah Hills Larson] having been born somewhat late,
at the end of March of '57. And actually, when the time came, sort of
the end of July, I thought, "I can't do that." I cannot give my child
over to somebody else to bring up because it meant leaving the house at
half past seven in the morning and not getting back till about seven
o'clock at night. And I realized that it wasn't going to be on for me. I
couldn't do it, so I told them that I was going to stop.
- GUERARD
- Oh. That must have been a really difficult decision.
- HILLS
- It was a difficult decision, but I just found that I adored being a mom,
you know, and--
- GUERARD
- Yes, yes.
- HILLS
- So for three years, I did nothing.
- GUERARD
- Hm. Well, you didn't do nothing. [laughs]
- HILLS
- Well, I didn't do-- I meant dancing wise, I didn't do anything. [laughs]
Didn't even do an exercise. Didn't do a plié, nothing. And enjoyed
bringing up Sarah and trying to have another child and having a
miscarriage and then finally having Amanda [Hills Podany] three years
later.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- She was born in June of 1960. And Sarah was then three and had a lot of
friends from pre-school and so forth. And the moms were saying, "You
know, we want to send our children to learn dancing. Where shall we send
them?"
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And, I thought, "This is a bit silly. Why don't I teach these
three-year-olds?" So I rented a hall in the little town where we lived.
- GUERARD
- Which was what?
- HILLS
- It was a town called Shortlands, which is about a twenty- five-minute
train journey out south of London.
- GUERARD
- Oh, so you were already commuting just to get to the first school in
London and then you were having to commute out to White Lodge?
- HILLS
- Yes. Then commuting to Richmond, which was even further.
- GUERARD
- Oh, yes!
- HILLS
- I mean, it was just-- It was terrible. All at rush hours, of course.
So--
- GUERARD
- So you decided to start a ballet school for little children!
- HILLS
- Yes, I did. Yes. And, first of all, just had the one class, you know, of
three-year-olds. And I had about thirty of them.
- GUERARD
- Now, you had never taught little little ones like that before, had you?
- HILLS
- Not since-- When I was a student, myself, I used to assist my teacher in
teaching her little ones' class. As a ten, eleven, twelve-year-old, I
would go in and hold their hands and teach the ones who couldn't get it,
how to do a polka or a skip or whatever it was. But, of course, I didn't
have those children to support me. So I was teaching my thirty children
by myself and with a friend, who was a pianist, whose little girl was in
the class, who had never played for a class at all, but she was
absolutely fabulous. And she still-- I don't know if she does it now,
since she's older. But she went on playing the classes after I'd quit
and come to the United States. She went on playing for classes for
years. She just was wonderful. Just had exactly the right idea of what
to play for little ones. I was just so fortunate that she happened to
live on the same street, you know. And we just walked down together and
I taught the class. And, of course, as years went on, my three-year-olds
grew bigger and got better and more advanced and we didn't do recitals.
We just did classes. And I went on renting this-- It was a church hall,
for all those years. And then-- I'm going to say this. Are we near the
end of the tape or are we okay?
- GUERARD
- No, no, we're fine.
- HILLS
- In the second--no, the baby level--class, I'd had a very nice girl
called Rowena Seaton-Brown, and her family left and they sold their
house to a mixed-race family. The father was Black and the mother was
White. And they brought their little girl to my class. And, of course, I
accepted her. She was the only-- One doesn't say African-American in
England. You said Black, you know. And now they call them-- I think it's
Jamaican, African-Jamaican or something, in England. Something like
that, to be politically correct and right and all those sort of things.
But she was a Black little girl and my entire class left.
- GUERARD
- No!
- HILLS
- Every single one of them, because I had accepted a Black child.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my God.
- HILLS
- The other classes stayed but I was left, out of thirty children, with
one. And I was not going to be upset by this. All the others had paid--
In England, you pay for the whole semester. You don't pay by the class.
And I thought, "Well, if they chose not to come, I've got their money.
I'm not going to refund it. I'm going to teach this one child." And I
did, for the whole semester.
- GUERARD
- Oh, good for you.
- HILLS
- I was not going to be, you know, put off by this. But the church refused
to rent me the studio after that.
- GUERARD
- Oh, wow!
- HILLS
- This is a church?! I mean, I was just so completely taken aback by this
whole attitude.
- GUERARD
- But --
- HILLS
- Because one half-Black family had moved into the neighborhood.
- GUERARD
- This is astounding.
- HILLS
- Isn't it?
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- I mean, it sounds so bizarre. And, you know, after that, I quit. I
couldn't go on there.
- GUERARD
- So, it was the mothers of these children, who were playing with your
children, who pulled them out of the school because--?
- HILLS
- Yes, yes. The pianist went on coming because she thought it was
absolutely dreadful, too, fortunately. And she went on going to the
church. We didn't go to the church, but she did. And she went on going,
but she felt very upset about the whole thing. In fact, in the year
before this happened, we had, in fact, moved from a rather gorgeous
apartment and bought a house. And we bought the house further out of
London still at a place called-- A tiny village called Knockholt. And
so, I'd been-- I'd learned to drive in the meantime. I had been driving
in and so I then decided, "Okay, well, I won't go on there. I won't try
and get another place in Shortlands. I'll start over again in our own
village, in Knockholt." And rented not a church hall but a village hall,
there, and immediately got a big school going there.
- GUERARD
- Great.
- HILLS
- And I also was then invited to teach at day schools, private day
schools, in the neighborhood. And so, two or three afternoons a week, I
would drive to-- The town was in the neighborhood and [I would] teach at
private schools. And that was very lucrative. That was really great
because that brought in a lot of money.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And somewhere along the line, in 1964, I had another child--my son,
Julian [Hills]--and he came, very fortunately, right at the end of June.
So I was able to just take the summer vacation off to have him, and
didn't miss a beat. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- How convenient!
- HILLS
- I was teaching. He was born on Sunday night and I taught on the Saturday
morning beforehand, and then sent everybody on their summer vacation and
came back in September.
- GUERARD
- Without your tummy.
- HILLS
- Without my tummy. Very fortunately, with all three, I didn't put on any
weight and got my figure back immediately. So, it was no sign. But, I
pooped in the meantime, or popped in the meantime. [laughter] And I did,
with my son, have a lovely woman who lived across the street from us to
look after him when I was teaching.
- GUERARD
- Were these racial attitudes carried out in the new village?
- HILLS
- No, there weren't any Blacks there for it to be-- It was just this first
arrival of this mixed-race family, which obviously threw the whole town
into haywire. I mean, I absolutely could not understand it, and cannot
to this day, that there could be that degree of intolerance in a church
group.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Especially in a church group.
- HILLS
- Yes. Absolutely unbelievable.
- GUERARD
- Do you think there was more tolerance in London because it was a
bigger-- The city, or--?
- HILLS
- It was the only time I ever came across overt intolerance ever in my
life. Because, as you know, England didn't have slavery, didn't have
segregation, anywhere, ever. From, through the whole of my life. So it
was just so bizarre. It was-- I just couldn't understand it and cannot
to this day. England, I've always felt, is completely tolerant of
everybody. Even the-- They're tolerant of the Irish, who let bombs off
all over the place. You know, you don't take it out on the Irish who are
not setting off the bombs.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- So I just couldn't understand it. I suppose there may have been two
people who set a seed of some sort of dissension or--I really don't
know, but I was glad to be out of it. It was horrible.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And, there were-- In the times where I went to the private schools,
there were quite a lot of mixed-race or different-race children of all
sorts. And I didn't see any bad vibes about them at all. So I think I
might have been in the middle of a bad situation without knowing it.
- GUERARD
- Well, good for you for standing your ground.
- HILLS
- Mm! Absolutely. Until the ground was taken from underneath me, and then
I couldn't. But I would have gone on teaching that-- Oh, she was so
sweet! She was called Sarah Gebedemah. I remember her so well. She was
absolutely charming. Delightful family. I met her father in the train
one day, coming back from London, just by chance, and chatted to him all
the way home. We didn't mention the situation at all. [laughs] He was a
very nice man. So that was quite a milestone, because I started my
school over again, completely. You know, I lost all the ten-,
twelve-year-olds that I'd had. Began with little ones again and built
up. So, it was nice. And it was a delightful village. And it had, you
know, the village school that my children went to and they all came over
for a class all together one afternoon a week as part of their
curriculum, to village hall. And, oh I must tell you, I had the most
wonderful experience. It just makes some things in life fantastic. There
was a baby who'd been born and had meningitis when he was tiny and was
completely deaf afterwards. And when he was three, his mother said, "You
know, I'd love him to come to your dancing class. I think he'll be able
to follow." And, of course, he never said anything, and he followed and
managed very nicely. The mothers used to sit and watch the class because
their children were so little. And, one day Jonathan-- His mother had
put his little truck up on the mantle shelf, toy truck, and he walked
over to it- -and in England a truck, in those days, was called a
lorry--and said, "lorry."
- GUERARD
- Just like that?
- HILLS
- First word he'd ever spoken.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- I mean, we were all in tears.
- GUERARD
- Oh, yes.
- HILLS
- It was absolutely incredible that he'd had some hearing coming back and
nobody had known. And he knew he wanted that toy off that mantle shelf
where he couldn't reach it and the only way he could get it was by
saying this word. It didn't come out as clearly as that, but, I mean,
oh, it was just wonderful!
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- The mother was in tears. All the other mothers were in tears. I was in
tears. Just so exciting. Great.
- GUERARD
- We're coming toward the end of the tape.
- HILLS
- Okay, that sounds a good moment to stop this one, then.
- GUERARD
- Yes, but I wonder--maybe you could talk about this on the next time--if
his ability to express himself had something to do with the dance?
- HILLS
- Who knows? I just don't know. One would love to think that he got
something through the music or the rhythms or--
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- We'll never know, but it was wonderful.
- GUERARD
- Feeling of freedom or feeling of--?
- HILLS
- Yes. Maybe the freedom of the space, even. That he could hear echoes in
there that he couldn't hear in smaller spaces. I don't know. But oh, it
was wonderful. He was just the same age as my son, and he was in the
class, too. He doesn't remember it, but I do, of course.
- GUERARD
- Oh, that's great.
1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE II APRIL 11, 1997
- GUERARD
- So, Margaret, you were talking about taking your summer vacation to have
Julian [Hills].
- HILLS
- To have Julian. [laughs] Before that, in fact, a woman who had her own
dancing school in Sevenoaks, which is the nearest town to Knockholt, had
asked me if I would run the school for her as well as my own school
while she had the baby. I think she was having a bad pregnancy or
something, and I agreed to do that. That was in a hall in Sevenoaks. And
some of the children there, three of them, were daughters of the
Sackville-Wests. Their aunt was Vita Sackville-West, who is a very
famous author. And they lived in an incredible mansion in Sevenoaks
called Knole House, which is historically very famous. Henry VIII lived
there, and so it was rather fun to have the Sackville-West children in
my classes. [laughter] Just a little snob value. [laughter] They were
nice kids. Not talented, but very nice and I did that for a year while
she was having her baby. And taught in Sevenoaks and another town called
Tonbridge, which was further away, while Julian was being--after he
was--born, and looked after by his delightful nanny from across the
street. It was nice for him because he had two older sisters, and Mrs.
Dayman, the lady who looked after him, had three older boys. And so
Julian had some role models of boys. And I will jump years ahead at this
moment because one of Mrs. Dayman's sons lives in Los Angeles and when
Mrs. Dayman comes to visit him, Julian gets to see his former nanny whom
he always called Mummy Dayman.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And we see Andy and Andy has a little son the same age as Julian's
daughter. So, you know, it's a very small world, really.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Well, it's sort of like--
- HILLS
- It gets these surprises.
- GUERARD
- Like when children have cousins who are always there and help bringing
them up or--?
- HILLS
- That's right. Yes. And Julian had these boys, which was great for him.
- GUERARD
- I bet!
- HILLS
- Yeah. His older sisters--You know, it's not terribly good for boys to be
youngest and have one much older sister and one--They were very close,
the two girls. They were sweet to Julian. They never fought or anything
like that, any of them. But, he-- It gave him an identity to aspire for
[laughter], which was good. My own school went on. We did do recital
things at that school. Being a village, you know, when they put on
little shows in the village, I was asked could my dancers take part in
these little shows. You know, it was like Topanga [Canyon] is here; a
lot of community effort going on of one sort or another. My husband
would produce amateur plays there and we put on a Christmas show of
various sorts, you know. So my dancers appeared in those, which was
great fun. But, all this took quite a-- Earlier, we were talking
together, not on the tape, about a change of perspective in my teaching,
and it was a very different perspective--
- GUERARD
- Yes, completely different.
- HILLS
- Of teaching little children in a very, very amateur environment. There
was no professional there, you know. I did have one child who went to
The Royal Ballet School. She was talented. But, it was very different.
And, to go back even further, when I stopped teaching at The, (then)
Royal Ballet School-- And I have to go back on that because we didn't do
the Royal Charter either, did we?
- GUERARD
- No.
- HILLS
- No. I have to go back to that in a minute, too. I had been famous, you
know, really, in the dance world, and had to such an extent-- And it
sounds so awful, but one tried not to meet fans, ballet fans. You tried
to not get involved with people who were crazy about the ballet because
they'd ask you questions that were so silly, you couldn't answer them,
you know. And suddenly, when I went to walk my daughter to, you know,
the baby clinic and all that sort of thing, I had to try and learn how
to approach people, which is something I'd never had to do before. I'd
always had people who wanted to know me and I had to do a really sort of
change of character to talk to people before they spoke to me.
- GUERARD
- Ah!
- HILLS
- You know, to ask about their children. And, it sounds so awful to have
to say this, but it was quite a while before I learned how to do it. I
must have seemed very stand-offish and nasty until I learned the
technique of getting to know people. I did it by inviting people home to
tea and, you know, that sort of thing, and it was a real learning
process for me. Strange.
- GUERARD
- It sounds very much like ballerinas and ballet dancers were looked upon
like Hollywood movie stars.
- HILLS
- Exactly the same. Exactly the same. And you tried to avoid the general
public. And then suddenly, there I was, one of the general public. It
was really odd. But, you know, I did it. It was okay. I sorted it out.
And then, the next thing came when I was starting to teach the tinys to,
again--
- GUERARD
- I'm glad you mention that because I don't think people in the United
States realize how being a ballerina really is being a superstar, in
England.
- HILLS
- No, I don't-- Well, I don't-- They do, because they understand that
[Mikhail] Baryshnikov and [Natalia] Makarova are superstars. You know,
the names that are famous here, where the other names were equally
famous there. And even though I wasn't a ballerina, as a teacher, I was
famous because of where I taught. And because everybody was learning my
syllabus at The Royal Academy, wherever I went, you know, because I'd
done it, again, I was looked up to rather than-- And this all at age
twenty-eight. It seems so odd now, all those years ago. So much has
happened since. We should just go back to that Royal Charter, when
Sadler's Wells became The Royal Ballet School.
- GUERARD
- I didn't want to interrupt your, the train of--
- HILLS
- I know.
- GUERARD
- Of schools, because I think it's really an-- It was an interesting
transition. On the one hand, you were very lucky to have been able to
incorporate having children with dance, which you had done all your
life, because so many women have to completely end their careers when
they have children.
- HILLS
- They do.
- GUERARD
- On the other hand, you were teaching in a whole different way--
- HILLS
- Entirely different.
- GUERARD
- Than you had been before.
- HILLS
- Yes. And feeling, in those days, a little guilty about it because in
those days, women did not go out to work. I didn't know any other mother
who went to work in any way. Women stayed at home once they'd children
and did not go out to work. And there were articles in the paper about,
you know, the ten women who were actually going to work, you know, in
London, after they'd had children. And, this was bad and you shouldn't
do it and it was terribly bad for the children and so on and so on and
so on. And I think guilt came in spades, you know, but I knew that I was
quite objectionable in the three years when I wasn't doing anything. I
was very moody and, you know, longing to be doing-- Although I had
chosen it. It was my own fault. I'd chosen not to go back. I really got
so fed up with just being at home.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- With nobody to talk to about dance or not to talk to about anything
except my husband who was, of course, out at work all day. And came home
tired and didn't really want to know anything about anything but just
don't talk to me about work and I don't want to know about yours, you
know. [laughs] No, he wasn't like that, but you long to be somebody
other than a mother.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- You long to find out who you still are inside and there's no way of
finding out.
- GUERARD
- Absolutely!
- HILLS
- None. You're a mother morning, noon, and night. And I must have really
liked it because I wouldn't have had two more kids, otherwise.
[laughter]
- GUERARD
- So true.
- HILLS
- One is ambivalent, in many respects, about this.
- GUERARD
- Right. Well, you also had a long-lasting love affair with dance.
- HILLS
- I did, and did get back to it in this small way of teaching the children
and it was rewarding. I've always somehow managed to find what I was
doing was the best thing in the world. [laughter] And enjoyed it a lot.
Because children are absolutely sweet.
- GUERARD
- Yes, they are.
- HILLS
- They're just wonderful.
- GUERARD
- And they love to learn.
- HILLS
- They do.
- GUERARD
- They are so responsive.
- HILLS
- And they love movement and to be allowed to move in big spaces. To be
required to move in big spaces. [laughter] It's quite surprising because
most schoolrooms are small and, you know, they don't have a lot of space
to dash around in when they're little, and they long to. It was great.
And my school continued very well and made enough money for me to have a
bank account separate from my husband's, which is always nice.
- GUERARD
- Oh, yes.
- HILLS
- The worst thing in the world is to say, "Dear, can I have some money to
buy you a birthday present?" You know. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- I know. [laughs]
- HILLS
- So, that was pleasant and to buy my own cars and things like that, which
I enjoyed. I finally decided to learn to drive when I was pregnant with
my middle daughter, Amanda, and my husband parked his car by the station
when he went to work. He didn't drive all the way. And I walked past
that car four times one day, parked near the station, as I was going
shopping and that sort of thing. And I thought, "This is absolutely
crazy. The car is sitting there. If I had it, I could drive here and
there." So as soon as Amanda was born, I took driving lessons and
learned to drive and bought myself a car and was then mobile for the
rest of my life [laughter], and not confined to buses and trains and
things.
- GUERARD
- Good.
- HILLS
- But a lot of people in England don't drive because the transportation
system is so good. You don't need to. Like New York. You don't need to
drive in New York and you don't need to drive anywhere in England,
really. There's always transportation.
- GUERARD
- Well, you were a jump start ahead when you came here and you already
knew how to drive.
- HILLS
- Ah, but on the other side of the road! [laughter] That took a little
getting used to. But, yes, it would have been much harder to learn to
drive here, I think, if I hadn't driven there first.
- GUERARD
- Well, Margaret, let's backtrack a little bit because, as you said, the
Royal Charter was a very important event.
- HILLS
- It was an enormously important event.
- GUERARD
- And this happened just about a year before you moved out of London?
- HILLS
- Yes. Well, before I left what was then The Royal Ballet School, and I
don't quite, you know, I was nothing to do with getting the Royal
Charter. I didn't even know we were up for it, applied for it, or
whatever you do to get it. I have no idea. But in the summer of 1956,
the director of the school was called Arnold Haskell, who has written a
lot of books about ballet. He was the director. [He] asked me if I would
meet with some men from America who were planning something called the
Lincoln Center [for the Performing Arts] .
- GUERARD
- Oh.
- HILLS
- And we were going to have lunch in the back of the Royal Box at [The
Royal Opera House] Covent Garden and then we were going to take them to
the senior school to look at the floors and the level and the height of
the barres and then we were going to take them to White Lodge to look at
the facilities there, for dance. And so I thought, "Okay, what can I
wear?" [laughter] And she [Arnold Haskell's secretary, Paulette Nixon]
[Margaret Graham Hills added The above bracketed section during her
review of the transcript.] said, you know, "Probably a hat would be a
good idea. "Now, I've never worn hats. I just don't-- I look terrible in
hats. And I thought, "What can I do?" And I bought a tiny, tiny, little
piece of velvet with wire around the edge that just sat on top of my
head [Guerard laughs] so that nobody could really tell it was a hat at
all, but it was, ostensibly, a hat. And I went to Covent Garden and was
taken up into the-- Through the royal entrance, there's a special
entrance to the Royal Box from the street. You don't go through the main
foyer or anything. And [I was taken] up into these royal quarters, where
we had the most sumptuous lunch on gorgeous plates. And I don't remember
the names of two of the men, but one of them was one of the
Rockefellers.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- But I don't know which one! [laughter] But one of them. And Arnold
Haskell and these three men and just me were talking about the Lincoln
Center plans and all this sort of stuff. And way over my head. I mean,
I'd no idea what the Lincoln Center was planned to be, going to be, or
anything about it. I didn't even know it was in New York, you know. And
then we drove in a huge, absolutely huge, chauffeur-driven Daimler car,
like the sort the queen has. And we went around and finally we took them
to White Lodge, where we had tea, and then I was driven back to the
station in this huge Daimler. And it was during the lunch that Arnold
Haskell told these men, in absolute strictest confidence, that the
ballet school was going to be given the Royal Charter. And so, I was one
of the very first people to know that we were going to become The Royal
Ballet and not-- It wasn't just the school. It was the company, as well.
They were going to be known as The Royal Ballet from a few weeks after
that.
- GUERARD
- That's how you learned about it?
- HILLS
- That's how I learned about it. In front of these Americans.
- GUERARD
- Wow.
- HILLS
- It was a very, very important milestone. But since then, of course, like
I'm doing here, where the transition comes, you talk about Sadler's
Wells Ballet before that and Royal Ballet afterwards. And from then on,
we were, in the minds of people in the United States at any rate,
confused, totally and utterly and completely, with The Royal Academy of
Dancing. And when anyone opens one's mouth to talk about the royal
anything you have to differentiate and try and make people understand
that The Royal Ballet and The Royal Ballet School are one entity and The
Royal Academy of Dancing is another, completely and utterly, separate
unit. And it's hard to get that message across, that they are different
because people assume that if you're from The Royal Ballet, you're
automatically going to teach The Royal Academy of Dancing method. And
no, you're not. It's different. But even people I've said this to many,
many times over and different ways of putting it, they still don't
really understand. And I don't know how else to say it. You know, I've
run out of descriptions of the difference so I just hope that it doesn't
matter. I don't know if I've made it clear on the tape in any way or
not.
- GUERARD
- Well, to me you have.
- HILLS
- Well, I hope it comes across, but it is a natural, perfectly natural
confusion.
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm. We Americans aren't used to so many different things called
royal.
- HILLS
- No, of course not! No! There's The Royal Academy which is the art place,
which has nothing to do with The Royal Academy of Dancing. It's The
Royal Academy of Art. Anything that has a Royal Charter gets the word
royal in front of it and a coat of arms. But there's so many-- The Royal
Shakespeare Company has nothing to do with The Royal Academy or The
Royal Ballet, you know.
- GUERARD
- Can you explain what getting a Royal Charter means for a company or an
organization?
- HILLS
- It's really just like getting a presidential medal .
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm. It's the blessing of the--?
- HILLS
- It's the blessing. It's the acknowledgement that you are an institution
of repute. Other things get allowed to use the Royal Seal. If the queen
buys Seagram's gin, they are allowed to put the Royal Seal on their
bottles. If she buys anything, they can apply to be allowed to use the
Royal Seal. They're not called Royal Seagram's. That's different.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- But just to be allowed to use the Royal Crest on your product means that
you are really quite something in English eyes or in United Kingdom
eyes, so it matters a lot there. It doesn't matter much anywhere else.
- GUERARD
- Well, it still tells the rest of the world that it's an institution of--
- HILLS
- It sounds good. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Repute.
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Were there any special performances or anything like that?
- HILLS
- No.
- GUERARD
- Built around the Royal Charter?
- HILLS
- No. I don't think so. Not that I remember, anyway. No, I really don't
think so. It was just, you know, everything suddenly appeared with a
coat of arms and a Royal Seal on it. [laughter] And I actually just got
a magazine on Wednesday. The Royal Academy of Dancing puts out a
quarterly magazine and mine arrived on Wednesday. And in the picture,
there was the fact that they have just been given a new Royal Seal. I
don't know why. I haven't read it yet. But there was the picture of the
proclamation with the new Royal Seal at the bottom of it. So what
they've done to get a different one, or-- I have yet to read. I don't
know. [Guerard laughs] You can obviously get a second royal something,
which I don't know anything about, either. But just obviously, they were
very proud of it because it was there on the page.
- GUERARD
- Yes! Yes. The Royal Royal Academy. [laughs]
- HILLS
- Yes. The twice blessed. [laughter] But there wasn't much, apart from--
We just felt good. It was a real feel-good factor.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Well, it really was an honor.
- HILLS
- Yes. And a great cause of confusion. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Well--
- HILLS
- So from now on, we call-- I shall not refer to Sadler's Wells. I shall
refer to Royal Ballet, and--
- GUERARD
- Okay.
- HILLS
- Here we go.
- GUERARD
- And we'll try to keep it straight.
- HILLS
- [laughs] So back to my own school, which was just going on, going on.
You know, both my daughters learned from me and my son, also. He
wouldn't like to admit it now, but he did. And they were-- They danced
quite nicely, but were not particularly talented and my one dread was
that one of them would want to be a ballerina. And I suppose I gave them
no clue as to whether they were good or bad in my usual sort of way I
was brought up not to let people know. But had they shown any desire, I
would have squashed it.
- GUERARD
- Really?!
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Why?
- HILLS
- Because they were not going to be good enough.
- GUERARD
- Oh. You could see that?
- HILLS
- I could see that. And they were brilliant at school and I wouldn't have
wanted them to waste other talents in order to pursue something that was
not going to happen. So, they were-- They just needed to use their
brains and artistic talents in another field, other than dance, though
they enjoyed it for a while. Sarah went on until she was fifteen, and
Amanda stopped when she was about twelve, I think. Julian switched to
tap when we came to the United States since he wasn't going to do
ballet. [laughter] Then he did that for about a year and then stopped
and hasn't done a thing since. And strangely, none of the three of them
is interested in any sort of physical activity, whatsoever. They really
aren't. I think one member of the family doing it is quite enough for
the entire family. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- It's not surprising, I suppose.
- GUERARD
- Well, there is a big difference between being interested in a physical
activity and being interested in dance.
- HILLS
- I think so, yes.
- GUERARD
- I mean, for some people- -some people who dance-- it probably really is
sort of a physical high, and that's important.
- HILLS
- Oh it is.
- GUERARD
- But that's not it.
- HILLS
- No. But the physical high, I think, people get from jogging and doing
that sort of thing, as well. What are they? The endorphins in the brain.
And when one is teaching, one is aware that you have to get dancers to
that level, otherwise the class is not a success.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- You just have to push people and to get them enjoying what they're doing
to get that trigger. And then they feel that it's been worthwhile. And
this is true of professionals and the rankest beginner. You have to get
them to that place where that brain thing clicks in. And then you've got
them hooked. I mean, they say it ' s a morphine replacement and it is as
addictive. It's what addicts people to drugs, addicts people to
exercise. It's exactly the same thing.
- GUERARD
- I believe that.
- HILLS
- Totally. And if you want-- If commercially, if you want them to go on
coming, you have to get them addicted. Which is appalling, but it's a
good addiction and not a bad addiction, so it's okay. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Even with children, you-- It's not quite the same, but to them, it's a
joy. It's not that same addiction, but the love of movement to music is
definitely something that they really just do love, the majority.
- GUERARD
- They do, and they're not quite as inhibited as adults about it, either.
- HILLS
- No, no. They-- Except for my granddaughter, who could care less.
[laughs] She's seven and she did dance for one season when she was six,
but she much, much prefers baseball. That's fine. She went to a baseball
match in Mayor [Richard J.] Riordan's box last week, because her, quote,
"boyfriend," his mother is one of the vice-mayors of L.A. I can't
remember her last name, but they went to Mayor Riordan's box and oh,
wasn't Emily happy! [laughs] It was wonderful.
- GUERARD
- That's great!
- HILLS
- So I guess I have one family member who is keen on exercise of one sort
or another. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- One healthy one.
- HILLS
- Yes! [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Well, Margaret are we getting close to the time in your life where you
made the big move?
- HILLS
- Yes, we are. 19-- It started in 1969 and my husband saw an advertisement
in the London paper for a position at Mattel [Inc.] Toys in California.
And we giggled about it a bit, you know, and he said, "Well, it would be
fun to go, wouldn't it?" And I said, "Sure, it'd be fun to go. Why don't
you apply?" So he did! And some months later-- The kids were screaming
in the garden. There was an awful noise going on. I mean, they were
having fun and the telephone rang and my husband picked it up and he
said-- Put his hand over it and he said, "Tell them to be quiet. It's a
call from California." And I took them all out in the garden, right at
the far end, and he was interviewed on the telephone by Mattel, from
California, for an hour and a half. An hour and a half telephone
conversation! And I kept thinking, "Is he still at it? What's going on?"
And he came off the phone and he said, "Well, it sounds as though I may
have got that job in California. They're going to send somebody over to
interview me and talk to me." So one of the personnel from Mattel came
over and interviewed Brian in London and this was still 1969; the end of
1969. And he came home and he said, "Well, I've got the job if we can
get a visa to go." Now we were going to be immigrants and to come into
the United States legally is an enormously long and difficult process.
And we went to-- I forget where, but some, probably the embassy,
American Embassy in London, and they said, "Oh, you don't have a chance
of going."
- GUERARD
- Even with having a job lined up?
- HILLS
- No. Not a chance. He said, "Only firms who cannot find anybody in the
United States to fulfill a position can employ somebody from overseas."
He said, "If you were a doctor, you would expect to wait twenty-five
years. There isn't the remotest chance, unless the firm that you're
going to can prove to us that they have done a huge search in the United
States and can't find anybody." Well, in fact, they had done a big, big
search, because Brian's a designer of a specific sort and they wanted
his specific design ability.
- GUERARD
- What does he specifically design?
- HILLS
- At that time, he had specifically designed electrical appliances, and
had some theatrical background. And they wanted those two things.
- GUERARD
- You had mentioned that he designed some of the--
- HILLS
- We didn't know they wanted the theatrical bit at all. We had no idea.
They really wanted-- What they said to him, they wanted somebody to
design parts of Barbie dolls. The recording equipment that made the
voices work and all that sort of stuff.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- But they convinced the American government that only Brian could do it.
And so they said, "Okay, well, we want your birth certificates, your
marriage certificates. We need to know every address you've ever lived
in your lives." The two of us! "The address where your parents were born
and their occupations, the addresses where your grandparents were born
and their occupations."
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- Now that took a lot of time to get.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And we were now into mid-1970 and doing all of this and trying to get it
together. Anyway, to cut a long, long, long story short, we finally got
Brian's papers together to come in June, 1971 and he'd spent a whole day
at the American Embassy getting all the paperwork done and getting the
green card. We hadn't got ours yet. And after-- He came in June, and
between June and September, when we got ours, I spent one entire day
with three children at the American Embassy getting everything done and
getting our green cards and all that sort of stuff, before we were
finally allowed to come. And so, you can imagine how we feel about
people being accepted. Oh well, they came in illegally, but, you know,
they're nice people. We're not going to throw them out. It cost us a
fortune to get all the information. We went to Somerset, this place in--
You know how the Mormon Temple here does family tree stuff. There's a
place in London called Somerset House, and we spent an entire day there
researching where our parents and grandparents were from.
- GUERARD
- You couldn't get the information from your parents?
- HILLS
- No! They didn't know. They didn't know where their parents had been
born.
- GUERARD
- Oh.
- HILLS
- They had no idea. It turned out that my grand-- One of my grandmothers
had been born in Ireland. We had no idea. [laughter] And we drove around
trying to find addresses where we'd lived. You know, we'd drive to the
place and find out where it was and then write the address down. And,
you know, I'd been to Turkey and all that sort of stuff and Brian had
lived in Canada and he-- To get to Canada, he had to become an immigrant
to Canada and he had never relinquished that, and that was an obstacle
of some sort. So we had to get over all this stuff. It was just
dreadful. But, you know, we wanted to come! And the job was for a year.
- GUERARD
- Only for one year?!
- HILLS
- One year. And we thought, "Well, Brian will go for three months and if
he likes it, then we'd like to move house when we come back anyway, so
we'll sell the house." And we invented the garage sale in England.
[Guerard laughs] Nobody had ever had a garage sale in England till we
invented it to sell all our furniture that wasn't coming. Mattel was
going to pay for a lot of it to be brought out, but there's, you know, a
whole lot of stuff you don't want to take. And so, we invented the
garage sale. [Guerard laughs] That was very funny because the children
and I had gone up to London to buy some new china and crystal to bring
to the United States and when we got back, there was a line outside our
house of people wanting to buy our stuff. And Sarah, when we got home,
had a temperature of 102 from her smallpox injection, which we'd had to
have to come here. And she wanted to go to bed and people were buying
beds from underneath her.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- And we kept moving her from bed to bed. [laughter] It was terrible.
- GUERARD
- So, had you advertised?
- HILLS
- Yes, we put up a notice in the post office. You know, just a card saying
we're moving and we would like to sell some of our stuff and we'll be
there most afternoons from four o'clock till six. Everything had gone by
six o'clock that afternoon that we weren't bringing with us.
- GUERARD
- Wow!
- HILLS
- So we slept, that night, on sleeping bags which we borrowed from the
next door neighbor. It was-- We made a lot of money. It was great, but
it was, surprisingly. [laughs] Anyway, Brian came and he enjoyed it and
so he said, "Well, I've bought a house and you can come and we'll live
in this house for a year." We said a year because we didn't know if
Mattel would take him on afterwards, and we didn't know if we wanted to
stay. Even with all this trouble we'd gone to get there, we didn't know
if we'd like California or not. There was no way to tell. And, of
course, after we'd been here about six months, we had no intention of
going back. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yeah!
- HILLS
- And they did keep him on. What they actually had wanted him for was
that, as well as to design, literally, to design things for Barbies,
they had planned to open theme parks. Mattel were going to open theme
parks of their own and they wanted him to do something to do with that.
- GUERARD
- Oh, I see.
- HILLS
- And, in fact, the whole thing fell through. They were going to be with
[Ringling Brothers] Barnum and Bailey Circus and theme parks with Barnum
and Bailey, and the whole thing collapsed. But Brian had invented quite
a lot of things for the Barbies and then finally it was too confining to
be just dealing with Barbies, so he opened his own business as a
designer.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And, we stayed. He did that for the rest of the time. First of all, he
worked for one or two other people and then opened his own business. And
for the first six months we were here--or roughly six months--I didn't
do anything because I didn't dare drive on the wrong side of the road.
But we got some friends down the street-- Cris Hurley she was called.
She said, "Look, you buy a car and I'll come and sit in with you and
drive with you." And she helped me enormously by telling me, "Just keep
your passenger in the ditch and then you're on the correct side of the
road." That worked and I could do it after that. And we found that
Stanley Holden, whom I'd known all my life because he'd been in The
Royal Ballet too, in a different part. We hadn't ever been close because
he'd been in different parts of the organization from me, though we had
started at the school around about the same time.
- GUERARD
- Well, he was in the [Sadler's Wells] Theater Ballet?
- HILLS
- He was in the Theatre Ballet and then he was in the forces and then he
was in the main company long after I was nothing to do with that company
but was teaching in the school. So we really hadn't known each other
well. We'd known of each other. We'd met and I taught his wife [Stella
Farrance Waller], whom he'd divorced before he came to the United
States. And at one time, my children had gone to his wife's school for a
little bit. It was in the transition time when Shortlands had closed and
before I'd opened Knockholt. They'd gone to her school. And my pianist
played for her, also. But, you know, again, I hadn't met him. I'd met
his wife. When I found he had the school here, I contacted him and said,
"You know, if ever you want anybody to substitute teach I'd be happy to
fill in." And, that's how I got to know him and started teaching just
part-time with him. And my husband had driven around the local
neighborhood in Rolling Hills before we got here and he said, "I drove
past one ballet school that had the right sort of noises coming out of
it. I drove past several [where] the noises coming out were not
authentic, but this one was okay." And it was run by a woman called
Alice LaMar and I wrote to her and I said, you know, I'd like to take
her out for coffee or something just to introduce myself. And she needed
somebody to teach for her, which was just a short distance from home,
where I could walk to start with and drive to later, and so I started
teaching for her in the evenings, several evenings a week. And, felt
very pleased when I made enough money to pay for the groceries for the
first time, here. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- And the children started school and were-- Sarah was one year ahead of
her age group in high school, Amanda was two years ahead of her age
group in intermediate high, and Julian, age seven, was just in his
normal age group. And they seemed to-- They appeared to fit in very
well. Since, they've told me that they had a hell of a time to start
with, you know, feeling very strange. But Amanda was very happy at her
intermediate school because she'd been there one day when she was asked
to go to the principal's office and he said, "We have another little
English girl who's coming today, who's new, and we thought the two of
you would like to go together." And when Amanda walked into the room
where she was, they embraced. They'd been at the same school in England.
- GUERARD
- Oh, how wonderful!
- HILLS
- She was called Louise Rose and her parents had spent six months in
Canada in between and we didn't know they lived down the street. They
went to the same school.
- GUERARD
- Amazing!
- HILLS
- Absolutely incredible. And, of course, they were--The Roses only stayed
for about two years and then they went back to England, but it was nice
for the two little girls to be together for that period. Again, such--So
many strange coincidences in the world.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- He was to do with theater lighting. He worked for one of the big theater
lighting companies. I can't remember what it was called now. And I think
he was something to do with putting the lighting into the Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion. I think. I may have got it wrong, but I think so. And
then when that was over, they went back to England.
- GUERARD
- So both your husband and he came out here kind of because of their
theatrical backgrounds.
- HILLS
- Sort of, though I think Brian's was minimal, really, on the theatrical
background. It was mainly the designer stuff. He designed a lot of-- He
worked for a big design electrical appliance company in England and
Mattel saw something in it that they needed, anyway. But it wasn't a
particularly pleasant place to work, I think. It had been. At the time
when we came, it had been very much burgeoning. I mean, became a very
big firm and then shortly afterwards it went-- Lost popularity a little
bit. I think the Barbies were overdone or something, and the Hot Wheels,
and they were laying people off. Brian wasn't laid off, but was made to
feel very uncomfortable because he was-- As the newcomer, he was still
there, and some of the people who had been there a long time were not.
And it wasn't a very particularly happy situation and he was glad to be
out of it, I think. [pause] The foreigner and all that stuff, too, you
know. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes. Yes. Well, so then your children gradually became accustomed to
American life and--?
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- You were--
- HILLS
- And I was starting to teach and enjoying that again. It was really nice
because after a short time, Stanley Holden said, "You know, I'd like to
have you not just substituting when somebody's sick, but doing it
regularly." And within a very short time, I was teaching for Alice LaMar
in Palos Verdes in the evening. I was teaching [at] Stanley [Holden
Dance Center] on the other evenings, the children's classes. And, I was
teaching a 9:30 ballet class in the morning. I was ballet mistress to
the Steven Peck Jazz Company, mid-morning. I was teaching for Irena
Kosmovska, on Wilshire Boulevard, early afternoon. And suddenly found I
was very much a full-time employee of a lot of different schools. Some
evenings, I taught for Tania Lichine [Lichine Ballet School] . Who else?
I taught for George Zoritch [Classical Ballet Studio], Roland Duprée
[Duprée Dance Academy] at a different time. That's a little later. All
over the place.
- GUERARD
- Were you teaching various levels and ages?
- HILLS
- Yes, from fairly young children--children about ten onwards--at Palos
Verdes and at Stanley Holden's, intermediate ballet at 9:30 at Holden's,
experienced and quite talented jazz dancers at Steven Peck's, company
class for the Los Angeles-- You know, Johnny [John] Clifford's Los
Angeles Ballet company.
- GUERARD
- Uh-huh. Right.
- HILLS
- And the senior students at Irena Kosmovska's. I was actually part of the
audition process for the Los Angeles Ballet, Johnny Clifford's, when it
first started.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- I didn't really like his choreography. They were very much Balanchine
technique and I didn't really fit in and I left there, by my own
volition, fairly soon. It wasn't what I really wanted to be doing. I
didn't want to teach that way, yet trying to teach my way to them,
although it was very similar to the way Stanley Williams teaches in New
York for [George] Balanchine, people here were not accepting of that
other style. Balanchine's own dancers did both quite happily, but the
Balanchine dancers in Los Angeles didn't really want to do other than
Balanchine. So there was a degree of tension there, which I didn't think
was worth putting up with and trying to rise above or anything and I
didn't really need to be doing it, so I stopped.
- GUERARD
- So, that was an instance where it was very- -it was a very professional
level, but there was a conflict because of--?
- HILLS
- Yes, that's right.
- GUERARD
- The type of technique?
- HILLS
- Yes, that's right. And then I started teaching pro [fessional] class at
Stanley's, alternate days with Stanley. And, of course that, in those
days, the professional class was very professional.
- GUERARD
- And was this very much like going back to the Sadler's Wells?
- HILLS
- Yes it was, because then, in those days, Stanley had a very structured
class-level of people. Although anybody could come to the beginning
levels, until their names were put up on the board, they weren't allowed
to progress to the next level. There was a definite grading system, in a
way. And the same with the children. They weren't moved up just because
their friend happened to move up. Unless they were good enough, they
weren't moved up. And everybody had to wear uniform. Even the pro class
had to wear black tunics, black leotards and tights and were not allowed
to sort of cover themselves in stuff. Things have changed a great deal
in twenty- six years. [laughs] One awful day some years after we opened,
one lady came and bought five classes. And before people had really
noticed what was happening, she thought that would take her to pro
class.
- GUERARD
- Oh, she did? [laughs]
- HILLS
- She took level one, one day, level two, level three, level four and
level five. She took-- Day five she took pro class, you know. And then
Stanley sort of looked at her and said, "What are you doing here?"
[laughter] And she never came back. She thought five classes and five
grades was one a day. [Guerard laughs] But now people could almost do
that and get away with it, unfortunately, because you no longer can tell
people that they're not good enough to do anything.
- GUERARD
- Yes, but--
- HILLS
- You can make a gentle suggestion nowadays that they might hurt
themselves and you really don't want to be responsible for them hurting
themselves and you would prefer that they took a lower level, but you
can't make them. And if they chose to go on coming, you have to put up
with it, which is, I find, quite appalling.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Nobody must ever fail or be shown to fail at doing anything. And it's
one of the reasons, I think, why ballet is less popular than it was,
because everybody thinks they can do it, too, and it's really quite easy
stuff. And they no longer have any regard for the ability of the
talented person to do it properly. I'm not speaking about everybody but
in general, anybody can do it. If I wish hard enough and pay a little
bit, I can do it, too. And it's very sad.
- GUERARD
- It's not that way, though.
- HILLS
- No. Twenty-six years, things have changed incredibly.
- GUERARD
- Hm.
- HILLS
- On the other hand, by sticking out for some time to levels and
standards, the improvement, in general, over the United States, of
teaching, has improved enormously. When we first opened at Stanley's,
the level of people coming, thinking they were good, was absolutely
appalling. They would come in points shoes with the bows done up in
front, go up on their toes and stay up there through full plies and
never coming down. I mean, they thought that was just fine. I've had
some serious thoughts because ballet, in the United States, was
principally taught by beautiful dancers from Russia. This was between
the wars and shortly after the Second World War. And the Russians are
now beginning to come back again into the United States--
1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE I APRIL 25, 1997
- GUERARD
- Margaret, end of last session, I'm afraid I let the tape run out, for
which I apologize, but you had said then that rather than pick up your
thought immediately on a new tape, you preferred to gather your thoughts
on that topic and bring it to this session.
- HILLS
- Mm hmm.
- GUERARD
- To review briefly, you were talking about the atmosphere and the level
of professionality in schools--in dance studios--and how currently, it's
difficult to give criticism to dancers on a professional level. I
believe your concern was the lack of structure in terms of having the
dancers achieve a certain mastery of each level before going on?
- HILLS
- That's right.
- GUERARD
- And you were beginning to discuss the influence of the Russian ballet
teachers in America.
- HILLS
- Yes. Really, I felt when I first came, since I was going 'round to quite
a lot of schools guest teaching, that I was getting quite a good
overview of the results of the teaching over the past few years before
we arrived in 1971, and my feeling was that the students had been taught
quite well when they were talented and very much, apparently, ignored if
they were not talented. And I felt very sorry that people who should
have enjoyed more facility than they showed were not really dancing to
their full potential, even though not obviously going to be
professionals. And I started to wonder why this would be and going from
my own-- Finding that I had to change my method of teaching when I
opened my own school and had every sort of body to teach, I wondered
whether the predominance of the Russian school in the United States had
anything to do with the fact that the Russian dancers- -professional
dancers--who'd opened schools in the United States, had relied only on
their own teaching; the way they had been taught, because, like The
Royal Ballet, they had been selected out of masses and masses of
children because they were talented bodies to be trained. And when you
have a really talented body, you, to some extent, at ten years old, you
do need to force some things, like turnout--as long as it's taught from
the right place, from the top of the legs and not from the feet--and the
extension of the legs, because you want to get those established before
growth finishes. So, you really want to have the high legs and the good
turnout well established before they're thirteen. And if you've been
trained only in that way, as those Russians had, it takes a good deal of
thought and anatomical knowledge to be able to adapt that teaching for
people who start late and for those who don ' t have the physical
ability ever to get their legs high and ever to achieve a really perfect
turnout. Because what I saw was that the talented people danced
beautifully and the non- talented people danced abysmally. The
difference was incredible and yet in hearing them talk, you would find
they had been trained at the same school.
- GUERARD
- Do you think it was completely different than the Sadler's Wells
[School] 's attitude of treating everybody in the same way, or do you
think--?
- HILLS
- No, I think it was that they-- What the Russians appeared not to have
done was to adapt their method of teaching to suit the non-professional
dancer.
- GUERARD
- Ah! Uh-huh.
- HILLS
- They treated everybody in the same way. I assume, because I didn't see
it. I'm only assuming from what I saw as a result of the training they'd
had that everybody turned their feet out at 180 degrees, whereas their
knees might be facing straight forward. And the hips were distorted
beyond belief to get the legs up high. And one can only assume that
they'd been yelled at, "Get your legs up, turn your feet out. Get your
legs up, turn your feet out," with no description of how they should
physically try to do that without hurting themselves.
- GUERARD
- They weren't taught about placement of--?
- HILLS
- No, not at all.
- GUERARD
- The hips or where the impetus came from?
- HILLS
- Not at all. No. And, of course, if you've got a very loose-limbed child
who is going to be very good, it will survive. Their bodies will get the
legs up without distortion because they can. And so, those people looked
great. And many of them were second generation from the original
teachers and maybe had been taught by another lot of teachers in between
the original émigrés. And that, I don't know. And any fault then would
be doubly wrong.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- Because they would have even less appreciation of what was wrong or what
was right. And it took some time after Stanley Holden and I were
teaching here in our way of structuring the classes for the shape of the
people in there and our demands in that way. Also, we never put children
with adults, in the same class, and it was obvious that many of the
people who came to us to start with had been taught children and adults
mixed up.
- GUERARD
- Oh! That's an interesting difference.
- HILLS
- Yes. And, of course, you teach children very differently than the way
you teach adult beginners. Financially, I can see why it probably had to
happen. If you have a small school that you're paying rent and you're
paying a pianist, and you don't have enough people to make up two
classes, one for adults and one for children, you do, financially, have
to put them together, but it's really to the detriment of both.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And I think that may be another cause of some of the bad technique-
-really bad technique- -that we saw. It took a long time to break some
of that down and to make people realize that they had a lot of reworking
to do. And reworking is harder than starting correctly from scratch,
because the brain has made those connections that this is how it ought
to feel and so you have to actually break down the brain's
brain-nerve-muscle connections and build them up again, which is really
hard. A lot of people took a couple of classes from us and didn't come
back. We did try and be as nice as we could about it, you know. And
others who really wanted to improve and if they stuck it out for a few
weeks found that they did actually improve. Their balance was better.
They could land from a jump with security instead of falling into the
next step. Then they began to understand that what we were saying was
right and that they could get better.
- GUERARD
- Do you suppose then that maybe in Russia if you weren't that person with
a natural turnout you just weren't a dancer?
- HILLS
- No, you didn't do it.
- GUERARD
- So they didn't have to adapt there and then when they came to the United
States, they just didn't change their, adapt their teaching methods.
- HILLS
- That's right. I'm sure that's right. I'm sure there are schools in
Russia all over the place, but as far as I know, I've never heard of an
examining body of teachers and children in Russia for the
non-professional, whereas we've been talking before about The Royal
Academy of Dancing--and there was also the Cecchetti Society--who did
have a syllabus for the non-professional child. And so, Stanley and I,
as children, had been in schools that did The Royal Academy examinations
at that time, and so we had been in classes ourselves with the talented
and the non-talented and our teachers had known how to teach us that
way.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- We'd got the other, the total immersion, when we went to Sadler's Wells.
But until then, we came from other schools. So, we did have to have,
perhaps, a better grounding for teaching non-professional dancers. On
the other hand, the people who had been really badly trained, I thought,
had no idea that they weren't any good. They had no idea they weren't
professional material because when, say, the Harkness Ballet or some of
the other ballet companies had auditions in Los Angeles, all those
people went to the auditions. And were devastated when they weren't
accepted. People who were in their late thirties and early- forties went
for the audition and really didn't understand why they didn't get in.
They were completely unaware of their limitations, which is really an
eye-opener because you saw the people in class and you thought they were
doing it for pleasure. In fact, they were doing it-- They hoped to
become professionals. So--
- GUERARD
- Well, was there a difference between the way that ballet dancers were
taught back East?
- HILLS
- I don't know because I never was back East. I really couldn't tell you.
I'm only talking about Los Angeles. It's all I know. As I said before, I
taught at Tania Lichine's studio [Lichine Ballet School], for instance,
and there, I think the standard was considerably better than some of the
people from other schools whose names I don't know, who turned up at
Stanley Holden's [Stanley Holden Dance Center]. She seemed to have a
very-- What's the word I'm after? Very professional attitude towards all
of the dancers . She knew enough about how to teach the
non-professional.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- And they were very rewarding to teach. Very nice people, very
well-trained. And she's still doing it. You know, she has a great
reputation, still. But some of the others, that came from who knows
where, were not very good. I taught, also, near my home, at a school in
Palos Verdes, which is now closed down, run by a woman called Alice
LaMar. And she sent-- She was very good. She knew that when her dancers
got to a certain stage, they needed to go into a bigger environment. And
she would send her more talented youngsters, when they were about
fourteen or fifteen, to Stanley Holden's, which meant a sacrifice for
her because she lost the money of those students. And that showed great
integrity to do that.
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm. Yes.
- HILLS
- I didn't all together agree with the way she taught children. She did
push them. And some of the non- talented ones, I felt, were not given
enough care. So when they came to my class, I tried to give them the
care that Alice didn't give. But with the talented ones, she got very
good results. They were excellent, and a lot of her dancers did go on to
professional standard, which was very nice. That was the studio that my
husband [Brian Hills] had driven by when he came here and we hadn't
arrived yet. When we came he said, "There was one studio I drove by with
the right noises coming out."
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And that was Alice LaMar's studio, where I finished up doing some
teaching.
- GUERARD
- The reason that I thought to ask you about if there was a difference
between the dancers back East is because I know that more recently, when
professional dancers from other companies back East are in town, they
tend to take their classes at your-- at Stanley Holden's studio.
- HILLS
- They do. Yes. Well, I think that came about, to some extent-- We had,
originally, a lot of very talented teenagers and there was a time when
there were twelve Stanley Holden dancers in ABT [American Ballet
Theatre].
- GUERARD
- There were?!
- HILLS
- Yes. So--
- GUERARD
- Wow!
- HILLS
- So we had quite a good reputation for getting people into ABT. And
because of that, they tended to come-- When they came back to L.A. to
dance, they would come to their "home studio," so to speak, and bring
other company members with them. Added to that, Anthony Dowell was guest
artist with ABT for a long time; a former student of mine, of course,
from The Royal [Ballet School]. And so, when he came to L.A., he came to
take class with us. And Georgina Parkinson, who is ballet mistress of
ABT, was one of my original Royal Ballet School students.
- GUERARD
- Oh, was she?
- HILLS
- So, the give and take between the ten or eight ABT and Holden's is very
strong. Not many New York City Ballet people come, or came, because the
Balanchine style is so different. I...
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- Peter Martins used to come because he was, when he first came to this
country, entirely Danish-trained, which was not Balanchine at all. But
he stopped coming after a while as he got more and more indoctrinated
with the Balanchine technique.
- GUERARD
- Oh, interesting!
- HILLS
- And now he's director of New York City Ballet since [George] Balanchine
died.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- But there is now, I think, in New York City Ballet, a difference from
what Balanchine insisted on. There is a Danish influence in there, which
mitigates some of the excesses of Balanchine technique, which I don't
like, but you know, he needed to have that technique to do his
choreography.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Just like Martha Graham technique. You need for Martha Graham, modern
dance.
- GUERARD
- Oh, of course!
- HILLS
- You need Horton technique for [Lester] Horton choreography. So you need
Balanchine technique for Balanchine choreography. Whereas I feel, at any
rate, with The Royal Ballet technique and The Royal Academy technique,
you can get into ballet companies almost anywhere in the world, apart
from a Balanchine company, because that technique gives you the ability
to do almost everything everybody else, but Balanchine, does. So you
don't have to go and learn Canadian--National Ballet of
Canada--technique or you don't have to learn Stuttgart technique or
Australian Ballet technique or South African Ballet technique because
it's all the same. Balanchine is the one sore thumb which is entirely
different.
- GUERARD
- The one that's quite different, huh?
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Well, I know that [Mikhail] Baryshnikov took classes there for years. He
may still. I don't know.
- HILLS
- Yes, when he came back when he was doing his show in Los Angeles a
couple of weeks ago, he still came back to take class.
- GUERARD
- So, I'm not sure what that says about his training and how it fits
into--
- HILLS
- Well, it fits in because the Russian training and the English training
is not that different. It's Balanchine. It's not Russian technique.
Balanchine is Balanchine. He took his Russian training and altered it to
fit the choreography he wanted to do. So, he is a sport. Just something,
you know, quite, quite different and very special. There's no doubt
about that. If you like what he does, and his dancers do it beautifully,
but it's not Russian technique or anything else. It's Balanchine
technique. And that, I think one has to understand that it is quite
different from Russian.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- He brainwashed. And that is right because what I was saying about the
brain-nerve-muscle reflexes, he had to change-- With each dancer that he
took, he had to change those reflexes to do his technique.
- GUERARD
- Oh. So this is on a much different scale than having to learn the RAD
[The Royal Academy of Dancing] technique as opposed to The Royal Ballet.
- HILLS
- Oh, absolutely!
- GUERARD
- We're talking about having to switch your whole center of balance and
everything.
- HILLS
- Absolutely. And speed of movement. You see, he liked dancers--and they
were beautiful--with very narrow bone physique, very short bodies,
extremely long legs, small heads. Now, if you've got very long legs and
a very short body and are required to do very, very fast movement, you
have to cut some corners. And so, the Balanchine class work technique is
very fast and you don't put your heels down in the same way. You are
allowed to bend your knees in different places from other techniques.
And it's necessary, if you're going to put Balanchine technique onto the
Balanchine-shaped dancer. You can't do it. You can't do the speed of his
technique with our training. You have to change. You have to be willing
to make that vast change. So, when a child's parents chose a school,
they are really choosing what future it’s going to have in the
professional world, if it's going to go that far. So if you start off in
Balanchine technique, you're going to stick with it.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- It is possible to start with the other technique, if you're really
adaptable, and go to the Balanchine technique. It's virtually impossible
to go from Balanchine to the other. From my experience, I dare say,
they'll prove to me that there are dancers who've done that, but it's
very hard.
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm. I think that's a very good way of explaining that.
- HILLS
- I think I should continue on this theme, although it's leaping ahead
some years. Once the Berlin Wall came down and Communism ceased to be in
Russia and many, many more Russian dancers started to come to this
country again, I have a great fear--and it's beginning to show a little
bit--that the Russians that are new to the United States now, are going
to fall into exactly the same mess that their predecessors did.
- GUERARD
- Oh, really?
- HILLS
- Yeah. I've seen people now who've been trained by some Russians who've
come over fairly recently, quite young ones, who are distorting their
bodies just like the old ones used to do. And it's sad because I-- You
know, "Russians are coming. Let's go to the Russians' classes and let's
screw our feet 'round to 180 degrees and never mind what our hips do,
you know. Margaret and Stanley are not here to tell us we're doing this
wrong. And look, my leg will go up here behind my ears, but where's my
placement and am I going to hurt myself? Is my body going to die, you
know, before I do?"
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- And so, I sincerely hope it doesn't happen, but it seems to be tending
that way and it worries me greatly. Particularly as Stanley and I are
now older and one just hopes that there are students we've had who will
carry on what we have tried to build up. But whether it will happen or
not, I have no idea. I have a feeling that we're really coming to an end
to one era and going into another.
- GUERARD
- Right. Well, I hope it's a healthy era.
- HILLS
- I hope it is, too.
- GUERARD
- Healthy for dancers and--
- HILLS
- Anyway, we'll get to that much later on, but I just feel that I needed
to breach that gap and to show what I fear for the future. [tape
recorder off]
- GUERARD
- Margaret, last time you gave us sort of a brief run-through of several
different studios where you were teaching when you first came to the
United States. I was thinking that when you were teaching in England,
you were teaching for one ballet company and one ballet school [and]
pretty much one--not pretty much, very much one-- sort of technique. And
now that you're in the United States, you're teaching for several
different studios and even for different kinds of dance companies; not
all ballet.
- HILLS
- That's right!
- GUERARD
- You mentioned a jazz company.
- HILLS
- Yes. Mm hmm.
- GUERARD
- Would you like to talk a little bit more about this?
- HILLS
- Yes. Perhaps if I talked about my day, would perhaps be a good start.
Traffic wasn't anything like it is now in Los Angeles in 1971, '72, '73.
I would take my son [Julian Hills], who was seven, eight, nine, to
school, and drop him off at about quarter of nine. And then I would
drive to Stanley Holden's to teach at 9:30. That's a twenty-two mile
drive, which you couldn't do in that time nowadays, but you could
easily, then. And I would teach at Holden's from 9:30 to 11, an
intermediate/advanced ballet class. And then I would leave and go over
to the Steven Peck [Jazz Company] studio--this is a jazz dance company
at his studio on Robertson, which is quite a short trip across- -and
start ballet class there at 11:30. They were very receptive to total,
perfectly normal ballet technique, although they were completely
died-in-the-wool jazz dancers and doing wonderful things with Steven
Peck's choreography. He had a very cohesive jazz company and I was
appointed his ballet mistress to his jazz company.
- GUERARD
- Oh, great!
- HILLS
- Very nice people. Some of them are still very well known. Dennon Rawles
and his wife, Sayhber [Rawles] . They weren't married then. They were
just teenagers and they've been teaching jazz in Los Angeles ever since
and still are and have children of their own now, who are rising
teenagers. I enjoyed being with them very much because they were
fresher. Very open and chatty and fun. Steven Peck ruled them with a rod
of iron and chose really weird names for them. They didn't use their own
names. There was-- I never really knew their proper names. Sayhber, I
don't know if that's her real name or not. She stuck with it. And
Dennon, I think that's his real name. But there was one girl who was
called Shiverie Puddingstone, which wasn't her name at all. [laughter]
And you remember Edwin Milam, who was a pianist at Stanley Holden's. He
married one of Steven Peck's dancers. And Steven Peck called her Sec
Onay, from the fact that she kept on saying she'd only be a second
before she did so- and-so. He called her Sec Onay. Her real name is
Rebecca LaBranche.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- So, he had a very twisted sense of humor.
- GUERARD
- I'll say!
- HILLS
- But it didn't seem to worry them very much, fortunately. They survived
the strange names and were really nice people and I enjoyed teaching
them enormously. On Friday afternoons, I used to go over to his other
studio in Fullerton and teach them over there, because they did
performances. He had a theater on Harbor Boulevard in Fullerton and they
had the class before the performance on Friday afternoon. So I used to
go over there then, but the Robertson studio for the rest of the time.
Just for one class. And I can't now remember if it was every day or just
two or three times a week. I suspect it was two or three times a week.
And then from there, I would go over to [Irena] Kosmovska's studio,
which was on the corner of, I think, Wilshire and Robertson. It was
upstairs. One of those big rooms which I imagine had been a ballroom or
a the dance place in the '20s and '30s. It was a big upstairs room and
some of the rooms on the corridors were owned or rented--I don't know
which--by a school for children wanting to get into movies. You know,
that sort of thing. And Kosmovska had a-- It was a lovely room. It had
some pillars in the middle which were a bit of a nuisance, but it was a
nice, nice dance space. I enjoyed being there. But she was one of the
people who had been trained by Balanchine and so they were entirely
Balanchine technique and I didn't stay very long. Johnny [John] Clifford
was just about to start his first effort at a Los Angeles Ballet and--
- GUERARD
- About what year was this?
- HILLS
- I can't-- You know, it's awfully hard to remember. It might have been
1975, but I'm really not sure. Time goes away and you-- I don't have
anything to differentiate the dates with. I could look it up. I have,
obviously, some programs and things at home. I could check it, but I
don't really remember off hand. I can give you an addendum for all this
later on [laughter] with dates and times and so forth.
- GUERARD
- Right. Just an approximation is fine.
- HILLS
- Yes. And I helped him with the auditions for the company, but I really
didn't fit in. I was trying to make them do the things that I felt they
should do and I hadn't appreciated, then, the difference between the
Balanchine technique and mine. It was only when I'd been battling for a
little while, I thought, "This is ridiculous. I'm in entirely the wrong
place. I must stop." And so I said, you know, I'd appreciated being
there, but didn't think anybody was gaining anything by my being there
and I left. And no acrimony at all. It was just [that] I began to
realize the differences.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Then, that would be from what, shall we say, 2:00 till 3:30. And then I
would drive back to Holden's to teach the teenage classes in the
evenings from four-thirty to six. And then an adult advanced class from
six to seven-thirty.
- GUERARD
- Now, somewhere in between there, your son has--?
- HILLS
- Come home from school.
- HILLS
- My husband, at that time, was working out of our home.
- GUERARD
- Oh, perfect.
- HILLS
- And so, he was there. He had-- As I told you, he came to work for
Mattel, Inc. and had found that the project that they had been really
employing him for was not going to follow through and so he decided to
open his own design business and was, before he got premises, working
out of our home. So he was home most of the time. And I also had a very,
very sweet neighbor who was definitely at home all the time and whose
little boy was a great buddy of my son. And so, I had an arrangement
with her that if ever Brian was out, Julian would go to Cris Hurley's
house and she would look after them. So, we had a nice arrangement
because when they wanted to go on vacation, Willie [Hurley] would stay
at our house, you know, because he had a lot of older brothers and
sisters and he was the baby. So, it all worked out beautifully. And my
two older daught [ers] -- Sarah [Hills Larson] had left home by 1973 and
gone to Eugene--well, first to San Luis Obispo and then to Eugene--to
become an architect. So she wasn't at home. But Amanda [Hills Podany]
was still at school until [pause] 1976, she graduated. I think. Yes! The
year of '76. Of course, yes. She was a 1976 centennial year-graduate, so
she was home, and older.
- GUERARD
- I see. I didn't mean to interrupt your schedule.
- HILLS
- No, that's right--
- GUERARD
- I remembered that you had started--
- HILLS
- Had a little boy, yes. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- At school in the morning.
- HILLS
- Yes, and what happened to this poor little boy, right? There was one
horrible occasion when they called me from the school to say that please
would I come because Julian had fallen and broken both his arms.
[Guerard gasps] He'd cracked his cheekbone the day before, riding a
bicycle down the hill and the little boy next door--not Cris Hurley's
son, but another little boy--had rolled a football out and Julian had
fallen over the handlebars, having hit the football, and cracked his
cheekbone on a rock. And had a great big black eye. You can't do
anything about a cheekbone. It's cracked and it's still cracked. You
know, you can't put a cast on a cheekbone. And he'd insisted on going to
school the next day. Said he couldn't possibly not go because he had a
test. And his eye was closed up so he had monocular vision and, silly
little boy, decided that he would swing from the gutter over the open
corridor; jumped up to reach the gutter and, of course, couldn't see.
Had no binocular vision, so fell and broke both his arms. Had them both
in a cast for six weeks. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Oh, how horrible!
- HILLS
- Poor child. [laughs] It was absolutely awful. I had to cut all his
shirts in half and velcro them down the shoulder and sleeve seam and put
one half on and then the other half on and clip them together with
velcro. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Oh! Oh, so sad!
- HILLS
- Just ghastly, poor little boy! He survived. Ran for seventh-grade
president or whatever he was--sixth grade, I think--and won. I mean, it
was a sympathy vote for him at that time. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- He was a hero to have survived that.
- HILLS
- Absolutely, yes! [laughs] So, one does have minor catastrophes when
you're at work, but we survived. It was all right. So, my day was quite
long.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- And partly, you know, Brian was setting up his own business and we
didn't have much money. Sarah was at university and we were paying for
her. It was fine while she was in San Luis Obispo. That was California.
But when she decided that that training wasn't good enough for an
architect--she needed to go to Eugene--that was out of state, so it was
very expensive. But, I mean, I'm thrilled we did it. It was worth all
the extra work one had to put in because she's done exceedingly well.
But it was expensive. And knowing that Amanda was coming on soon, too,
to go into school--
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- So, I really was working many hours of many days. I didn't do the
teenage class at Holden's every day. I did Tuesday and Thursday. And
Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I taught teenagers at the Alice LaMar
studio near home. So, on those days, I was able to dash into the house
and have a quick bite to eat before going up there. And then, of course,
once that was over, it was a very short getting home. It was just a mile
and a half away from our house, so that was nice. In those days, Stanley
Holden's didn't have classes on Friday nights. He had found that nobody
came on Friday nights. And we had no classes on Saturday morning.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- None of-- In those days, on Sunday, of course not. And I wanted to make
some more money, so I said to him, you know, "Could we have class on
Saturdays? You don't have to come in." He didn't want to. He was newly
married and wanted some time at home with his new wife [Judy Holden] and
stepdaughter [Mimi Keith] and he said, "Well, I don't think anybody will
come [but] you know, you can if you like." And so I taught Saturday
mornings. Nobody else did. For many, or several years, I did a 9:30
class, advanced. I did professional class at eleven and a 12:30 class
afterwards.
- GUERARD
- Great!
- HILLS
- Yeah, it was! It was good because, you know, I was making all that money
which I needed desperately.
- GUERARD
- Well, and probably bringing in more interest to the studio.
- HILLS
- Yes. A lot of people-- It was about that time when people suddenly sort
of thought that they could go to ballet classes after work and on the
weekends. And we were helped because the fitness thing was taking root.
- GUERARD
- Uh-huh!
- HILLS
- And so, many more people who didn't really care for jogging down
concrete streets and didn't want to be out in the sun and still wanted
to exercise. And it was before the arrival of all the gymnasiums that
there are now you know with all the machines. There were no machines.
So, to dance was a good way of getting your exercise, enjoyably, and
feeling good about yourself.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And so we were very fortunate that that happened all at the same time. I
don't think it was a conscious thing on my part. I just-- I wanted some
more money.
- GUERARD
- Uh-huh! [laughter] Very practical.
- HILLS
- And that just happened to be at the time when people wanted exercise,
and so those Saturday morning classes were huge, which was very nice. We
were also helped by the arrival of Baryshnikov from Russia, who elected
to take class at Stanley Holden's. And there was one occasion when
Baryshnikov was taking class and Stanley was teaching it that day and I
can't remember the exact numbers, but I think there was something like
seventy people in Studio One [Guerard laughs] , to say they had been in
class with Baryshnikov. And I had an intermediate class at the same time
in Studio Two which is, as you know, not very big. And I had fifty- four
[Guerard gasps] in that class, because they wanted to say they'd been in
the same building with Baryshnikov.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my God!
- HILLS
- And there were people sitting on the sofas in the lobby in hysterics
because they weren't allowed to go and watch Baryshnikov in class,
because they weren't students. I mean, people came off the street when
they saw him come into the building, with piles of ballet books, waiting
for him to sign them.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And we wouldn't let them. You know, he came there to take his class. He
didn't come there to be a performer in classes. This is one of the
things about professionals in class. They don't want to be watched.
- GUERARD
- No.
- HILLS
- One of the rules which Stanley very sensibly put in when he opened was
that you can only observe classes by the discretion of the teacher or
the director. And there are still times when I won't have people
watching because I know there are movie stars in class who have no wish
to be seen. They're doing dance for pleasure. They're not particularly
good, so why should they be viewed by strangers who just come to gawk?
- GUERARD
- Well, whatever their reason for taking the class, it's for personal
improvement.
- HILLS
- Exactly. Exactly. And you don't want to have people putting their faces
right in the door and saying, "Hey look, that's so and so." So, we've
been very careful about that.
- GUERARD
- But how could you even breathe, let alone take a--?
- HILLS
- You couldn't.
- GUERARD
- Move, with seventy people in that room?
- HILLS
- You couldn't. You absolutely couldn't. It was-- One couldn't teach. It
was just crowd management. You could give a class divided into, you
know, several groups. At the barre everybody-- You couldn't set a port
de bras forward and back, for instance, because nobody had room to bend.
And everybody had to face out for the grand battement and all-- It was
absolutely horrible.
- GUERARD
- Hm. Did you find a way to cut down on the numbers of people in the
class?
- HILLS
- Well, when Baryshnikov wasn't there, then not so many people came. But,
from the financial point of view, because he had been, even when he
wasn't there, it did a tremendous amount to boost the reputation of the
studio. And people-- Mothers sent their young children to it for the
same reason; that if Baryshnikov was prepared to take class at that
studio, it had to be good. And it was. And, it was right. He chose the
right studio, in my opinion, to come to.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And the follow on was right. It helped us enormously, and I think we
trained them well. And we still were strict, at that time, about-
-particularly with the juniors--who was in which level. You couldn't
just chose your own level.
- GUERARD
- So, you couldn't just switch levels in order to take class with
Baryshnikov.
- HILLS
- No. No. There were seventy professional dancers in there. Because, you
know, Los Angeles, at that time, had a lot of shows with dancers in
[them]. It had a lot of television shows which were made here with
dancers in [them].
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- A lot of movies that had dancers in [them]. It was right around the time
of Turning Point, also. And the dancers in Turning Point used to come to Holden's for class.
It was shot at Twentieth Century-Fox [Film Corporation studios], so it
was only just down the street. So those dancers would come and take
class, also. Leslie Browne was there and the boy [Phillip Saunders] who
was in it. And also, Tom Skerritt. He won't mind me saying this because
he was wonderful. He'd never danced a step in his life and he was
supposed to be the ballet teacher in Turning
Point. And he came to pre-beginning ballet classes for months and
really, really tried. The trouble was that he had very short arms and
quite a big head and he couldn't get his arms into a fifth position over
his head; you know, the crown of the arms over the head, in the fifth
position. And they wouldn't meet. And I felt very sorry for him because
he worked exceedingly hard to be able to do enough to look as though he
was teaching a class. And everything was cut out of the movie. He was
acting. He did the father thing and he did the administration in the
school sort of part, but he never was shown teaching a class. And it was
very sad because he'd worked so hard. He was a charming man. Very, very
nice. And I would love him to have just some little bit that he did in
that movie. It was very sad. So, he deserved more for that.
- GUERARD
- This brings to mind, too, were there professional dancers, then, in your
professional-level class at Stanley Holden's who were not necessarily
professional ballet dancers?
- HILLS
- Oh, yes! There were.
- GUERARD
- Because of the Hollywood influence or environment?
- HILLS
- Yes, absolutely. And provided that they were, you know, could get the
combinations right, and knew enough, if they were professionals, that
was okay. There were professional jazz dancers and the jazz dancers from
Steven Peck's, on the days that I wasn't giving them a ballet class,
would sometimes come and take pro class at Holden's. And, at that time,
Stanley and I taught it alternate days. And so, you know, they would
either take from him or me, as the case may be. And I really enjoyed
teaching that professional-level class. It was very nice. That had to
stop when I started teaching at UCLA in 1984, because I couldn't do it
anymore. I was at UCLA much more time. And so, I stopped doing pro class
then and I haven't taught it since, which is a regret of mine. I would
have liked to have got it back again when I stopped at UCLA, but it
didn't happen. One of the regrets of one's life. You know, there are a
few, obviously. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes. Well, you can't do everything. [laughs]
- HILLS
- No, you can't.
- GUERARD
- But you'd like to.
- HILLS
- Yes. One would. To go back to my sort of daily schedule, when I stopped
teaching for Kosmovska, Roland Duprée studios [Duprée Dance Academy]
asked me if I could teach a two o'clock class in the afternoon, there.
And so, I filled that gap by teaching an advanced ballet class for
Roland Dupree. And during his summer schools, I taught repertoire and
things like that, which was great fun. Very different situation because
at Stanley Holden's, at that time, we did have a jazz teacher. Patrick
Adiarte taught jazz and your friend, Ellé Johnson, also taught other
than ballet there.
- GUERARD
- It was Afro-Caribbean.
- HILLS
- Yes. She was a great lady. Very nice. I liked her very, very much. So,
we had-- They were the sort of odd people with most of the people there
being ballet, whereas at Steven Peck's and at Roland Dupree's, they were
principally jazz dancers and I was the odd person who came in to teach
ballet. So I had an empathy with the jazz teachers at Holden's, which I
might otherwise not have had, because I know how odd they felt.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- To be the stranger in the midst, so to speak. And yet, I really enjoyed
teaching the jazz dancers. The approach was different. They wanted fast
movement and to get on with it and rather more jazzy music for class.
And the pianists were very good. They managed to find a compromise
between the totally balletic sort of music and the more upbeat stuff for
the jazz dancers.
- GUERARD
- So, that presented a whole new teaching challenge, didn't it?
- HILLS
- It did! Yes. Yes. One had to be a little careful not to over correct the
tail sticking out of the back for a jazz dancer, you know. You couldn't
make them look entirely balletic.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- Because they needed the other muscles for the jazz. Just as one has to
approach somebody who's principally a singer slightly differently and
ask them if their singing training has them breathing out through the
ribs of the back or through the belly. As I understand it, there are two
different methods of training for singing. And if you over straighten
the spine or over pull in the abdomens, according to the singing
training, you can be detrimental to the singing.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And so, if they're learning to dance as a secondary strain to their
singing, you don't want to interfere and make them change their physique
entirely. So one has to be a little careful when you go to correct
somebody who's got developed muscles where you don't expect to see them.
You want to find out why those muscles are like that. There was one girl
who came and took the intermediate class with what looked like an
enormous belly, and I went over to just touch it, to teach her how to
pull it in, and found it was hard as a rock. This was a bulging belly of
muscles. And I asked her, I said, you know, "What do you do to get those
muscles so big that they stick out?" And she said, "Oh, I've got the
president's medal for doing the most sit-ups."
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And she'd been doing them by building muscle in her abdomen to such an
extent that she-- I mean, her body was distorted. It was very sad. She'd
done whatever numbers it was to get the president's medal for sit-ups,
but she should never been allowed to do them the way she had. It was
very sad. I never was able to break that muscle down. Try as we would,
it was there. I don't know whatever happened to her. If she had children
later, it would have been horrendous I think, poor thing. And so, one
just does have to be-- To watch; not just watch your teaching, but what
the other part of people's lives are about.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And the jazz dancers were my first introduction into this. There will be
others as we go on, as you'll see. But just not to overstress the
relaxing of some of the muscles that they need for other things. But to
keep the joys that they get from dance into the ballet, you know. Not to
have them think, "Oh we've got to do this ballet because we're told to."
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- But to enjoy it just as much as their chosen field and one they were
best at, which was the jazz. So, it was fun! I really enjoyed it. The
Dupree jazz dancers were different from the Steven Peck jazz dancers.
Their approach was different. I don't know enough about jazz to know how
it was different, but the bodies were a different shape. They moved
differently.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- It was rather fun. And I stuck with Dupree for two or three years, I
think. And then, he was selling up his studio, and so I stopped.
- GUERARD
- Margaret, I'm sorry. We're coming almost to the end of this tape.
- HILLS
- Oh, okay.
- GUERARD
- So let's pick up right away at the next one.
- HILLS
- All right. Good!
1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE II APRIL 25, 1997
- GUERARD
- Margaret, I'm struck with, now, not only realizing the difference in
teaching technique and techniques that you're doing in the United States
as compared to in England, but also with the joy that you bring to
teaching these different-- Teaching people with different viewpoints.
And I can see that you're really enjoying it.
- HILLS
- I love a challenge. That's the thing, I think. I suppose-- We talked
about the luck I had all my life. I think the luck to be asked to do
this sort of thing keeps life so alive. If one just went on teaching the
same lot of pliés to the same lot of people every day, ad infinitum,
[it] would be deadly.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- I think one needs to be challenged and to have to rethink your-- The
things you have had as your creed, so to speak, and to see how you can
change it without compromising your integrity.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And those are challenges which are fun. And I also found I got an
enormous amount of pleasure in allowing people to find they could do
things that they had no concept that they could do. And this was
something that I found surprising to myself when I started teaching
older beginners. I don't mean elderly, but I mean not children. After
the movie Turning Point came out, a lot of
people suddenly wanted to learn ballet who'd never done it or had done
it as children and stopped once they started to grow, and now they were
in their twenties and they wanted to start coming back and do it again.
And I started teaching some of those people. And to see them blossom
into almost different people, was wonderful! Some of them had been very
bad at p . e . at school, you know, and they'd come and say, "Really,
you know, I've got two left feet. I really don't think I'm going to be
able to do this at all, but I just-- It looked so nice, I really want to
try." And to have them prove to themselves and to find within themselves
that they could do it and that they could get an enormous amount of
pleasure in doing it, was incredibly rewarding. I didn't expect to find
that. To find that I found it rewarding was a big surprise to me because
I thought I would hate it, when I started it. You know, I looked at them
and thought, "Oh, gosh! What am I going to do?" You know, "These people
can never be any good." And then suddenly from them, I got this joy, and
it was wonderful!
- GUERARD
- I guess there has to be a certain willingness on the part of the teacher
to let go certain standards, even though you hold them to be important,
in order for a creative kind of teaching to happen.
- HILLS
- Yes. I would argue with you a tiny little bit about let go standards
because the basic kinesiological standards are maintained, or should be
maintained.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- What one lets go, of course, is the degree of turnout, the degree of
elasticity in the limbs because, of course, once the bones have finished
growing, there's not a lot you can do about that elasticity. But within
that concept, to keep the placement right. Certainly, you don't expect
them to get their legs way, way up and that sort of thing. You can
encourage them to get them as high as they can. But one doesn't want the
standard to slip. One wants to keep the standard within the physical
capability of the person. And that, I think, is just subtly different
than the other phrase.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And one does have to assume that sometimes those people who have started
late may ultimately teach other people .
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And that, one has always at the back of one's mind, to say, "Am I giving
them enough grounding that they know what is right, even though they're
not able to do it themselves?" One would prefer, of course, that they
didn't teach. But they have paid for their lessons and they've gone on
and done quite well. They know quite a lot. By the time they've gone
from pre-beginning to an advanced class, they know a lot and there's
nothing in this country to stop them putting up their shingle and
opening a dance school. And so, one is always conscious that you have to
make them very much aware of the principles of what they're doing.
- GUERARD
- Yes. You wanted to be responsible in case they would go on to teach
somebody--?
- HILLS
- Exactly.
- GUERARD
- That they wouldn't be hurting them.
- HILLS
- If they opened a school and a talented body came to them, one wants to
be sure that they wouldn't lose that talent, that they wouldn't mistrain
it, and that they would bring out the right thing. And there is one
person, and I don't know if one should mention names or not, but she's
called Heather Benes, and she sometimes takes my class at Holden's,
still. And she took my classes at UCLA. And I think her degree, I'm
practically certain, is in kinesiology, not in dance. She has opened her
school in-- Somewhere in the desert. I'm not quite sure where it is. And
she has since brought her students to Holden's on odd occasions and they
are exquisitely taught. She's not a great technician, herself. She does
very well, but she's-- You know, she started late. She knows she started
late, but her teaching is superb. She's got the kinesiology background,
of course, which is a great asset. But she's brought in two boys who are
beautiful and two or three girls who are excellent, talented. So there's
a case where I'm happy that what ballet technique I've given her is
being used to great advantage. She'll never be a performer herself, but
that is very nice to see happen.
- GUERARD
- Yeah!
- HILLS
- And these rewards that you get from what your students have done is
lovely. One of the teachers from-- She teaches Renaissance dance and
Baroque dance at one of the universities, who takes class at Stanley's,
Linda Tomko. She said to me one day, "Don't you get frustrated teaching
non-professional people?" She said, "What have you got to look forward
to?" And I said, "Well, I have to think what I have to look back on."
Because my students are now in places of great importance all over the
world. And Sir Anthony Dowell is director of The Royal Ballet, Dame
Merle Park is director of The Royal Ballet School, Georgina Parkinson is
ballet mistress of American Ballet Theatre, Dame Antoinette Sibley is
president of The Royal Academy of Dancing. All four of them, ex-students
of mine. Ballerina Marcia Haydée was director of the Stuttgart Ballet
after John Cranko, who was also a student of mine, died. He was a
choreographer. So I have all those people, whom I was partially
responsible for their training, in enormously prestigious positions in
the world of ballet. And now I have other students who are, like
Heather, teaching future dancers. So, really, what have I got to grumble
about? [Guerard laughs] You know? It's exceedingly rewarding to have
this feedback from the younger people. It's marvelous! You feel there
has been purpose in your life, you know, which is a great position to be
in.
- GUERARD
- Yes, it is.
- HILLS
- It happens, I think, to very few people. And I feel enormously honored
that I've been able to do that. It's just fabulous.
- GUERARD
- What about the kinds of students that you had at Santa Monica College
and at UCLA? Was that a different kind of atmosphere because of the fact
that they were colleges?
- HILLS
- Yes. I should tell you my history of getting to UCLA, where I went in
1984. I had, for years, had people from UCLA coming to take my advanced
class [at Stanley Holden Dance Center] and I'm afraid I'd had to tell
them that they were not ready for my advanced class and had to go to a
lower level. And they were very upset. They didn't like this. And, in my
opinion- -and in this case, I am not going to mention any names. People
can do some research if they want to, but--the level of training of
ballet at UCLA was abysmal. The placement was exceedingly bad. They
twisted their hips all over the place and I had criticized it, openly.
And one day, up on the board at Holden's was one of those letters they
send out from universities saying they're doing a job search for, in
this case, a ballet professor.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- At UCLA. And I knew that the dancing there was terrible and I didn't
want to go. And so, I didn't even think of applying. Didn't cross my
mind. And then one morning, I had a telephone call from UCLA saying why
hadn't I applied? [Guerard laughs] And I said, "I don't want to come!"
And they put the receiver down and then two days later, I had another
telephone call from somebody else at UCLA saying, "We really would like
you to come. We know you've criticized us and we feel that now [that]
you're being given the chance to do something about it, you should take
it."
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And so I said, "Okay. What do you want me to do?" And they said, "Well,
what we'll do is to send some faculty members from UCLA to watch your
class at Holden's." And on three separate occasions, three people came
to watch class. And I knew why they were there, but some of the students
didn't know why they were there and I found afterwards that some of
those students had applied to the job for teaching at UCLA and thought
these UCLA faculty were coming to watch them in class. And, in fact,
they were coming to watch me teaching. So there was this strange
atmosphere in class, which I didn't understand at the time. And after
the third class, they all took me out to breakfast, all three of them,
and said, "We are the search committee and we want you to come." And so
then I went and saw the chair of the Department [of Dance], Carol
Scothorn, and we discussed my salary and all that sort of thing. And,
blow me, I was in. And I hadn't written a single thing on a piece of
paper, which people normally do to get a job in a university. I'd sent
no resume, nothing.
- GUERARD
- Wow!
- HILLS
- Which was, I'm sure, not what they were supposed to have done. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Did you feel differently, at that point about--?
- HILLS
- Well, I felt--
- GUERARD
- The prospect of teaching there?
- HILLS
- I felt here was another challenge that had really-- I mean they'd really
thrown the glove down at me.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- And I had felt bound to pick it up. It was not a full-time position. It
was a forty-five-- A seventy-five percent-time of time position, which
meant that I was called a visiting lecturer. And I taught all the ballet
classes at UCLA. I was to teach the first two levels, the freshmen and
sophomores, who had two classes a week every day for two years. [pause]
No, I'm sorry. Twice a week for two years. And an intermediate class
which was open to anybody in the university, not just the dance majors,
which also met on two afternoons a week. And the advanced, which was
also open to the entire university, three times a week. And that seemed,
you know, okay, but I would have to drop some other things.
- GUERARD
- Yes! I was just going to say that.
- HILLS
- Alice LaMar, at Palos Verdes, dropped me because she had also applied
for the job [laughter], which I didn't know about.
- GUERARD
- Ouch.
- HILLS
- So that was a real ouch. And it took a long time before she spoke to me
again. And I had to drop the professional class at Holden's because most
of the classes at UCLA were at 11:00 in the morning. So I didn't-- Oh,
at least, 11:30. I got them to change the schedule slightly so that I
didn't have to drop my 9:30 class; that I could go on with that. So, I
started at UCLA at 11:30, so I had to dash from Holden's in half an hour
and park and get going and then get into class, which I did.
- GUERARD
- [laughs] You're a dancer, You can do that.
- HILLS
- Yes, Of course! Used to quick changes and so on. So on Tuesdays and
Thursdays, I would start at Holden's at 9:30 and take my half hour to
get to UCLA and teach three classes there and finish at six. So that was
a long day. And after a while, I persuaded them to change, and now I
can't really remember which days we changed, but the intermediate class
was put on another day so that I only did two classes after, on Tuesdays
and Thursdays and two classes on Monday and Wednesday, and one, the
advanced, on Friday. So, it was slightly less arduous, from my point of
view. Because teaching at a university is different. You have to do more
homework. You have to mark homework, also.
- GUERARD
- Oh, yeah! [laughs]
- HILLS
- And you were asking, originally, when I went into how I got there, what
the difference was. And it was very different. It was as different as
teaching the jazz dancers. But when I got there, I found that, with the
faculty and with the students, ballet was a dirty word. They really
loathed it. They had loathed the ballet training they had had up to that
point. And I was in a difficult position because in replacing the former
teacher, at the moment of replacing her with me, they had found that if
she was given another year to teach there, she would get a pension. And
if she didn't, she would not get a pension. So there was a year, the
first year I was there, where she was teaching an advanced class in one
room at the same time that I was teaching an advanced class in another
studio. She had very, very few people going to her. Just a few whom
she-- who'd loved her when she was there and went on and finished while
she was there. But, you know, she would go up one staircase and I would
go up another because there was no way the two of us could meet.
- GUERARD
- So there was terrible tension.
- HILLS
- Very strong tension. And my main aim, feeling this tension when I first
got there, and the loathing for ballet, which was over the entire
department-- It's a modern dance department, exclusively. And ballet was
something they were told they had to do in order to improve their modern
dance technique. Which was right. It was a good premise to be going
from. But it didn't make them like it, because they'd all gone into
modern dance because they didn't want to do ballet.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And my main aim was to make them like it, to start with.
- GUERARD
- Good goal! [laughter]
- HILLS
- Yes. It was not so difficult with the freshmen because they hadn't been
indoctrinated with the hate yet. The next-- The other layers were
harder. Particularly the sophomores, who'd had one year of being told to
hate it, you know. They were tough, very tough. The intermediate class,
which was open, and the advanced class which was open to the entire
university, including the dance department, though it wasn't required of
them, some of them chose to do it. First year, very few of the dance
department chose to do it. By the second year, more and more were coming
in because word had got around that this wasn't such a bad thing, after
all. So the first year was very difficult. I had, in the intermediate
and advanced class, however, some really good dancers. Not from the
dance department, but from the rest of the university. And they were
what, now? Twenty-year-olds, I suppose, if they were in their junior
year, who had been well-trained as kids in various schools from all over
the country, not just L.A., because UCLA gets students from all over,
who had grown to be slightly the wrong shape to become professional
dancers. And their parents had obviously said to them, "You've got to
stop this and go to university." So I had some really good dancers,
particularly in the advanced class, which I did by audition. I
auditioned the-- Because we were limited in space for the number we
could take in. And normally, I would have sixty students arrive for a
class that was closed at twenty-five. So I had a big selection to do,
you know. Some were very upset when I weeded them out . You know, I
said, "This class is too big." They'd say, "Well, we were first on the
list." And I'd have to explain to them that because of the level of the
class, they could stay if they wanted to, but they were probably not
going to get a very good grade. And, therefore, their GPA would go down
and it was up to them to decide. But I would strongly advise them not to
take it. Because it said "Permission of instructor," so I was covered a
little bit, you know, in the catalog. And most-- I think, without
exception, they took themselves out if I'd advised them. So, those
classes were really quite fun.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And they became more difficult the more dance department people came
into them because they had definite priority. They were not-- I was not
able to advise them out. They had to take it if they chose to take it.
And as time went on, there were fewer people from the rest of the
university and more from the dance department. And they weren't as good
because they had all started late.
- GUERARD
- Oh, I see.
- HILLS
- And they didn't audition for the dance department. If you applied to
come into the dance department at UCLA, on your application, if you were
accepted by UCLA, you were accepted by the dance department
automatically. There was no audition process. And so there were some
very strange-shaped people. Really strange. That was very difficult
because there were people who had not the remotest chance of being even
a modern dancer, let alone a ballet dancer.
- GUERARD
- They were accepted because of their academic--?
- HILLS
- GPA. Yes.
- GUERARD
- Background had nothing to do with dance.
- HILLS
- That's right. And what we got-- Later on, we did audition them, though
they've stopped auditioning again, now. But we did get auditions later,
after I'd been there about three or four years. But at that time, a lot
of the [pause] oh, intelligent but Beverly Hills 9027 whatever it is
types would elect to go into dance because they thought it would be an
easy major.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And were very disillusioned very quickly because, of course, in dance,
there's a lot of overtime you have to put in for performances and
rehearsals and all that sort of thing. But the freshmen in that class,
were-- Really, had to be seen to be believed. [laughs] They would come
to class dripping in gold and diamonds, you know, from ears and wrists.
[laughter] And not prepared to make any effort whatsoever. Of course,
they failed and had to go on to something different. So it was a bad
idea because we lost a lot of students in the department and, therefore,
the department lost money because, of course, you know, the department
runs on the number of students it has. And so, the sophomore year tended
to have not many students. Then in the junior year, we would get
transfer students from other two-year universities. We'd get transfers
from Santa Monica and all the others from all over the country who'd
come into junior year and have had two years training. Some of them had
had good ballet training and some of them had had bad. But by then, they
weren't required to do any ballet.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And so, you got, in the junior and senior level, some people who clearly
had not had a good ballet background and you'd have UCLA students who'd
gone through freshman and sophomore at UCLA, but were quite a small
number by the time they dropped out. And in order to stop this drop-out
thing happening, we arranged after a few years to have auditions for
freshmen. So the auditions were huge, of people who would like to be in
the dance department. But at least from then on, the students we chose
were much, much better.
- GUERARD
- Oh, I'm sure!
- HILLS
- So, it was a really tough process. From my own point of view, I was
there as a visiting lecturer, first of all on a one-year basis of
renewal of contract. And you're allowed to do that for three years and
then after three years if they-- Or at the end of the third year, if
they accept you to go on, you can have three more. Not one at the time,
but as three years.
- GUERARD
- A three-year contract?
- HILLS
- And, I got that by, you know, peer review and student review and all
that sort of thing. And then, after six years--this was in 1990--I was
officially not allowed to be at UCLA anymore because visiting lecturers
cannot go on after the three single years and the three years. You have
to then become an assistant professor, not a visiting lecturer, and that
is a very bureaucratic process that you have to go through, and with
visiting the dean and all this sort of thing. And with the chair of the
department. Ron Brown, who taught modern at UCLA, and I were in the same
position. We'd both gone through this together. And we went to see the
dean and he said to Ron Brown, "Well I don't think you will have any
problem. You know, you do a lot of performances and your reviews have
been good and you will go on doing performances, won't you, and it'll be
okay." And then he said to me, "I'm sure your background in performing
will be okay." And I said, "Look, I think I should tell you my
background in performing is minimal. I am, let's face it, a well-known,
well-renowned teacher." And the dean said, "A teacher? Oh dear! I don't
know how we're going to get around that!"
- GUERARD
- But it's so odd that you would have to get around being a teacher in
order to become a teacher!
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes. [Guerard laughs] Exactly. And I wished I'd had a tape recorder
because he went stone cold and really, really worried. And he said,
"Well, we'll really have to do the review process in very, very great
detail. I mean this is-- This-- I don't think we're going to be able to
do this. It's going to be very, very tough. You're going to have to get
us forty letters of recommendations, or forty people we can apply to for
letters of recommendation for you from Europe and another forty from the
United States and let's say, can you give me the names and addresses of
a hundred students who might write you letters of recommendation?" And
so, I went home and I said, "Brian, I don't know how we're going to do
this, but I've got so far with changing UCLA, I've got to get this,
somehow."
- GUERARD
- Excuse me, did those numbers, the forty letters and the hundred, come
from rules that he had in front of him or was this his assessment?
- HILLS
- No. I think this was his way of getting 'round the fact that I was a
teacher and not a performer. I think he was trying to make the obstacle
so huge that I wouldn't be able to even begin to overcome it. And he
said, "You'll have to do all the normal c.v. [curriculum vitae] things,
which means that you've got-- You'll have to have proof of everything
you say you've done. Any performing you've done, we want the programs.
Anything else that you've done, we want. You know, if you've done a
videotape, we want the videotape." Well, fortunately, I had quite a lot
of stuff from England that my mother [Ida Cockshott Hampson] had kept
and fortunately, thank goodness, my father still had. And so-- No, my
brother [John Hampson] had. And so, I wrote to my brother and said,
"Send me everything you've got." And I finished up with a c.v. which was
pages long and boxes and boxes and boxes of things where I'd got
magazines where I'd been mentioned in reviews and articles that I'd
written for magazines and my Emmy that I'd got from a show we did from
Holden's. It was a series called In Rap with
Dance, which Jackie Landrum and her-- Bill. I forget his name, her
husband. Oh, he's Landrum, also. They'd done a series for Westinghouse
Cable called In Rap with Dance, and they'd done
one segment of it about the scholarship teenage program at Stanley
Holden's and it had won an Emmy .
- GUERARD
- Wonderful!
- HILLS
- And so, I had my Emmy certificate. The producer got the little statuette
but we all got a certificate, so that went in. And the ballet records
I'd made with Michael Roberts, those went in. All those sort of things.
And I started this process in February of 1990 and-- No, no. I'm sorry.
November, 1989, in prospect of the 1990 date. And I finally handed it
all in, in March of 1990. It took me all that time. I mean, I had papers
all over the house. I did get eighty total addresses of professionals
and a hundred students. And the letters started to come in. And the
chair of [the] department said, "I wish we hadn't asked you for so many.
The letters are coming in and coming in and coming in." And of all those
people, only two people didn't reply.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my gosh!
- HILLS
- As I learned afterwards. I didn't know at the time. And one or two
people who were close friends sent me copies of the letters, so I knew
some people had, but I didn't know anything like how many. And I put all
my boxes of stuff in and I waited and I waited and I waited. And then,
part of the process is that everybody on the [pause] some committee at
UCLA, has to look through all of this. So it's a tedious process for
them, poor things.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- Then I had the chance to refute any of the allegations about me which
might have come in all these letters of recommendation. And so I had the
interview with the chair of the department, Carol Scothorn, to go over
this. And she kept turning them and turning them and turning them and
saying, "Oh, here's one who says that this lady felt that she perhaps
didn't give her quite enough corrections in class. Do you want to say
anything about that?" And I said, "Well I don't know who she is, but you
know there are some people you give up on giving corrections to because
they're never going to get any better. Perhaps that was one of those."
And the only person that-- I found out afterwards, Baryshnikov didn't
reply, and I found out since, he never does letters of recommendation
for anybody. And one other person, and I don't know who that was. But
they had all these letters which they had to read and they were all
apparently good. [laughter] One day, at nearly the end of the year--it
was June the something and the quarter finishes in the middle of
June--there was a notice; big, big notice on the board outside my office
saying, "Congratulations. You have been appointed full professor." Not
assistant. Not associate. Full professor. [laughter] Adjunct professor,
because I was still only seventy-five percent of time. I was not
full-time. But I had skipped all that. So it was worth all the effort.
In retrospect, it was very funny, but at the time, it was horrendous.
Absolutely horrendous.
- GUERARD
- But your determination drove you on.
- HILLS
- Yes. Well, I wasn't going to give up on them at that stage because, you
know, we'd started, now, the auditions and everything was coming
together. We had an MFA in dance now and the MFA students were going to
have to be able to do the advanced ballet class, and do it properly,
which was something I'd stuck out for. We had faculty meetings every
Friday the whole time I was there. They were hoping to get a doctorate
in dance, which actually they didn't get, but they were hoping to get
that. But this was this wonderful thing, that I was going to have some
really good students in the department. I was also given a class of
teaching ballet pedagogy. [pause] How to teach ballet.
- GUERARD
- Oh, thank you!
- HILLS
- To the MA and MFA students, which was something I'd been dying to have.
Because all the way through, the students kept saying, "I've got a
chance of a job. I want to make some money teaching ballet." Never
teaching modern. It was always they were going to be teaching ballet.
What could I do for them? How were they going to do it? What music
should they use? How much should they be paid? And so, I put together a
curriculum for this class and said, "This is what you've got to have."
Because all these kids were getting jobs teaching ballet and they don't
know how to do it. And that was great. I enjoyed doing that class
immensely.
- GUERARD
- Oh, so wonderful for them!
- HILLS
- And that went on. You know, I-- Obviously, this has gone a long way from
our original question of how I had to adapt my teaching to modern
dancers.
- GUERARD
- Oh, yes.
- HILLS
- And one did have to adapt enormously. Much more than for the jazz
dancers, because modern requires, as I-- I don't know a great deal about
it, even in spite of spending so long there, but it requires some
movements to be controlled in off-balance positions. And in order to do
that, they build up very big muscles in the legs and the buttocks and
the big muscle down the spine. And I liken them to a tree that's growing
on the side of a cliff. It has a very big root system because it's
growing off gravity. And modern dancers tend to have big muscles where
ballet dancers don't have them because they spend so long in positions
off gravity. And it's very hard to build a body that looks like a ballet
dancer on that. You actually can't. And since the major was in modern
dance, I had to be adaptable and try not to be upset by the look that I
was getting on my ballet students. The other thing that drove me crazy
was that when they came for the first six weeks as freshmen, they
listened to the music and danced to the music. After six weeks, in their
modern classes, they'd been indoctrinated to the metronome count which
modern dancers have to have in their heads so that they can dance
regardless of what music is played.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And once they got that in their heads, they couldn't dance to the music
ever again.
- GUERARD
- [laughs] Huh!
- HILLS
- Never. It was absolutely out of the question. And that is devastating,
of course.
- GUERARD
- Yes . In ballet, the movement is so much a part of the--
- HILLS
- You dance with, absolutely, with the music.
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm .
- HILLS
- The faculty at UCLA called dancing to the music, "Mickey Mousing the
music."
- GUERARD
- Hm!
- HILLS
- And it's something that is not done. If you dance with the music, if you
do a big movement on a crescendo in the music, it's not done. GUERARD
Oh.
- HILLS
- And it took me a long time to understand this, to accept it, because as
a faculty member, I had to judge some of the choreography of the
students. Every student was required to choreograph. Whether they liked
doing choreography or not, they were required to choreograph and as
faculty, we had to judge it. And my jaw dropped the first time I heard
one of the faculty say, "I don't like the music you've chosen to dance
with. Please change it. I like the choreography. The choreography is
great. Change the music." And I mean, to a ballet dancer, that is out of
the question.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- You could not do that! But modern dancers can because they have this
pulse in their-- I think that's what they call it, the pulse, in the
head. They can do their stuff regardless of what is played, or to
silence. It makes no difference to them.
- GUERARD
- Right. Well, it's a statement about the dance being the stronger
element, I suppose.
- HILLS
- Yes, yeah. So that was something I never got used to and never liked. To
have music going on that has no relationship to what the dancers are
doing, to me, is wrong. I heard a quote the other day and I can't
remember who it's from, but, "Ballet is the drawing together of the
three arts of decoration, music and movement." And I think that is just
[a] perfect description of what ballet is. Of what modern dance is not.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- Jazz is. Jazz dancers dance with the music. That was no problem. They
were very musical. But modern dancers are music-blind. By requirement.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- So, that was a difficult thing to cope with. To try and keep them-- At
least to listen to the music, because they cut it out. They don't
listen. That, I find, is very difficult. I had a wonderful musician,
Michael Liotweizen, at UCLA. Big man, whom I later found had been an
infant prodigy on the piano and won all sorts of prizes in France, and
never did find out, really, what caused him to become a ballet pianist.
Some tragedy in his life.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- He later committed suicide after he'd retired from UCLA. So there must
have been some big problem, but I don't know what it was. But he was
brilliant, absolutely brilliant, as a class musician for ballet. Never
had a piece of music in front of him. Improvised everything. He was of,
I think he said, Hungarian background. He was born in San Francisco but
he was of Hungarian parents. And there was a Hungarian life in that man.
He was huge-- six feet seven- -and hundreds and hundreds of pounds. And
apparently, he played before I got there and he used to, at one time, to
smoke all the way through classes.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And I had-- Obviously, my reputation had gone ahead of me that one did
not smoke in my classes, because he didn't. But he used to go out on the
balcony every time I stopped and have a quick drag and then come back,
you know. The other thing that was a joy about teaching at UCLA, quite
apart from the horrors of some other things, was that they came every
day. They had to try. They had to get a grade at the end. And so, one
was able to build, like with professional children that are going on to
be professionals, at least a continuity of syllabus that you were going
to get through in each quarter. And, that was a joy. And you could set
them written work to make sure that they understood the terminology and
the steps and the history of-- History of dance was taught quite
separately, but I would make them read some ballet stuff which was very
applicable to what we were doing at any time and ask them to write about
that. To go to ballet performances and write critiques.
- GUERARD
- Oh, great!
- HILLS
- Which is, you know, it was-- And they, the joy of UCLA students are by
definition, they're very bright. They wouldn't be there if they weren't
very intelligent.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And to be taught in high school how to use that intelligence. And so,
they sparked on all cylinders. And did all the tests and really tried
hard at them. And most of them did very well. And that was new to me, to
be marking papers and that sort of thing, which I had never done before.
- GUERARD
- Right. Were you actually required to give them written assignments and
papers?
- HILLS
- I think it would have been very awkward not to. Didn't occur to me not
to, so I really don't know. The written work was twenty- five percent of
their grade. You know, you have to say how you grade them on a sheet you
give them at the beginning of the quarter. And most of it was
improvement on technique. I couldn't say they had to achieve so-and-so
but that each one was graded individually on their progress from when
they'd started to when they finished, because I had to take the bodies
into consideration, knowing that they weren't auditioned or anything
like that.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- If they had completely flat feet, it was how they learned to work them
that counted. So, you know, there were occasions when people who were
really already quite good but made no progress got worse grades than
somebody who started off doing really abysmally but had made tremendous
progress. By working them entirely individually on that, it gave quite a
different feeling in my mind to what I was marking them on.
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm. Yes! Well, I can see how you would get a sense of satisfaction
from that kind of situation as opposed to in a professional studio,
somebody might study with you for five years or a year or, you just
don't know.
- HILLS
- No, and you don't know how often they're coming. In a commercial studio,
you can't build from lesson to lesson.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Because, you know, some people come on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Some
people come Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Some people take the whole lot
and some people only come once a week. So one tends to be very
repetitive about what you say in a commercial class . And you tend to
feel rather embarrassed about the repetition for the people who come
often. And I often feel very sorry for the pianists who hear the same
jokes year after year, you know. [laughter] But when you find some
little word that you use triggers the right reaction in people, you're
obviously going to use it again.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- Some people at Holden's have been taking my class day in and day out for
years and years and years and years and years, and I do feel sorry for
them. You know, you tell them the same joke and you just hope that your
anecdote hasn't "improved" with the years. You know, that it is still
true, because it could happen very easily and one wouldn't be aware of
it. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Maybe you could ask the pianist for some feedback as to which version
works better. [laughter]
- HILLS
- I think ballet pianists are a race apart. They really are. It can't be a
very fulfilling job. They're playing for-- Just churning out music in
eight bar phrases year in and year out, to the same sort of steps, you
know. It must be very difficult to keep it fresh.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- And it's not very well paid. But at least it's a job, I suppose. Some of
them do it so wonderfully well. And others are not so good. They've
obviously just got bored with it.
- GUERARD
- There must be a certain enjoyment to creating music for people to move
to, or--?
- HILLS
- Yes, I would think so, if you are on the creative side, like Michael
Liotweizen was. And he seemed to get enormous joy from it. And we
certainly got joy from his music. There's no doubt about that. But there
are others who get-- You know, you say the name of the step and you're
pretty sure you're going to get the same tune. Or you know you're going
to get Mimi from La
Bohéme either for pliés or for port de bras somewhere during the
class, you know.
- GUERARD
- Uh-huh.
- HILLS
- And they're the ones who are really dead, as far as helping the class
along is concerned. But then you get somebody like Helen Dillon, who is
going to be, I believe, ninety this year, who still plays for classes
every day in different studios all over Los Angeles. She plays from
music, doesn't improvise. And she plays classical music. But I think she
has a sequence that lasts about two or three weeks and then she changes
entirely.
- GUERARD
- Really?
- HILLS
- And she's been doing it forever. And she's fresh and absolutely
professional. Wonderful. Keeps perfect tempo all the time. Never, never
varies.
- GUERARD
- Hm.
- HILLS
- Which is another thing that musicians can do. Some slow down, some speed
up. And sometimes one has to teach differently with them, knowing their
idiosyncrasies of speeding up. But Helen is marvelous. Just great.
- GUERARD
- What a gift!
- HILLS
- Yes, it is. Yes. And she tells me she did dance at one time. So that
obviously helps.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- A long way from the days when we used to have the retired musicians, as
I mentioned earlier, from the old movies. Now they're-- Helen might have
done that for all I know. I doubt it, though she's presumably old enough
to have. But the young ones coming up are a different breed. They
sometimes do wonderful compositions for you. I wish sometimes that they
would have a little tape recorder beside the piano because when they
come up with something really wonderful, they don't always remember it.
And it works so well with some steps. They don't-- Michael Roberts did
when he was playing for us. And he brought out his four or five ballet
records which are used by so many people for classes. Of course, now the
CDs are coming out. The new players are much easier to use than having
to rush over to a record player when you don't have a musician. Just
stand with the thing in your hand. First time I tried to use it, instead
of pointing to the CD player, I pointed to the student I was talking to.
[laughter] Didn't do any good at all. Remotes don't work when pointed at
students, [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Margaret, I'm going to have to bring this to an end, on that note.
- HILLS
- Right.
- GUERARD
- And we'll pick up on another tape.
- HILLS
- Okay, good.
1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE I APRIL 30, 1997
- GUERARD
- Margaret, last time we were talking about your teaching years at UCLA--
- HILLS
- Mm hmm!
- GUERARD
- And I'm wondering why and when that came to an end.
- HILLS
- Well, I was-- As you know, I'd been made a full professor--adjunct ,
certainly, at seventy-five percent of time--and was really enjoying
being there very much. And the whole university went through a process
of wanting to economize. And they were offering early retirement
packages to people who had worked for certain lengths of time so that
they could employ people who cost them less because, of course, the
longer you'd been there, the more you earn because it builds up year by
year.
- GUERARD
- Can you just remind us what year that is?
- HILLS
- This was '93. I'd been there seven years. And I looked into how it would
affect me and they were offering five years for five years; an extra
five years onto the time you'd already been there, in monetary value, so
to speak. If you'd been there for twenty years and you got five years
more, it didn't make a lot of difference, but I'd been there for seven
years at seventy-five percent of time, which in time terms meant that
I'd been there for five years. And so, being offered another five year
increment on top meant that my retirement benefits doubled.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- It didn't mean they were very much, even then, but doubled. Whereas, if
I'd stayed on for another year or two or whatever, I might lose that and
finish up with only, what, six years' money instead of ten years' money.
- GUERARD
- Oh. Oh , I see.
- HILLS
- And to turn that down seemed to be crazy because I was then, you know,
sixty-five and thinking that possibly I was getting a little old to be
teaching so many classes a day and perhaps the students might begin to
feel that I was getting a little old for it, you know, because one had--
Teaching beginners, one had to demonstrate everything.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- You know, if I scratched my head, they scratched theirs. [laughter] When
complete beginners, that's what they do. And I wasn't really feeling
that that was a terribly good idea. And, as I say, the benefits were
incredible because they, in the retirement package from UCLA, continue
paying for your medical insurance, which is [an] enormous amount.
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- And well worth having. The money from the retirement benefit can be
taken such that by taking a very small amount less per year, it can be
carried on to the surviving spouse. Now, my husband [Brian Hills] having
been self-employed, didn't have any retirement apart from social
security, and so, it, again, seemed a thing that would be crazy to turn
down. . . We went to a lot of meetings, you know, of faculty at UCLA
where it was all described to us and the benefits and the pros and cons
of doing it or not doing it. But to get double the amount I might get,
was something that I decided I absolutely had to do . I was sorry to
think of leaving, but decided I must. And then, again, bureaucracy is
absolutely crazy. The contract retirement time was to happen on October
the 31st, which was right in the middle of the quarter. And some people
taking that early retirement just up and left in the middle of the
quarter. My musician, Michael Liotweizen, chose to retire at the same
time, and he did. He left in the middle of the quarter.
- GUERARD
- Oh, what a mess!
- HILLS
- It would have been a terrible mess and I didn't feel that I could do
that to the students at all. And so, I went to the chair of the
department and I said, "I am willing to teach for the rest of the
quarter without being paid, as long as you'll pay my parking." And I
understand that this was discussed at a faculty meeting and some people
who didn't like me much said, "Well, she's only doing this so we'll ask
her back as professor emeritus. She just wants to be asked to do that
and that's why she's doing it." And other people said, "Nonsense,
nonsense. She really believes in the students." This is all hearsay. I
wasn't at that meeting. But my offer was accepted.
- GUERARD
- Great.
- HILLS
- And so, I did teach through to the middle of December, for nothing. And
the students were most appreciative, I must say. They were wonderful.
And, of course, they were then trying to decide who would replace me for
the following quarter and the following two quarters. And they chose to
ask George de la Peña to do it. And he was able to do through the
intermediate level and not the advanced level, for commitments of his
own, I presume. And so, they asked me if I would, being paid to go back
as professor emeritus, to teach the advanced class for two more
quarters.
- GUERARD
- Oh, wonderful!
- HILLS
- So, that was great. One is limited by the contract of retirement to the
amount you're allowed to be paid by the UC system.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- You're only allowed to be paid a small portion of your other salary. And
so, even if they'd wanted to ask me back to do the whole lot, they
couldn't have because they couldn't have paid me. Yet they were allowed
to pay me the amount for the advanced classes. And so, I sort of went
into retirement, partially. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Right. It was a real easing into it.
- HILLS
- It was. George de la Peña turned out not to be a great success, from the
point of view of teaching ballet. He really didn't teach ballet. He is a
good ballet dancer, but has some ideas of his own and he really taught
them how to pass an audition for a stage show. Taught them tumbling and
cartwheels and all sorts of other things, which upset me. And so, in the
brochure for the catalog for the last quarter, they wrote down-- Mine
was called classical ballet and his was called ballet, just to make the
distinction, because I was very upset.
- GUERARD
- Right. Mm hmm.
- HILLS
- They didn't, in fact, keep him on when I did finally stop. They got
Rebecca Wright, who had been teaching in Long Beach, who was an ex-ABT
[American Ballet Theatre] dancer.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- Actually, George de la Peña's wife, but she--
- GUERARD
- Oh! [laughs]
- HILLS
- Teaches ballet quite, quite beautifully. And so, I was very happy that
she then took the whole thing over.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- And is doing a great job. But, I think, as I understand it, some of the
ballet classes have been undermined by not being compulsory anymore. So,
I'm sure she's regretful, also, that it's no longer the Department of
Dance by itself, but is combined with World Arts and Cultures.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- So, as a dance department, it has ceased to be an entity of its own. The
chair person, Judy Mitoma, of what was World Arts and Cultures, was a
dancer and she became chair of the combined department and I'm sure it
seemed logical but-- I think UCLA is not quite as in favor of fine arts
as a discipline. The school-- What was the College of Fine Arts became
known as the School of Fine Arts. They were whittling it down all the
time to give it less money and give it less prestige. It's a shame.
Charles Young, who is the chancellor, is leaving this year and whoever
comes in after him--they have appointed him but I can't remember who it
is--may change things again. I don't know. But Young was really very
much in favor of letters and science and sport because that brought in a
lot of endowment money. And nobody endows things to the fine arts, so--
- GUERARD
- No. And there are budget and economy problems as well, and arts, in
general, are the first to be cut out .
- HILLS
- Yes. Always. It started off in elementary school and worked its way up.
I'm not sure that I don't agree with them. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Really?!
- HILLS
- Not as far as children are concerned. I think they should have their art
and their music, but as far as dance is concerned- -and I was going to
say this later but I think it comes in better now- -if you're not a
performing dancer by the time you're eighteen, you're never going to be
a great performing dancer. And if you're eighteen and going to college
for another four years, or six if you're going to get a master's
[degree], your body is past it and you're not going to get a job as a
professional dancer.
- GUERARD
- Right. So this raises the whole question of whether dance belongs in
universities or not.
- HILLS
- Yes. I don't think it does. I've benefited from it being there, as far
as having, you know, an academic side to my life which I wouldn't have
had otherwise. But I don't think it's very good because the people who
they employ-- I mean I didn't have a master's degree or any degree in
dance, as far the university is concerned, and was employed because I
was a known teacher, artist, and we went over that before. But nowadays,
any advertisement for teaching in a university, a master's degree is
required. And so, you don't get professional dancers teaching in
universities. It's almost self-perpetuating less than adequate
performers. It seems one of-- And this is why I don't think it should
happen.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- I don't know enough about the music but, again, I feel that children
learn music and particularly at violin, one knows unless you're virtuoso
or future virtuoso by the time you're seven, you're not going to be a
soloist. And though the universities may be producing run of the mill
musicians, I don't think they're probably going to find their soloists.
And again, is it a good idea? My son's [Julian Hills] life is in art.
He's the-- Produces all the posters for Universal Studios, through
computers. And he never took an art class or a computer class in
university. His degree is in English. Certainly, my architect daughter
[Sarah Hills Larson] did study architecture at university and got her
degree in that. And my historian daughter [Amanda Hills Podany] got her
degree from UCLA; got her doctorate in history from there. So those two
needed it, but Julian and I certainly did not.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- So, I think probably it is a bad idea. I don't know about the artists,
whether they go on to become great artists or not, but I know that you
can be a great artist without going to university.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Yes, you can. It's interesting because all along, you've talked
about the positive aspects of the structure that existed within the
Sadler's Wells [Ballet] and The Royal Ballet, so it is helpful to have
that so that artists have goals to reach and reach a certain point of
mastery. But I think what you're saying is it just doesn't work within
the academic system.
- HILLS
- No, to start at eighteen--
- GUERARD
- Yes, it's too late.
- HILLS
- Your body is already formed. When your body is your instrument, you have
to form that instrument from early childhood. And, you know, UCLA
teaches a lot of ethnic dance and I'm sure particularly much more so now
as World Arts and Cultures. But you think of the things on television
you've seen about the training of the Balinese dancers where they start
as very young children to get their hands turned right back and all the
discipline that they have to go through from a very early age, and yet
UCLA teaches Balinese dance to older people whose bodies have changed.
And it seems to me obvious that just as in ballet, they cannot, however
hard they try, do it correctly.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- They can do an approximation. But then do they go and teach it to
somebody else in another university because they happen to have got on
their transcript a degree that includes Balinese dance or includes
ballet dance? And yes, I'm afraid they do!
- GUERARD
- Right. So, it sort of becomes like a--
- HILLS
- It's self-perpetuating mediocrity.
- GUERARD
- Becomes like a-- Yes, thank you. You said it. You said it. I was
thinking that, "Where is [there] an institution that strikes a balance?"
And maybe it has more to do with schools like [The] Julliard [School] --
- HILLS
- Yes, of course!
- GUERARD
- Or places like that. But then, of course, that limits art to the elite,
doesn't it?
- HILLS
- Yes, it does. If you're saying, you know, it's good for these people to
learn how to do it, yes, it is, as long as the general public isn't
given the impression that they are doing it professionally.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And they do go on and teach it. And that worries me.
- GUERARD
- I see. Yes.
- HILLS
- Very, very much. Because if they have been taking-- Talking about my own
discipline of ballet, a girl comes to UCLA or another university, age
eighteen, having done no ballet before with a body that is already
mature, that cannot really be altered to any great extent. She takes,
perhaps, ballet for four years, twice a week. If she gets to advanced,
three times a week, and only in the times that the university is in
session. So that's ten weeks, three times a year. Thirty weeks of the
year, three lessons. So, in a year, she has ninety lessons. In four
years--four times ninety--360 lessons. She has, then, a bachelor's
degree, which includes ballet.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- She takes another two years, so she gets another 180 classes in ballet
and she now has a master's degree, which enables her to go and teach
ballet at another university. Now, somebody who is a professional dancer
has been taking five classes a week for-- From the age of eleven to
seventeen. Do your arithmetic. [Guerard laughs] And in the last four
years of that, they've been taking many more than five classes a week.
Sometimes up to five classes a day. And you've got, then, a professional
person who knows pretty much all there is to know about ballet, who is
capable of teaching well but has no master's degree and, therefore,
can't go to a university to teach. If they go to a university, they have
to go as a freshman, when they retire from a ballet company when they're
forty, and learn how badly it's done in a university. [Guerard laughs]
It just is nonsense.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- So, it-- All the time I was there, I was putting blinkers on myself and
not saying all this because if it was going to be taught, I wanted it to
be taught as well as possible and I did feel I could do that.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- But every time somebody said they were going to teach ballet and all
they'd learned was from me in that situation, my blood ran cold. And
that's why I fought for the ballet pedagogy class. Because at least then
I could teach them how to teach it.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And they appreciated it a lot. I have it on sound tape. And I have the
notes for that. But, you know, it's gone. The few people who were there,
I hope remember it.
- GUERARD
- And, of course, you were sort of bridging two worlds at that time, too.
You were coming from a professional environment, but you had all this
experience as a teacher.
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- George de la Peña was a great, is a great dancer, but that doesn't
automatically give him the talent to teach.
- HILLS
- No. And he'd been a dilettante in other art-- theater forms, also. I
mean, he'd been a dancer, but he'd been a dancer in Cats, the lead. He did [Mr.] Mistoffelees wonderfully.
Wonderfully! And he played Nijinsky in the movie about Nijinsky [Nijinsky] , beautifully! But he had commercial
ideas for-- And this may have been his compromise. He may have looked at
those students and thought, "I can't teach them ballet. If they want to
get into a professional job, I'll teach them how to pass an audition."
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- And maybe there's something to be said for that, as long as you don't
call it ballet.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- If it's done as ballet on the transcript from a university, people
assume that you know how to do it. And, you don't. There's quite a lot
to be said for his philosophy, if that's what it was.
- GUERARD
- Right. I understand. And sometimes teachers come to the university
having a mission about teaching about the real world because sometimes
there isn't enough practical knowledge passed on.
- HILLS
- Oh, there isn't. It's absolutely true. Absolutely true. I can only talk
about my own discipline. My daughter, who is an architect, went to San
Luis Obispo first to the architecture school [California Polytechnic
State University, San Luis Obispo] there, and found that it wasn't
suiting her needs for future life. And so, she moved to Eugene in
Oregon, which suited the sort of architecture she wanted to do, which
was houses, and got her degree there. So she made a change because she
wasn't satisfied with what she was getting at one place, for reasons I
don't know because I don't know how to train an architect. But she
moved. Whereas Amanda, who is a historian, found that UCLA was perfect
for her. She went and got a second master's degree in London before she
came back to UCLA to get her doctorate. But the curriculum there was
perfect. Her discipline is in ancient Middle Eastern history. And it was
perfect for her. She now teaches at Cal Poly [California State
Polytechnic University], Pomona.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- Her husband lives here and she lives here, and that's fine. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Great. Well, so getting back to UCLA--
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Then you were saying that you were easing out, then?
- HILLS
- Yes. It was a gentle easing out.
- GUERARD
- It was a gentle closure.
- HILLS
- In June of '94, when I'd been there all together for ten years. And, of
course, all this time I'd been teaching at Stanley Holden's [Dance
Center] every morning.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And my 9:30 class had gone on and my Saturday morning classes had gone
[on] all through this period. And so, I resumed, or continued, doing
those. Also, a lot of people had heard me talk about the ballet
pantomime, which I had done off and on. And, usually on St. Valentine's
Day, I would, as port de bras in class, teach them how to say, "I love
you. Do you love me?" in ballet pantomime, just--
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- Just to whet the appetite, you know. And, one or two other occasions, I
would use some pantomime in class. And I'd been badgered to do a series
of these classes [laughter] and finally, I thought, "Well, perhaps I
should." And so, in May and June of that year, I think it was, I did
several Sunday afternoons of teaching a course in ballet pantomime. And
I had quite a good number of people. I think there were thirty people
signed up for it. I charged a set fee and my husband came and videotaped
the whole thing.
- GUERARD
- Oh, wonderful!
- HILLS
- And so, we have it on videotape, which we sold. You know, we sold them
the videotapes afterwards if they wanted to buy them. And, I had-- I
gave them a lecture on the history of pantomime first and then we worked
our way through all the gestures and finished up doing the Lilac Fairy
pantomime from [The] Sleeping
Beauty and the second act pantomime from Swan Lake. And they really did-- I was quite surprised. They
did remarkably well. This was the first time since I'd been at Sadler's
Wells [School] that I had taught a course of any length. There, we used
to have it every week. It was part of the curriculum. So there was a
slow build-up of getting the technique of the gestures. And, of course,
in a short--I think we did four or five two-hour sessions in this
particular seminar. So they didn't get particularly good at it, but they
got a good idea of how to do it.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Up to then, I'd only done single master classes. Some of them at Santa
Monica College.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- Which were only an hour. And in that hour, I wanted them just to get the
feel of how to do it and show them how to do the Lilac Fairy mime scene.
Even though they did it not at all well, they enjoyed just trying. And
I'd done a lecture to the Friends of The Joffrey Ballet one evening. And
I saw some of the husbands who'd been brought along nodding off in the
front row. [laughs] So I said, "Now, stand up and we'll do this."
[laughter] You know what husbands are like. Their wives want to see it
and they don't.
- GUERARD
- Uh-huh.
- HILLS
- There were one or two heads nodding quite firmly and I just had to get
them on their feet. And they started to enjoy it better after that.
- GUERARD
- Right. But very exciting for a dancer who has just an idea that it
existed historically, and to have an opportunity to learn about it and
see it in real life, is great .
- HILLS
- Yes, that's right. And there aren't many of the mime scenes left in many
of the ballets now because people just don't understand it. But when it
started, it was based on the Commedia dell 'arte mime, pantomime. And
then, people did understand. You didn't put a synopsis in the program.
You told the story in pantomime gesture, part way through the ballet.
So, things have changed a lot. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes. [laughs]
- HILLS
- But doing those master classes at Santa Monica, I got to know some of
the faculty at Santa Monica as I was doing that, which was nice.
- GUERARD
- And you did those master classes earlier?
- HILLS
- Yes. I can't remember when I did the first one, but way before I started
at UCLA, even.
- GUERARD
- Oh. Uh-huh.
- HILLS
- And, I'd done some ballet master classes at Santa Monica College, too.
It began to feel almost like going home, you know. I went there to do
another master class and got to know my way around campus and where the
studios were and so forth and-- Very charming people there. Really nice
students. Very, very receptive. There seemed to be a very nice
atmosphere at Santa Monica College, which I enjoyed.
- GUERARD
- Great.
- HILLS
- And when I'd been away from UCLA from June 1994, Linda Gold, who runs
the dance section of-- It's theatre arts. Dance is in part of the
[Department of] Theatre Arts at Santa Monica College. Linda Gold said
would I consider going to teach an intermediate class at Santa Monica
College every week? And, I thought, you know, "That would be rather
nice" because I'd really enjoyed being there. And I was already missing
having students on a regular basis [laughs] rather than just popping in
and out. And I said, "Yes, I'd really love to do it." And it was just
for one semester and-- The intermediate level, because that's where they
wanted the teacher. And I went to the office and did all the paperwork
and filled out various forms about, you know, what I'd done and so forth
and since I didn't even have a bachelor's degree in dance, let alone a
master's degree or a doctorate, I went in, and still am at the absolute
bottom, rock bottom, pay scale.
- GUERARD
- Hm. So, being senior ballet mistress doesn't--?
- HILLS
- None. I mean, they looked at my c.v. and the fact that I was professor
emeritus from UCLA made no difference whatsoever because it's absolutely
bureaucratic and you-- The union insists that you are paid by the degree
that you have. And the fact that there wasn't any dance in any
university at the time I could have gone, if I had of, makes no
difference, whatsoever. But it's really rather nice being there and
having the students . They run on a semester basis, which means that you
have the students for sixteen weeks.
- GUERARD
- That's right.
- HILLS
- Twice a week. And I find that's much better. Of course, only two
semesters and not three quarters, so probably the overall length of time
is about the same. But you get in a greater continuity in sixteen weeks
than you do in ten. Ten is a very short time.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- While I was at UCLA, there was some question that the whole university
would switch to a semester system. Because UCLA law school is on
semesters.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- And the rest of it isn't. But, it didn't happen. I don't know why. I'm
sure people were sent out questionnaires and ballots and all sorts of
things, but it didn't happen. But I think it would be better.
- GUERARD
- I think a lot of the students would think so, too .
- HILLS
- I think so.
- GUERARD
- And professors .
- HILLS
- Yes. Ten weeks is-- You know, you've got ten weeks, divided. You've got
to have a mid-term section after five weeks. And then the last week is
finals. There's no time whatsoever to do anything. You barely get to
know the names of the students, you know. And I have a good memory for
names [Guerard laughs], but even so. It's tough.
- GUERARD
- Uh-huh. Well, how does the-- Santa Monica is like a junior college--?
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Although I know it's giving bachelor's degrees in certain areas.
- HILLS
- I think so. I'm not-- Even though I've now been there for nearly two
years, I'm not sure how it works. I've gone and taught my students, but
I know that some of the students in my class have just signed up for the
one class. They don't have to sort of join and take all the other
requirements of a full-time student. But some do. And I don't know which
they are. There's no way that I can find out, short of asking them.
- GUERARD
- So, do you find, then, that the students, in general, at Santa Monica
College have a different sort of attitude about ballet than you found at
UCLA?
- HILLS
- Yes, I do and I put it down entirely to the enthusiasm for ballet for
the modern dance faculty. Linda Gold and Judy Douglas and Renée Hawley,
who all are on the faculty there, all have taken my ballet classes
pretty regularly over the last twenty years. And so, they are definitely
ballet oriented. They want their students to do ballet. Both Judy
Douglas and Linda Gold teach ballet, also. Renee Hawley teaches only
ballet and not modern. Patrick Adiarte, who teaches jazz there, is also
good at ballet.
- GUERARD
- Oh.
- HILLS
- Kai Ganado teaches modern. He's not a ballet dancer, but was a colleague
of mine at UCLA. Did the same thing that I've done. He started at UCLA
and has gone, now, to Santa Monica. There's another lady called Marie
Bender who teaches modern but is obviously, by the way one sees her
movement, happy to have ballet in the background of her dancers. So the
atmosphere there is supportive of ballet rather than, "Well, ballet's
required of you," or you know, "You've got to do it, but, don't let
yourself be seen doing anything balletic in modern class." They're quite
different. So the atmosphere is great, from my point of view. The
students are very enthusiastic, until it comes to written work. And tell
them they're going to have a test and half the class doesn't show up.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- They'd rather not be put to the challenge of writing, which is quite
different from UCLA. They-- Obviously, the caliber of student is
different.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Mentally. But from the point of view of technique and coming, is great.
And of course, Santa Monica has a system whereby fifty percent of your
grade is just being there, twenty- five percent is written work and
twenty- five percent is progress. And so, they know they're only going
to lose twenty-five percent of their grade if they don't put a pen to
paper the entire semester, which I don't think is a very good idea. And
it almost means that nobody fails as long as they show up for every
class.
- GUERARD
- Yes, but you can't really excel if you lose twenty- five percent of your
grade, either.
- HILLS
- No. They don't seem to worry very much about getting A's. Not like UCLA
did. Their grade point average mattered so much to them.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- It mattered for getting scholarships and all the other things, as well.
They'd come and sort of throw themselves at your feet at UCLA and say,
"What can I do to make up such and such and such?" you know, and you'd
try to find some way that they could make it up. And at Santa Monica,
I've never had anybody ask me how they could make up anything. So the
attitude, from that point of view, is quite, quite different.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- They're much more similar to high school students than university
students. The discipline is quite different. But, they are enthused, so
that's great.
- GUERARD
- So, I mean, perhaps their aspirations are not in academic achievement.
- HILLS
- No.
- GUERARD
- Maybe they care more about performance.
- HILLS
- Yes, and they do do a lot of performing. At the end of every semester,
we do a works in progress, where each class puts on a
two-and-a-half-minute something using what they've learned.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And that's rather fun. It's difficult, again, because ballet is such a
structured thing. This semester, I'm getting them to choreograph their
own two-and-a-half-minute waltz thing, so that they can use their own
skills to put it together.
- GUERARD
- Oh, great!
- HILLS
- And, that will be good. We did pantomime one semester. Last semester we
were off campus because there was asbestos floating around in the air,
so we had to rent studios off campus. So we didn't do a performance
then. But, you know, they really enter into it with great joy, again.
So, it's really nice. I'm supposed to teach kinesiology, which is not my
specialty at all, but I do it by relating it to the ballet, rather than
making them learn the names of the bones and the-- Because some of them
are taking kinesiology classes from qualified kinesiologists. So I don't
want to be in competition with them.
- GUERARD
- No!
- HILLS
- I don't enjoy the thought of keeping one class ahead of the class by
reading a book. I found a nice book that's called Inside Classical Ballet Technique, [Inside
Ballet Technique: Separating Anatomical Fact from Fiction in the
Ballet Class by Valerie Grieg; illustrations by Naomi
Rosenblatt].
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And that is written by a dancer who has taken kinesiology since. And
it's very clear and very helpful. So we use that book and relate it to
ballet movement. It's a great book to have.
- GUERARD
- Great.
- HILLS
- We use another technique book which is quite an expensive one and they
don't all buy it because they can't afford it, which is called Classical Ballet Technique by Gretchen Ward
Warren. And it's the best ballet technique book I have ever come across.
I tried to write-- I've tried to write several, with no success at all.
- GUERARD
- Have you really?
- HILLS
- I'm too-- I diverge away from my subject too much. One day, when I
really am finally retired, I'll look at it all again and do it from the
teaching perspective, which hasn't been done, I don't think. But this,
for learning your technique is just beautiful.
- GUERARD
- Hm. Yeah, I would think you would, after writing all those syllabi--
[laughter]
- HILLS
- Yes!
- GUERARD
- You might have the ability to write a really good book.
- HILLS
- I think I probably can if I give my mind to it for-- And using the tapes
and the pedagogy lectures that I gave. I think if I can get that
together. But I was doing the technique one when this new book by
Gretchen Ward Warren came out. And I thought, "I can't compete with
that. That is perfect!" [laughs] So, what's the point? You know, you
don't need another one with that one. It's so good.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- And, there's also a videotape of classical ballet technique which was
done by Georgina Parkinson, the ABT [American Ballet Theatre] ballet
mistress. And that is also excellent. It's boring. Absolutely boring.
It's an encyclopedia of all the steps there are, on video, with all the
terminology that's ever been used for any one step. And you see it in
real time, slow motion and then real time again. Each step beautifully
done, but not with a sense of humor anywhere, you know. [Guerard laughs]
As it shouldn't have, in a way, but you long for something to lighten
it. And it doesn't, or hadn't when I got it, have a bibliography or,
"Such and such a step is at such and such a place on which tape." So you
have to hunt about a lot to find what you're looking for.
- GUERARD
- It would really help.
- HILLS
- It needs somebody to do an index. A good one. I did it for UCLA, for
their copy. But, of course, on different machines, it comes up at a
different number on the reader on the video machines. It doesn't always
come up at the same place.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- So it was fine for the one machine I did it for, but not for all of
them. You can get a rough idea where it is from that, but not a definite
spot. So it needs some-- You can now index things.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- With the remote, and that would probably be the ideal thing.
- GUERARD
- Yeah. That would be perfect. I've heard that-- I know in Steven
Spielberg's Holocaust project [Survivors of the Shoah Visual History
Foundation], that there is a way to do that.
- HILLS
- Oh, is there?
- GUERARD
- To--
- HILLS
- That's what they're--
- GUERARD
- Immediately access a certain point.
- HILLS
- Yes. That's what this needs. [Guerard laughs] And maybe it's been done
by now. I just-- It isn't on mine, but it could be done. And that would
be a great asset.
- GUERARD
- Of course, you've been very busy teaching in classes, so-- [laughs]
- HILLS
- Yes, there hasn't been a lot of time in between to really do things.
Again, I could do that, I suppose, for myself, which would be useful. I
think I should-- I only just thought of it. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Put that on your list.
- HILLS
- Yes, yes I should do that. It would be very helpful. That tape is
excellent. And there were only two steps that I could think of which
they'd forgotten or missed out. Now I don't remember what they were, but
I was searching my mind to try to better them, as one does, and I could
only think of two. And, it's a very-- The book--actually the two books,
the kinesiology one and the technique one--and that videotape, are
extremely useful tools for anybody who is studying dance; ballet
technique. You couldn't learn how to do it from that because you need
instruction, but to look along with your training is an excellent thing
to do. And I think every school should have them for their students to
look at at off times. A lot of students think it'd be good if they were
videotaped, and I don't think so.
- GUERARD
- You think that they think they could learn about their dancing--?
- HILLS
- Learn by seeing themselves. And I think, with the majority of people,
they would stop because they don't realize how bad they look--
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- For a long time. It's better that they don't see until they get good
enough, and then when they're good enough, they don't need to see.
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm. Hm. I think they use that in professional sports and--
- HILLS
- They do, to analyze movement. And maybe that's a good thing, but they
are generally older when they're learning their professional sport. I
think a child and its parents looking at a video-- Well, the parents
always think their children are beautiful, anyway. [Guerard laughs] My
grandmother used to say, "Every mother's duck is a swan." [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And that was before I learned a step of dancing at all. [laughter]
- HILLS
- But she was quite right. One can look at one's children and think
they're perfect, which is just as well, but a person looking at
themselves can see the flaws. But a beginner doesn't know how to put
them right and I think they would quit very quickly.
- GUERARD
- Hmm. It would be too discouraging.
- HILLS
- It would be too discouraging. Absolutely. Particularly for a late
beginner.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- You want to feel that at least you're beginning to look like you think
you look. And there's the mirror there, of course, to see and even with
the mirror, I don't think people really see. They see what they want to
see.
- GUERARD
- Right. Right. Well, it ' s a complicated process when you're looking in
the mirror but also thinking about the movement.
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes.
- GUERARD
- And the music and the timing and everything else.
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- So you don't see with open eyes.
- HILLS
- No. No. And, I must say, I see myself in the mirror all day every day
and I try not to see myself. It would be awful if one was concentrating
on yourself in the mirror. I use the mirror to see the students behind
me-- to see what they're doing. And they're marking something behind me
so that I can see if somebody's got it totally wrong. It's like the
professor with the mirror at the side of the glasses as she's writing on
the board, you know. [laughs] See what the class is up to behind them.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Well, it's-- I don't know what people think who watch dancers
taking a class looking at themselves in the mirror, but it's not like
looking at yourself in the mirror when you're getting dressed or
something.
- HILLS
- No, not at all. No. It's absolutely not.
- GUERARD
- The dancers may be looking at just a certain part of themselves.
- HILLS
- That's right and sometimes they're looking at somebody else in the
mirror to see if they're doing the same as they are, to see if they've
got it right.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Yes. [laughs]
- HILLS
- Instead of looking directly at the person, they're-- And that causes a
cross in the brain which is very odd.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- When I'm directing my husband when he's driving, he'll sometimes say--
When I say, "Turn right," he says, "Are you facing the class or have you
got your back to it?" [laughter]
- GUERARD
- Margaret, we're almost to the end of this side.
- HILLS
- Okay.
- GUERARD
- This would be a good point to take a rest.
1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE II APRIL 30, 1997
- GUERARD
- Margaret, I know that we're to the point in your life now where you're
teaching at Santa Monica College and also at Stanley Holden's [Stanley
Holden Dance Center].
- HILLS
- That's right.
- GUERARD
- And I want to pick up on this point, but before I go on, I'm very
curious about something. We've spent a lot of time talking about your
life in England and now you've been in the United States for a very long
time.
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- I'm curious to know which country you feel is home.
- HILLS
- That's a very hard question. My family and our house is here. I think
probably when you change countries when you're close to forty, you are a
citizen of neither country, in your heart. And I think my husband and I
knew this years ago, when he'd spent his year in Canada and I'd spent my
year in Turkey. He was then asked if he wanted to stay on in Canada and
decided not to. And at that time, we said to each other, "If you move
from one country to another, you're probably a citizen of the world, but
never one of one particular place." And I think it's true. When we'd
been here for five years, we felt we knew less about the place than we
did when we first came because we realized all the things we didn't
know, by five years time.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- Five years is the time when you can apply to become a citizen of the
United States, when you've come here legally. You have to be here five
years before you can become a citizen. And at that time, we definitely
did not feel we were ready to become citizens. There were so many things
that we didn't know. We were only just beginning to start to understand
how The Constitution worked, how people interrelated with one another,
and definitely ruled out giving up our British citizenship at that time.
We still felt more British than we felt American.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Things happened as time went on. Young Ron [Ronald] Reagan [Jr.] came to
Stanley Holden's to train to be a ballet dancer and got into the younger
Joffrey Ballet Company after a few years.
- GUERARD
- Yes, I remember that!
- HILLS
- And, when his father was nominated to be president, we were invited to
the inauguration. And we felt a little guilty because not only had we
not voted for Ronald Reagan, we were not allowed to vote for Ronald
Reagan because when you're not a citizen you cannot vote. But we went
because it was such a wonderful experience to be that special, you know,
to be invited by the president to go to his inauguration.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And, we were actually included in the list which was known as Friends of
the President's Family.
- GUERARD
- Oh, how wonderful!
- HILLS
- So we were treated very specially. It was a wonderful, wonderful
experience. I would not have missed that in a million years; to be there
sitting in front of the Capitol building, you know, in the cold, in a
borrowed fur coat. [laughs] My husband had borrowed a cashmere overcoat
from Warner Brothers [Pictures], through various friends, you know. And
I needed a fur coat. And Juliet Prowse had been taking my classes. So I
said, "Juliet, do you have a fur coat I could borrow?" She said, "Yes,
most certainly. You could borrow this one." She's taller than I am, so
it was long on me, but it was wonderfully warm. And she said, "This is
the second inauguration that this fur coat has been to."
- GUERARD
- Are you serious? [laughter]
- HILLS
- Truly! And I said, "How come?" And she had been Frank Sinatra's
girlfriend at the time of JFK [John F. Kennedy] 's inauguration. And she
had gone to that inauguration in the fur coat and I went to Reagan's. So
not only it had been to two inaugurations, [but] one [had been] Democrat
and one Republican. So I hoped it was totally appreciative of its
experience.
- GUERARD
- Yes. [laughter] A very American fur coat.
- HILLS
- Yes, a very American fur coat. Now poor Juliet has died, which is very
sad. She had cancer and died last year. She was a delightful person. A
great friend. We really had a wonderful, wonderful time. It was just
terrific.
- GUERARD
- Yes. And was that your first visit to Washington, [D.C.]?
- HILLS
- First visit and only visit to Washington, as a matter of fact. We should
go and do the museums. They were all closed because each state had taken
over a museum for its state party. And so, we didn't get to see anything
but just the-- You know, Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House. It was
very, very cold but not very deep snow that year, fortunately. Four
years later, we were invited again. As I mentioned, I think, on the
tape, UCLA had frowned on giving me time off to go and [it was] probably
better if I didn't mention that I'd been invited, even, because it was
Republican and not Democrat.
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm. [laughs]
- HILLS
- And so, we didn't go. It was just as well because that winter was
incredibly cold and the ceremony was held indoors. And so, most people
who got their seats to sit out of doors didn't actually see the
ceremony, which is a shame. So, we actually had a better time seeing
that one on television and imagining, you know, what it was like.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Wow! Had the Reagan's ever come to watch his son dance?
- HILLS
- Yes! Yes, they did! They both came on one occasion to watch Ron in
class. And Ronald Reagan had a wonderful eye for the best dancers in the
class.
- GUERARD
- You mean senior Ronald Reagan?
- HILLS
- Senior Ronald Reagan. Yes, I'm sorry. He asked about the best dancers.
His wife [Nancy Reagan] didn't say a great deal. We met her again at--
There was a gala performance of The Royal Ballet at the Shrine
[Auditorium] and she was there for that and was like any-- Oh, it's very
sweet, really. Like any mother whose son is learning something that they
don't know a great deal about, she was asking me how young Ron was doing
in class and that sort of thing, you know. [laughter] This is actually
before she became the First Lady. This is earlier, when he was still
governor of California, I think. But she was very worried about whether
he was going to make it or not, you know. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- Those deep, deep, intense eyes and-- She was absolutely charming. Both
of them. And a delightful couple. Just very, very nice. So, it was a
pleasant experience. Again, we-- You know, by the second inauguration,
we still weren't citizens. The thought of renouncing one's roots is
tough.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- If you come to a country as a refugee from a country that's turned sour
on you, I'm sure that you really do want to become part of that country.
When you come because somebody has asked you to come to work, it's very,
very, very different.
- GUERARD
- Yes. You haven't left under any duress.
- HILLS
- No, none at all! And you still have family back there, you know. And you
send-- We still do. We send a hundred Christmas cards back to England to
friends every year. So our ties are very strong. But, of course, you
don't vote in either country and you begin to feel a little left out.
And what really actually tipped the scales for us was the Americans
really turning against immigrants, legal or otherwise. And since all our
money is in this country, we began to worry, even though we were
definitely legal immigrants with green cards. We have every right to be
here. We began to wonder that it was really only a stroke of the pen
could take our social security away from us.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- It would be very easy. They were already saying that, you know, you
couldn't have welfare, even if you were a legal immigrant.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- So, how soon was it going to be before we became non-citizen enough? And
we would like to vote. And we were getting very much involved in, you
know, the next election and that sort of thing. And so, we thought,
"This is the moment."
- GUERARD
- And when did this moment happen?
- HILLS
- Well, it took a long time. It started off with the fact that you had to
pay seventy-five dollars to have a new green card. And, we went into the
process of doing that and that took six months. And during that process,
we thought, "You know, this is crazy. We really should become citizens."
And so, we set that process in motion before we had actually got the
other new green cards. And it took a year.
- GUERARD
- Oh, it did?
- HILLS
- Yes. They're saying it's going to take a year now because they're being
much more thorough in their FBI investigations of people. But this is
now two years-- nearly two years ago. It took a year before we got our
interview and answered our questions about The Constitution, and all
that sort of thing. And then another few months before we were sworn in,
which must have been in-- I think it was April. No. No, no, no. No,
September. September of '96. And we'd started the process of the
replacement green cards eighteen months before that, so bureaucracy does
take a long time. Our daughter, Sarah, became a citizen some time ago,
but the other two [Amanda Hills Podany and Julian Hills] still haven't.
- GUERARD
- Oh! Huh!
- HILLS
- We thought it would enable them to make a decision, but so far, they
haven't done anything. They're married and they have--both
have--children who are American citizens.
- GUERARD
- Yes, because they were born here.
- HILLS
- Because they were born here. And both are married to Americans, but they
haven't done anything about it. So it's up to them now.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- And it's-- You feel more legitimate, being a citizen. But, of course, we
still feel very tied to England. You know, we go back there for
vacations and shall do. And who knows what happens in one's old age,
where you finish up, you know. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Right, right. Well--
- HILLS
- Life is always an adventure, whatever happens.
- GUERARD
- You have good ties in both places.
- HILLS
- We do! Yes. Yeah. But now, if people say, "Are you an American citizen?"
we can say, "Yes we are." It's easier. But before that, people would ask
us, "Why hadn't you become an American citizen?" And we've said, "Well,
how many American citizens living in Britain have become British? Would
you not think it odd to ask an American living in London why he isn't
British?" And, you know, when you put it that way, they began to
understand that it's quite a big step to take.
- GUERARD
- Yes, it is.
- HILLS
- The inauguration ceremony was horrible. We expected it to be, you know,
exciting and gorgeous and uplifting and everybody was all in their best
clothes. And it was just a zoo. There were five thousand people.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness!
- HILLS
- And Brian was called to the morning session and I was called to the
afternoon session and you're not allowed to sit together. And you're
just treated like cattle. It was horrible! It should be gorgeous and it
really isn't. Sarah said hers was delightful because she was in
Minnesota and there were about-- I think she said fifty of them, only.
- GUERARD
- Oh. Maybe because this is Los Angeles.
- HILLS
- Yes. Yes. And there are so many immigrants in California. But it was a
disappointing day. It should have been a day of elation and it really
wasn't. It's a shame.
- GUERARD
- Oh, I'm sorry.
- HILLS
- Yeah. [laughter] But, you know, we've read since that they were grinding
people through as fast as they could.
- GUERARD
- Right. Right. I'm sure they are.
- HILLS
- So, if you're dealing with twenty-five thousand people in a weekend, you
know, what can you do? It's bound to be like that, but I wish it had
been pleasanter, that's all.
- GUERARD
- Hm. You know, this brings to mind, I know that you've gone-- I know that
you go to England all the time, but I've heard a couple of times you've
gone back for various fiftieth anniversaries.
- HILLS
- Yes, I have.
- GUERARD
- Of the Sadler's Wells [Ballet].
- HILLS
- One has been done and one is coming up. February of 1996 was the
fiftieth anniversary of the reopening of The Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden. And they wanted to put on a gala including those who were still
living who had been on stage on that opening night. And I had been and
Stanley Holden had been. And so, we were one of--two of, the two of us-
-twenty-nine people who had been on stage on February the 20th, 1946.
And they made a very special event for us. The ballet that had opened
then was The Sleeping Beauty, and they put on
another performance of The Sleeping Beauty in the
presence of the queen [Queen Elizabeth II] and her niece, [Lady] Sarah
Armstrong-Jones. And the twenty-nine of us, in the fourth act, were
introduced to the audience individually. We walked out-- There's a big
sort of sunburst in the back of the stage and we all entered, one at a
time, down some steps, and Sir Anthony Dowell, who is my former student
and is now director of The Royal Ballet, introduced each of us to the
audience separately. And we walked, for our last time, you know, down on
that stage and were presented with a bouquet and sat at the side.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- We had a coffee morning and a rehearsal. You know, it was lovely to be
back in the rehearsal call at ten o'clock, you know.
- GUERARD
- Yes! [laughter]
- HILLS
- And they had two dancers standing on the steps-- pages, to help us down.
And we ladies, ex-ballerinas, were not going to be helped down these
steps. [Guerard laughs] And so, we all walked down and we realized that
we were all looking at our feet very carefully and haltingly coming down
these steps. So we had a little talk and said to Anthony, "Could we
rehearse that again? We think we will use the pages' arms." [laughter]
So we kept our heads up and held on as we walked down the stairs, and
looked a lot better than we otherwise would have .
- GUERARD
- Right!
- HILLS
- And then at the end, we were all walked back up the steps to stand on
the raised platform and the entire company knelt, facing us.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And, of course, it brought the house down, and then they brought on a
huge birthday cake and Ninette de Valois, the founder of the company,
was there. She was then ninety-eight.
- GUERARD
- Wow!
- HILLS
- And she stood through the whole ceremony. She's stone deaf, so one can't
speak to her. But she looked wonderful. And it was just a fabulous
night. And then this year, in July, they're having the fiftieth
anniversary of the opening of the then Sadler's Wells School, the big
day school which opened in 1947. And I'm invited back to that since I'm
now the-- Ninette de Valois, who is still alive, and I are the only two
surviving dance faculty members.
- GUERARD
- Oh, is that right?
- HILLS
- That's right. All the others have gone.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- Some of the education staff-- One of the men who taught the boys
education is still alive and he and I are going to give a talk before a
performance that the students are putting on in The Margot Fonteyn
Theatre. This at White Lodge in Richmond Park. That's being in July. The
school actually didn't open until September, but they want to do the
gala anniversary thing at the end of the school year rather than at the
beginning of the next school year, which is reasonable.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- And everybody who has ever been a student at the school is invited.
- GUERARD
- Oh, how wonderful!
- HILLS
- I don't know how many people they'll get, but I've been writing to
everybody I know who's living in the United States now who was there.
And quite a lot of people are going, so it should be a wonderful
reunion.
- GUERARD
- It really should be!
- HILLS
- Yeah. So, I'm really looking forward to that. I'm not going for any
length of vacation--just for a long weekend just to do it in, but I
think it's going to be fun.
- GUERARD
- [laughs] Yes!
- HILLS
- So, this has been quite a busy two years, as far as fiftieth
anniversaries are concerned. And when you begin your first ballet class
when you're three, you don't really think about going back to fiftieth
anniversaries of things that happened in your teens. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- No!
- HILLS
- It's quite surprising. And [to] still be doing it.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- You sort of think, "Well, a dancer's life finishes at forty," you know.
Here I am, still at it at sixty- eight.
- GUERARD
- And people dream about having a life of dance, but it's very, very
difficult to carry out.
- HILLS
- It is! And without all the luck which we mentioned before that I've had,
I could have just been a housewife somewhere after the age of-- Well,
who knows what.
- GUERARD
- Yes, but I must say that you have had great luck--
- HILLS
- I have.
- GUERARD
- And you've talked about your luck, but one does make one's own luck and
you've had a lot of determination.
- HILLS
- Well, I think you grasp your own opportunities.
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm.
- HILLS
- I'm sure there are some people to whom opportunities don't happen. But
if you dare to grasp them, I think probably there are moments when you
can swing fate in your favor a little bit. And I have been very lucky.
Let's hope it continues because Stanley Holden's is about to close down.
- GUERARD
- Oh, my goodness!
- HILLS
- The-- After twenty-six years he's been there, the lease in the building
is running out. He's been on a five-year lease, renewable every five
years, all this time. And the landlord who is now, has his monthly
income from the studio divided between four other family members and
himself, and so doesn't get a great deal of money of the vast rent that
Stanley pays individually. That doesn't sound like a lot of money. And
he wants to sell the building.
- GUERARD
- Oh, he does?
- HILLS
- He really wants to sell it. And so they argue all the time, this family,
about who gets how much and that sort of thing. It's very difficult. And
they would all like to have a proportion of the $1,300,000 that they're
asking for the building. And, of course, dancers can't possibly afford
that sort of money. And if he leases it, he's putting the rent up yet
again to a sum which, as a dance school, you could not make. Dancing is
space- expensive. The footage profit is very small.
- GUERARD
- Yes. You need a lot of space to move!
- HILLS
- You do. You need a lot of space and those three studios are, do use up a
lot of space. When ballet was very popular, when all three studios were
in use all day, there was a profit. Now that ballet is nothing like as
popular, they're not in use all day and the organization is not making a
profit anymore. And so, Stanley just felt this is the time he has to
stop.
- GUERARD
- Oh.
- HILLS
- He would like, of course, as I would, for somebody to buy the building
and get it, use it for dance studios in some way and for them to employ
us, so that we don't have any of the paperwork to do and just to be able
to go on teaching, either there or in a space elsewhere.
- GUERARD
- Stanley would like to go on teaching as well?
- HILLS
- He'd like to go on teaching without any of the hassle of administration.
And I would like to go on teaching, as I shall at Santa Monica College,
which is nice for me. I have that now, more or less as long as Santa
Monica has money I shall go on doing that.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- But, I would also like to have the other. I like the students I have. I
would like to go on working with them, either in that space or another
space. But I've looked into the thought of renting space and running the
class myself, but the cost of renting space and the cost of a musician
and the fact that one cannot get any insurance whatsoever to cover any
accidents that students may have, make it absolutely out of the
question. It's no use, for this purpose, saying what the amount is
because in twenty years' time, the amount of rental and the amount you
pay to a musician won't make sense. But it means that if ever a class
met with fewer than ten students, one would make absolutely zero. And
there are times, you know, in flood or earthquake or whatever, when that
doesn't apply. You don't get ten students and you're still having to pay
the rent.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- So it's out of the question. If somebody else is paying rent for a
building and they want to employ you to teach a class, they make quite a
bit of money if ten people come.
- GUERARD
- Yes .
- HILLS
- Because their overhead is there anyway. So that would be the ideal, if
it could happen.
- GUERARD
- Yes .
- HILLS
- So we’ll see.
- GUERARD
- Well, I hope that will happen.
- HILLS
- I hope so. So, my life has now come to a sort of moment of change and I
look at it to see will luck still hold out? [laughter] And will somebody
buy the building and convert it and allow us to go on teaching there or
will I be teaching somewhere else? So, by the time you've listened to
this tape, you may know the answer to that question that I don't know
right now. [laughter]
- GUERARD
- And, are you optimistic?
- HILLS
- Yes, of course. Yes. Yeah. And if I don't go on teaching, then time for
my book.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- So there are all sorts of things still one can do.
- GUERARD
- [laughs] I've found your response to this challenge to be a running
theme throughout this entire interview. I think you're incredibly
inspiring as a teacher, but also as a model of a person who has just
continuously responded to the challenges of life with determination and
a real joy for life in whatever it offers. And I think that the people
who listen to this tape or read the transcription will feel that-- come
away feeling that way, too.
- HILLS
- Well, thank you! It's certainly how I like to feel I feel about life. If
it comes across that way, that's a bonus. Thank you.
- GUERARD
- Well, thank you. This has just been a privilege and a joy.
- HILLS
- Thank you very much.
1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE I NOVEMBER 18, 1998
- GUERARD
- Well, Margaret, here we are a year and a half later, and some
significant events have taken place since that time, and so we thought
we would come back and recap a little bit.
- HILLS
- Yes. We stopped at just the moment when the Stanley Holden Dance Center
lost its lease and was closing down. And that was the moment when
Stanley went to another studio in Culver City, which I didn't feel was
the right place for me. It was going to be an enormous barn of a studio
and I didn't really want to go. And one of my students said, "Well,
there's a studio in Santa Monica, in the Christian Science building. I'm
going to go and see if they would like you." And she did. And I had an
interview with the director of the studio, Frank Bourman, and we came to
a nice financial arrangement and I moved in-- We finished at Stanley
Holden' s on May the 31st, I think it was (either May 31st or 30th,
whichever was the Friday) , and on the Saturday morning, we opened up at
the other studio. There were forty people in the last class of mine at
Stanley Holden's and thirty-five of them showed up at eight o'clock the
following Saturday morning. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- That's tremendous!
- HILLS
- It was really very exciting! They haven't all continued to come, but
that was a tremendously supportive moment, which was--
- GUERARD
- Yes!
- HILLS
- It was very nice.
- GUERARD
- Absolutely!
- HILLS
- It was. And I've stayed there ever since, teaching, now at nine o'clock
in the morning instead of nine- thirty because they have-- They are a
non-profit organization. It's called the American Academy of Dance and
Kindred Arts, and they bus school children in- -public school
children--for ballet classes in the mornings, starting at quarter to
eleven. So I finish at half past ten and then these bus loads of
children come in and they have their ballet class and they're bussed
back to school, which they do on a voluntary basis.
- GUERARD
- Wow! So it's a course that they take.
- HILLS
- Yes. I think they're third-graders, probably. They look about
third-graders.
- GUERARD
- That's wonderful.
- HILLS
- And they do wonderful work with them. It's just amazing. And Frank
Bourman, who does all the teaching of those children, I don't know how
he does it. I couldn't. I couldn't teach children like that at all. But
they adore him. They do exactly what he wants them to. They stand in
lines, they take their shoes off and do all the right things and if it
was me, they'd be dashing about all over the place, going absolutely
crazy. He's quite a large man and he really has control over them
beautifully. And I've gone on going to Santa Monica College, as well.
And for the last year and a half, that's been what I've been doing. The
classes- -the nine o'clock classes- -have got considerably smaller. I'm
lucky now if I get fifteen, which barely pays the pianist and me, you
know, so they're not making any money on the classes, really, which is
sad. And, obviously, the interest in ballet is waning very considerably
[pause] all over the world, actually.
- GUERARD
- Well, I was going to ask, because we had talked about trends before, of
interest in ballet. And I was wondering what you thought about that, if
this is limited to Los Angeles or--?
- HILLS
- No, it's not, because all through these tapes, I've been talking about
my roots being with The Royal Ballet and now they are without a theater
in London.
- GUERARD
- They are?
- HILLS
- They closed The Royal Opera House Covent Garden for two years'
refurbishing. And the company was going to go here and was going to go
there. And then the government suddenly pulled the ground out from
underneath the refurbishing of the theater. The government changed from
being a Conservative one to a Labour one, and they don't want to support
the arts.
- GUERARD
- Oh.
- HILLS
- And any support they do give, they say that the theater has to have a
percentage of seats which are very cheap so that people don't feel it's
elitist. But, as somebody else has pointed out, it is elitist to go to
the opera and ballet and the other people, even if the seats are cheap,
won't go. They don't like it.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- They would rather stay home and watch their MTV and their football and
all that sort of thing. And so, there's a tremendous row going on in
England and The Royal Ballet has temporarily moved back to the Sadler's
Wells Theatre, which has just finished being refurbished. Whether
they'll ever go back to Royal Opera House Covent Garden, I really don't
know. At the end of last month, they had to sign a contract which cut
them down by £5 thousand a year less than they were getting. They've
also got to guarantee that they will--this is dancers mind you--work an
eight-hour day. Regardless of rehearsals, class time, they will work an
eight-hour day.
- GUERARD
- But they probably work than more than eight hours a day, anyway.
- HILLS
- They do work more than eight hours a day, sometimes. But sometimes, of
course, they don't. And if they're not in the ballet that's being
rehearsed, they get a day off.
- GUERARD
- As they should.
- HILLS
- As they should. But I think there's something to do with that wasn't
going to include class time, because that's not working. [Guerard
laughs]
- GUERARD
- What is it doing?
- HILLS
- I don't know. And they were no longer going to be provided with tights
or jockstraps for the men or the number of shoes they were going to get
was going to be cut down. All this because of the government taking part
in the thing. You know, instead of just saying, "Here's some money. Get
on with it."
- GUERARD
- Well, that must be so disillusioning for the dancers and--
- HILLS
- Oh, devastating! I think so awful for Dame Ninette de Valois, who
celebrated her hundredth birthday last May.
- GUERARD
- Yikes!
- HILLS
- And she's still alive and still aware. And to see the thing that has
been her child since 1931 suddenly disintegrating, must be devastating.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- You know, it's bad for the people who are still trying to being employed
in it, but for her it must be just, just awful.
- GUERARD
- Yes. Yes! I mean, she worked so hard for so many years.
- HILLS
- Yes, she did.
- GUERARD
- And saw it blossom and grow. And to have a pin put in the balloon--
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- It's terrible! [tape recorder off]
- GUERARD
- Sorry for that interruption! [Hills laughs]
- HILLS
- The trouble there is the same, I think, worldwide, American Ballet
Theatre isn't working full time. I don't know how long their contract
is, but it's possibly forty weeks or something. And there really seems
to be just no interest in ballet. Children are not going to ballet
classes like they did sort of almost automatically years and years ago.
I suspect it's to do with women's lib, if you really get down to where
it started from. When the little girls now want to do what the boys do,
you know, they're on the baseball teams and doing all those sort of
things rather than dancing.
- GUERARD
- Hm!
- HILLS
- They're tougher. People like to see rather muscular bodies moving. All
the advertisements, now, are showing very muscular women, which is what
ballet is not about. And I think the whole culture has changed
tremendously. The clothes people wear are no longer what you might call,
in quotes, "pretty." People wear things that are comfortable to move in,
but not pretty.
- GUERARD
- Right, right.
- HILLS
- And ballet is, generally speaking, pretty. And so, why do you want to go
and see something [that] looks pretty, because it's not what you're used
to seeing.
- GUERARD
- That's really an interesting insight.
- HILLS
- And I think that's why it's losing-- Well, has lost it's popularity. I
shouldn't say "losing." It's lost it. And that shows in the way people
dance in ballet now. They look depressed when they're doing it. If you
go to see a performance, they don't look joyful when they're dancing.
They look as though they're going through the motions, which is sad
because I-- You know, I'm just as bad as everybody else. I'm not going
to see ballet performances. I'm not enthused by them.
- GUERARD
- Oh. Yes.
- HILLS
- And, if I'm not, then who is, you know?
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- I ought to be going to support them, but it's very expensive.
- GUERARD
- You know, that was one of the questions I was going to ask you, if you
think it has to do with the expense?
- HILLS
- I don't, really, because you think the men who are determined to get
tickets for a World Series will spend hundreds of dollars to get there
because they're enthusiastic. So seventy-five dollars for a ticket is
expensive, but it's not as expensive as they will pay for something they
really want to see. So I think they really don't want to see it.
- GUERARD
- Right. Well, you know, it's interesting because I've been looking at
Ballet Annuals from the late forties and early fifties and, you know, of
course we're in such a different time frame now with the different
styles and all of that, but one of the things that really has struck me
as I'm looking at these photos, is that the ballet dancers seem to go
beyond the costume and the make-up and all of that and they are, in
fact, very muscular. They're in very good shape, but the sort of grace
and involvement in the character that they're dancing kind of supersedes
all of this.
- HILLS
- Yes. And the ballet training, although it does make a dancer muscular,
the actual movement, when you see it, doesn't look like muscular
movements.
- GUERARD
- Right. Exactly.
- HILLS
- The training transcends the fact that the muscles are doing it and to
give a feeling of being ethereal. And, of course, nowadays, if you're
working on machines to build up your muscles, you want to show off the
muscles. And the people want to see you showing off your muscles. So
again, it's quite, quite, quite different. You know, people have been
going crazy about Riverdance, the Irish tap dancing, you know, which is
very, very physical. And they love it. It's percussive, that noise,
noise, noise of the taps, and they're filling houses with that.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- And it's utterly different.
- GUERARD
- It is, quite different.
- HILLS
- I don't like it, personally, and I don't mind people knowing I don't
like it, but a lot of people just love it. And the-- What's that other
group. Smash, is it, where they beat dustbin lids together and things
like that? Again, it's noisy, it's brash, and it's harsh and people love
it.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- I suppose we've all got inured to the noise that's on television; the
cops and robbers and the cars crashing into each other and that ' s
become the norm, what we wait for. I say "we," but not me. I don't go
for that. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- Yes. Well, I hope it's a trend that will change.
- HILLS
- I think it will, because ballet has been down in the dumps before.
- GUERARD
- It has.
- HILLS
- In the 1840' s, when Coppélia was first
choreographed, there were no men available to be in it. All the parts
were played by women. And so, you know, that meant that ballet was
pretty much in the doldrums. until the Romantic Era started, just
shortly after that. And then, people loved the Giselles and all those sort of ballets, which were very
different from the showmanship of the story ballets before. So it'll get
revived, as long as somebody keeps teaching it and polishing it, you
know.
- GUERARD
- Right. Well, I've been reading about organizations like the Balanchine
Foundation and others of modern dancers, to revive some of the old
choreography, and I hope they'll be able to do that.
- HILLS
- Well, I think we stand a better chance now because before this slump,
most of the ballets and modern dance pieces, for that matter, are now on
videotape. A lot of them are written down either in Laban Notation or
choreology, so there is a resource for people to find out what it was
like. In the past, there was nothing but word of mouth and some
photographs. So, the library for revival is there, which is great.
- GUERARD
- The difference is that maybe the teachers were those who had performed
and they were actually there to--
- HILLS
- Oh, they were. That is absolutely true. And so, it'll go-- If it does
come back, it'll probably go through a time of being rather academic
until those people who have danced the academic stuff have thought, "I
want to put more into this." And they will sort of start doing that and
then they will teach and they will bring out the good stuff again. It's
bound to happen, just as the countries where ballet has been centered
has changed from Denmark, Russia, France, Italy, England, America. It's
gone circle, circle, circle, so it may not be in England. It may not be
America. It may be somewhere else. [pause] But I think it will be
revived. Probably not in my lifetime, maybe in yours. So, I'm not
hopeless about it.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- I'm sure it'll come back. Something that's survived for four hundred
years can't just be eclipsed.
- GUERARD
- No.
- HILLS
- Opera and ballet and painting are the longest-- And of course, just
music is really long-lasting.
- GUERARD
- Well, I'm glad that you can see that--
- HILLS
- The hope for the future.
- GUERARD
- See the hope for the future. But how does that effect you, right now?
- HILLS
- Well, me personally, I went through a few months of feeling very
depressed about the whole thing and thinking, "Why am I doing this?" You
know, "I just want to stop." And now I'm sort of resigned to the fact
that my classes are getting and will get smaller because there's nobody
taking lower level classes to come up.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- And so, it will just peter out and I shall just bow out gracefully when
there are so few people taking class that it isn't paying anymore. It's
nice to be doing it to be making a little pocket money and keeping some
people interested and willing to try and do it right. But, of course,
the people taking my class are not, the majority of them, ever going to
get a job. Even one of the girls who is really very good, is depressed,
because nobody is asking her to go and be a soloist in Nutcracker this year because they are all using their own
students from their own schools, and they're not paying soloists to come
in and do it. And so, she is now thinking, "Well, maybe I should go to
Santa Monica College and learn how to do math and start to get a degree
in something else."
- GUERARD
- Oh, sure.
- HILLS
- When there are a lot of dancers out of work who have been in the big
ballet companies, there's obviously no hope for people who haven't or
who have only just been in small ones.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- It's bound to happen. What all the dancers will do-- They can't all
teach, because nobody's learning. [laughs] So I don't know what they'll
do. It's sad for them.
- GUERARD
- It is. Well, people aren't just going to stop loving dancing.
- HILLS
- No. No. They'll all be feeding on each other and giving each other
classes for a while. [laughs] But it is sad at this present moment. And
this sounds like going out on this tape on a very low note, but I don't
want to do that because the resources are there for revival.
- GUERARD
- Yes, uh-huh!
- HILLS
- Which is something that's never happened before. We can see Margot
Fonteyn. We can see [Natalia] Makarova . We can see [Mikhail]
Baryshnikov after he's dead. We can see [Rudolf] Nureyev, who is dead.
We can-- You know, it's there.
- GUERARD
- Yes.
- HILLS
- Which is fabulous.
- GUERARD
- Well, and so hopefully, the spark will come around full circle.
- HILLS
- Oh, I think it will. It's bound to.
- GUERARD
- So, in thinking back, one of the things that I definitely wanted to ask
you about was your trip back to England. When was this, a year or so
ago?
- HILLS
- Oh, this was summer of '97. I went in July for the fifty-year
anniversary of the opening of The Royal Ballet School. And in a way,
that was another closure for me, because it was badly organized. They
had asked all the people who had ever been in the school if they would
like to go back, you know, and charged them for a dinner.
- GUERARD
- So, it would be all the performers of The Royal Ballet or the Sadler's
Wells [Ballet]?
- HILLS
- You would have thought. But the company didn't go.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- They'd stayed away, en masse. I don't know why.
- GUERARD
- You mean, those who were in the company when you were at the school?
- HILLS
- Yes! I think the trouble was, from what I heard afterwards, that all the
people who'd been in the company felt they should have been invited to
go back and not asked to pay to go back.
- GUERARD
- Oh!
- HILLS
- And so, they didn't go. Likewise with the people who had taught in the
school . They thought they should be invited. Well, of course, if you
invite that many people and you've got to give them dinner and arrange
it all, it wouldn’t pay.
- GUERARD
- Right.
- HILLS
- And the other thing that was so wrong was that a lot of the former
students did show up for this evening event, but what I'd forgotten is
that English people do not like having name tags. [Guerard laughs] And
so, there were all these grown up people, nobody wearing a name tag,
nobody knowing who anybody was, and I was walking around up to
people--and I'd put my own name tag on--and said, "I am Margaret Graham.
Should I know you?" I actually managed to meet fifty former students
that way.
- GUERARD
- Very good!
- HILLS
- But if I hadn't, they couldn't have found me, because I don't look the
same.
- GUERARD
- Well, nobody does, fifty years later.
- HILLS
- No! And last time I saw them, they were between ten and fifteen and, of
course, they looked entirely different. And so, we did chat a little bit
to those people. But I didn't sit with them at dinner. The table-- We
were assigned places for dinner and I sat with my former colleagues
who-- The older ones had shown up, Barbara Fewster and Alex [Alexander]
Grant and a girl called Pauline Wadsworth and David Gill and a whole lot
of people who were my contemporaries. We were all stuck at this table.
We had a great time, but it wasn't what we were supposed to be doing;
meeting the former students.
- GUERARD
- Yes. And had you been in touch with some of those people, anyway?
- HILLS
- Oh, yes! The people that I was sitting at the table with, I send
Christmas cards to every year, you know. [laughs] So it was just
reviewing. Just, "What have you been doing this year?" more or less. So,
that was actually a disaster, I think.
- GUERARD
- Oh, too bad.
- HILLS
- It was not really what one had hoped. And there were several girls who
are American and like me, took the trip over, and they were very
disappointed, too. They'd gone to all this long trip and were not
welcomed, not celebrated, just left to fend for themselves. It's the
English way. They don't ask you how you are. They don't ask you
questions about yourself. They're very, very, self-contained and I'd
forgotten. I'd really forgotten how to be English.
- GUERARD
- Hmm. [laughter] I don't know whether to say, "Well, good for you," or
not! [laughter]
- HILLS
- Well, I don't know, but it was very strange. It would be very hard to go
back to it. Very hard. So I guess we're right to be American now.
- GUERARD
- Good. Were any of the-- Was Dame Ninette de Valois there, or were any of
the other main administrators?
- HILLS
- She wasn't there. The week before, they'd had a performance at the Royal
Opera House, a student performance, and she had gone to that and got
very tired. And so, she didn't come to the dinner. I think, possibly,
that performance at The Royal Opera House was the event, but in the
blurb they sent us by mail, it sounded as though that-- And it was a
week apart, and I chose to go to what I thought would be the big event.
And I think if I had gone the week earlier, it would have probably been
better. But how can one tell, you know? They don't tell you. I thought,
you know, "I'm really connected with the school and not so much with the
theater, now. " I think I chose the wrong event to go to. However, it
was an experience. I wouldn't have missed it. But, it became a closure.
I don't want to go back to the school again.
- GUERARD
- I see.
- HILLS
- And I can't go back to the company again because it's not at The Royal
Opera House anymore. And so, this is, I think, probably why I got a
little miserable, because I saw everything that I had built really
closing. And, you know, the people that I taught who've now got the high
executive positions, they'll be retiring soon. The Royal Ballet School
principal, Dame Merle Park, has now retired. And her job is being taken
by a girl from Australia, whom I'd never heard of. You know, so going
back is-- They say you can never go back, so I suppose that's how it is.
- GUERARD
- Well, it's a whole generation that's passed by.
- HILLS
- Yes.
- GUERARD
- Also, it must be a very strange feeling that it's the house you grew up
in and the house isn't there anymore.
- HILLS
- Yes! No, exactly. And, of course, Stanley Holden's studio closing down
was quite a trauma, even though I am still teaching some of the same
people. All in one year, there was a lot of stuff that finished.
- GUERARD
- Yes. And Stanley was somebody who came from England.
- HILLS
- Yes. We had known each other since we were sixteen, you know.
- GUERARD
- Right. And you were there for how many years?
- HILLS
- The studio on Pico? From January '72 until May '97. So, twenty-five
years. That's a long time.
- GUERARD
- It is. [laughs]
- HILLS
- But he says the same thing; that his classes, in the studio he's taken,
are smaller. Where he used to have a lot of professional dancers who
were dancing in shows in Los Angeles would come to his class, they don't
come anymore because they take their company class, which is free, and
they can't afford to take other classes. And so, he says his classes,
also, are getting smaller and smaller. And he has an enormous rent to
pay, which I don't. I'm on a salary, which is really why I wanted to go
somewhere other than paying rent for the studio. Because if you're
paying, you know, seventy- five dollars rent for an hour and a half,
plus thirty dollars for a pianist, and people are paying ten dollars a
class and grumbling about it, you've got to have a lot of people in that
class before you make a cent.
- GUERARD
- Oh, you have to. It's a tremendous burden.
- HILLS
- And then you've got insurance and all the other things, you know.
- GUERARD
- Mm hmm.
- HILLS
- Awful. So, I wouldn't recommend anybody became a ballet teacher, either.
[laughter]
- GUERARD
- It's not an easy path, is it?
- HILLS
- It's not. No, it never has paid well, but now, it's really right at rock
bottom. But it will revive, Genie! [laughs]
- GUERARD
- It will. It will. It will. [pause] I'm just wondering if you might look
forward to doing some other things.
- HILLS
- Everybody says this. They say, you know, "If you stop, what are you
going to do?" And I think I'd probably like to find out what it's like
to be all the other women in the world who don't go out to work, who do
stay at home and garden and cook and all those sort of things. I'd
probably hate it after a month, but I would like to give it a try.
Because I never have not worked.
- GUERARD
- That's true. It's true. From-- How old were you when--?
- HILLS
- Four. [laughter]
- HILLS
- It's been a long time. And I may--probably would--hate the way the other
people live, but I'd like to give it a little try. And maybe I'll do
volunteering in something or other. Who knows what.
- GUERARD
- Well, I know you won't stop. You won't just stop working. You'll be
working, somehow.
- HILLS
- Everybody says this. [laughs] We'll see. A little "r and r" might be
quite nice.
- GUERARD
- I think so. Yes.
- HILLS
- But when, who knows? A year, two years, next week? I haven't the
faintest idea.
- GUERARD
- Well, you've hit sort of a landmark in your life.
- HILLS
- Well, I guess. I had that wonderful birthday party they gave me when I
was seventy, which was just so exciting. And a lot of people came back
for that who don't dance anymore, you know. And it was very flattering.
I had a lovely time.
- GUERARD
- Probably a lot of people much younger than seventy who don't dance
anymore.
- HILLS
- Yes, I think I was probably close to the oldest there. [laughs]
- GUERARD
- And Still dancing and still teaching.
- HILLS
- Yes, yes. [pause] So, we shall just see. And this tape would not know.
But you can write it in one day.
- GUERARD
- Yes. [laughter] Well, you know, it's getting to be sort of like old
times, sitting in these chairs, so you never know when we might be here
again.
- HILLS
- Mm hmm. But you'll have to get this done, Genie. I mean, one day it's
going to finish.
- GUERARD
- Yes, it is. It is, soon. And on that note, I really have to thank you,
once again, for sharing all your experiences and your thoughts with me
and also with those people who are going to be reading this oral
history.
- HILLS
- But I have to thank you, because if you hadn't suggested it, I wouldn't
have done it. I'm a very lazy person as far as getting myself to do
things and I have you to thank for getting me in there and doing it.
Thank you very much, Genie.
- GUERARD
- Oh, well, you're welcome. So, are there any other thoughts that you've
been having or anything you would like to add to this?
- HILLS
- No, I've been sitting in the car these last few weeks thinking what do I
need to round off and I can't think of anything else. That's it.
- GUERARD
- Okay. Well, thank you, once again, for this wonderfully rich experience.
- HILLS
- Thank you.