Joan Denise Moriarty is on a mission to bring ballet to conservative Ireland
OAN Denise Moriarty studied her life’s obsession at the Rambert Ballet School in London. While back in Cork on holidays, she found herself on St Patrick’s Bridge one day when a friend asked her what she was up to. She said she was studying ballet. The man was dismissive. “I can’t stand it!” he grunted. “Well, what is it? A man chasing a woman around the stage.”
Moriarty bristled: “I remember thinking — I’ll make you eat those words yet. I’m going to one day come back home and I’m going to start a ballet school and a ballet company and you’ll all accept it.”
As shown by a new documentary premiering at the Dublin International Film Festival tonight, she did just that. She started a ballet school during the Second World War (for six months she went without a student) although she managed to prosper enough to set up the Cork Ballet Company — and later the Cork Ballet Group, Ireland’s first professional outfit — in 1947.
She then, improbably, brought ballet to the most remote corners of Ireland, including the North during the Troubles. The villages in conservative 1950s Ireland often didn’t know what to make of her ballet troupe when they fetched up in their local parish halls. Priests refused to attend performances for fear of committing a mortal sin (although some of them tended to sit in on rehearsals).
The mayor of Clonmel felt moved to make a speech after one performance. “You might think this is rock ’n’ roll. This is pure ballet,” he said, stressing the ‘t’ in ‘ballet’. “It gives me great pleasure to see those ballet-drinas flitterin‘ across the stage. My God, they were great dancers. They have great legs.”
Moriarty’s life is shrouded in mystery. She never married although she had several suitors. Her passport said she was born in 1920. Her driver’s licence has 1916 as the year of her birth; her mother’s husband died in 1913. It seems likely she was illegitimate, which would have been a scandalous situation around Mallow, Co Cork, which she thought of as home.
Dancers were always trying to guess her age and locate her well-spoken accent, says Claire Dix, director of We Are Moving: Memories of Miss Moriarty. “They were trying to guess where is she really from,” explains Dix. “Some of the stories about her background are conflicting as well. Even some of the interviews I listened to her give about her background had differences in what she said. We tried to fudge on that.
“In this film, you get different stories. It’s people’s memories, impressions of her. It’s not a biopic. These are not facts we’re trying to put forward about her. We’re putting out fragments of her life. The film is supposed to feel a bit fragmented because she left behind a love of dance but also lots of artefacts. Every letter anyone wrote to her, every receipt she kept, and boxes of videotapes, photographs, and Super 8 film. What we’ve tried to do is collect them and present them with people’s memories. It’s up to people watching the film to make up their own minds about her.”
We Are Moving - Memories of Miss Moriarty a celebration of Joan Denise directed by Claire Dix at #ADIFF16 book now https://t.co/8B46lI6qIQ
— Dublin International Film Festival (@DublinFilmFest) February 12, 2016
Controversially, Moriarty’s life work came undone in 1985 when a report commissioned by the Arts Council recommended she be removed from the struggling ballet company she had founded. It left her devastated. She never formally said goodbye to her dancers, and declined to attend a planned celebration for her. She died in 1992. In her will, she stipulated that it wasn’t permitted for her works to ever be performed again.
We Are Moving: Memories of Miss Moriarty will premiere tonight at the IFI as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival. www.diff.ie.
