30 years of Cork City Ballet: 'One thing dancers do not have is time'

From tour bus high jinks to funding problems, Alan Foley’s Cork City Ballet has weathered a lot to become Ireland’s longest running professional ballet company

Sun, 29 Oct, 2023 - 18:13

Ellie O’Byrne

While the cast of Cork City Ballet’s 30th-anniversary production of Swan Lake are in intensive rehearsals for their opening night on the stage of Cork Opera House, there’s one man in particular who, despite the proximity of Tchaikovsky’s classic fin de siècle ballet to his heart, doesn’t envy the dancers their gruelling regimen.

Alan Foley, Cork City Ballet’s founder and artistic director, hung up his pointe shoes over 15 years ago in a dramatic forced retirement from his dancing career at 38, following a collapse and open heart surgery.

He owned the role of Swan Lake’s Prince Siegfried in numerous productions in his own time on stage, including opposite fellow Irish ballet star Monica Loughman, but now, in his 50s, he’s happy to impart his knowledge during coaching, he says.

“I remember the difficulty,” he says. “Our bodies always complain in ballet, but over time they revolt. I was lucky I got out in time: I was 38 when I stopped and I could still pretty much do everything. I look at them now, and I think, ‘thank God I don’t have to do that.’”

“The downside is that of course I know the roles intimately. And it’s not that I want them to be exactly like me, but when it comes to musicality in particular, I’ll be like, ‘you missed that semi-quaver!’ But that’s what coaching is all about and I really enjoy imparting that. Sometimes it’s a single word that opens up everything.”

Behind the scenes at rehearsals for Swan Lake. Picture: Miki Barlok

It was far from a single word that opened up Cork City Ballet when, fuelled as he says by the ignorance and naivety of youth, Foley decided to open his own ballet company in 1992, following his split from the famous Joan Denise Moriarty and her Cork Ballet Company.

Foley, a dancing prodigy who had worked for years with Joan ‘De Knees’ Moriarty, as Corkonians affectionately dubbed her, says: “I was very young and I thought I was invincible, as young people do.

“I had that sense of the clock ticking on my career as well. I felt restricted, pinned down. There were so many things I wanted to do and this is a young person’s game: the one thing dancers do not have on their side is time.”

There have been many ups and downs for the company in the 30 years since they first brought a selection of ballet scenes to the stage of the Everyman in 1992, with then-Lord Mayor Micheál Martin as guest of honour.

Not least of which has been funding struggles: Foley is open about the fact that there have been many points at which he’s felt the company can’t go on, more frequently since the Arts Council stopped funding the company in 2011.

“I sometimes wish that it wasn’t always so difficult, because so much in the last couple of years has been so difficult,” he says with a sigh.

“At the same time, I’m a very optimistic person and I always think bigger, better, brighter. I think it’s because of that tenacity that we have forced through some of those tougher times we’ve been talking about. You have a time when you’re thinking, ‘oh God, I don’t know if I can do this for much longer,’ and then something happens that gives you a new lease of life, and then you’re going, ‘oh my God let’s go for it, let’s do it’.”

For all the challenges and tough times in a notoriously tough art form, there have also been rewards.

Janet Dillon has worked alongside Foley in admin, as auditions director, and always doing front of house since Cork City Ballet was founded. She relishes her memories of the fun of touring productions with the company, travelling to Dublin, Wexford, Galway, and Kerry.

“We’d have so much fun on the tour bus,” she says. “That, for me, has been the high point. You see the dancers, magnificent on stage, and then 10 minutes later they’re bundled into tracksuits and climbing into a bus to go down the M50.”

Yury Demakov pictured at rehearsal for Cork City Ballet's Swan Lake. Picture: Miki Barlok

But there has been nothing like the home audiences, she says.

“Through thick and thin, Cork has always had a fantastic ballet audience. There’s a fantastic audience for the arts in general, who are very supportive and come back year after year. It’s through that love and support that we have been able to keep going. And it’s an amazing achievement to be celebrating 30 years through thick and thin, economic crises and everything.”

The milestone provides a rare moment of reflection for the company and its founder.

“It’s only at moments like this that I sit back and think, God, 30 years,” Foley says. “First of all, where did it go? And secondly, I look back and think of some of the stuff that we’ve accomplished. Really, really good productions of an international standard, with incredible dancers from all over the world, who continually want to come back and work with us.”

Foley remains dedicated to the discipline, rigour, and structure of classical ballet, and is scathing about some of the directions that contemporary dance has taken in the 21st century.

But this doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to innovate and move with the times. His dream, for the next 30 years for the company he founded?

“I’d love to find a sponsor that would support not only what we have done, but allow us the luxury of doing other things,” he says.

“Much as we love Tschaikovsky classics, there are so many other ballets in the repertoire. We’d love to create more jazz ballets, explore other options. But that means dancer time, studio time, pay for everyone, and that’s what needs support.

“I suppose that would be a dream come true, for someone to come along and say, ‘you’ve done the hard graft, I see where you are at the moment and what you’ve managed to accomplish, here you go.’”