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Manitobans Who Made a Difference

(Courtesy Royal Winnipeg Ballet)

Choreographer and dance producer Gweneth Lloyd was a pioneer of dance and ballet in Canada. A co-founder of the Winnipeg Ballet Club, she later helped to transform it into the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the second-oldest ballet company in North America and the oldest surviving company in Canada.

Lloyd was born in Eccles, near Manchester, Yorkshire, England, the daughter of Joseph Charles William Lloyd, owner of an automobile engineering business and an inventor. Through her maternal grandmother's influence, she attended the foremost primary education institution in Cambridge, England, the Perse School, and then Northwood College boarding school, near Pinner, northwest of London, where her family had moved. Lloyd developed her interest in and love for dance at Northwood. She graduated from the Liverpool Physical Training College (with honours), and in a three-year course in Greek dancing from the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama in London. Her education and training provided her with an expertise in both free-movement styles and traditional ballet technique. Lloyd taught physical education and dancing at Jersey Ladies' College in the town of St. Helier, on the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands, close to the coast of France. She then opened her own school and taught dance in Leeds, England, before immigrating to Canada where she had visited a friend in Winnipeg in 1937. Lloyd arrived in Winnipeg in 1938 with her former student, dancer Betty Hey, whose surname became Farrally when she married in 1943. Together in 1939 they established both the Canadian School of Ballet and the Winnipeg Ballet Club in the Time Building at 333 Portage Avenue. The school started with five, but by 1954 had between 300-400, students.

The Ballet Club made its first public appearance in June, 1939, as part of a pageant staged for the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The group was not seen by the royal party, but danced two brief ballets on prairie themes, "Grain", a mimetic piece about the wheat cycle, and "Kilowatt Magic", chronicling the social improvements due to the coming of hydro-electric power, both choreographed by Lloyd. The Club presented its first full evening performance, with three of the ballets choreographed by Lloyd, at Winnipeg's Playhouse Theatre in June, 1940. Lloyd, wishing to make ballet accessible to the public, succeeded in establishing a small, highly mobile, contemporary company with a diverse repertoire of original works, the themes of which appealed to a broad audience.

The Ballet Club became the Winnipeg Ballet in 1941, operating semi-professionally and making occasional tours out of town. Despite a shortage of male dancers during World War II, the company grew and improved. In February, 1945, on invitation, the Ballet performed twice in Ottawa, and in November, 1945, undertook a Western Canadian tour including Regina, Saskatoon, and Edmonton, the beginning of a touring life that in succeeding years would take the company around the world. With a board of directors, Lloyd as artistic director and choreographer, Farrally as principal dancer and ballet mistress, and David Yeddeau as manager, the Winnipeg Ballet was incorporated under Manitoba law as a non-profit cultural organization, and was transformed into the first professional ballet company in Canada in March, 1949. The Ballet gave a memorable Royal Command performance in October, 1951, in Winnipeg before Their Royal Highnesses the Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. In February, 1953, the Ballet became the first company in the British Commonwealth to be granted a prestigious royal charter, and thereafter was known as the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

Lloyd was not a dancer, but a teacher with a special interest in movement and dance. When she needed ballets suited to the talents of her dancers, she became a choreographer. With one exception, the entire repertoire for the Ballet's first decade was created by Lloyd. Before her retirement from the Ballet in 1955, she had produced 35 original ballets, comical and light, grave and abstract, traditional or modern, blending classical and contemporary elements, including "The Wise Virgins", "Ballet Blanc", "Les Préludes", "An American in Paris", "Backstage 1897", "Chapter 13", "Finishing School", "Visage", "Dionysus", "The Shooting of Dan McGrew", "Shadow on the Prairie" (perhaps her most famous composition), "Arabesque" (I and II), "Romance", and, to music by Vivaldi, "Rondel", and by Chopin, "Etude". Lloyd, who moved to Toronto in October, 1950, but who remained as artistic director, periodically returned to Winnipeg to mount new ballets. She also directed and/or taught dance in Winnipeg, Toronto, London (Ontario), Alberta, and British Columbia, including the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts (1946-65), the Toronto Festival Dancers (1951-54), and the Royal Conservatory of Music, and choreographed for opera and television. In 1954, Lloyd was an associate and examiner for the Royal Academy of Dancing for Western Canada, a fellow of the Greek Dance Association, and a member of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing. Both she and Farrally were adjudicators.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet was almost destroyed in the Time Building fire in June, 1954. The company's studios, choreographic records, sets, scores of original music, and entire stock of costumes, were consumed by the fire. The following year, Farrally became the artistic director and Lloyd was given the largely honourary title of founding director. In the next two years, the Ballet and its founders became estranged. When Farrally was fired or resigned in 1957, Lloyd resigned in protest. The breach was not healed until the company's thirty-fifth birthday celebrations in 1974.

Farrally, who died in 1989, and then Lloyd, moved to Kelowna, British Columbia, in 1957, where, in 1962, they opened a branch of the Canadian School of Ballet, other branches of which they had already established in Toronto, Lethbridge, and Australia. Additional branches were started in Penticton and Vernon, with a total of 500-600 students. Lloyd and Farrally continued to operate the Winnipeg branch in absentia until 1962, when Lloyd became curriculum advisor to the new Royal Winnipeg Ballet school.

Lloyd was the recipient of many awards and honours during her lifetime, including the Order of Canada, the Governor General's Performing Arts Award, the City of Winnipeg's Outstanding Achievement Award, and an honourary doctorate from the University of Calgary. She died in Kelowna.