In mid September 2023 I received information that contradicts  a paragraph contained  in the first and second editions of Cranko the Man and his Choreography (page 299). This information, regarding a letter from ten German dancers in the Stuttgart Ballet was drawn, with John Percival’s personal permission, from his 1983 biography of Cranko, Theatre in my Blood  (pages 211-212).

Birgit Keil, a leading dancer with Stuttgart Ballet for many years, now assures me categorically that the wording quoted by the Stuttgarter  Zeitung newspaper on 2 April 1969 was not in fact written nor signed by the  dancers. It appears that the letter was  a communication from an unknown source to the Landtag (state parliament) and subsequently published by the newspaper. 

I apologise for any hurt caused to the named dancers.

Who was Cranko Road in Cape Town named for?

When I was told that that there is a Cranko Road in Cape Town, I followed some leads back to a ship’s master, Johannes Karel Krankoor. In 1652 he arrived from the Netherlands in his ship that was part of the fleet, led by Jan van Reebeek on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. They sailed to the strategically valuable harbour at the southern tip of Africa. Krankoor was granted land, and he built a home in District Six, the Cape Town suburb now called Observatory. He married his seamstress, Dorothea, and changed his name to Cranko, ostensibly to avoid matrimonial repercussions from Holland! The road where he and Dorthea lived was named after him – and Cranko Road remains to this day.

Can anyone verify this story? I have put the facts together from reliable sources, but any further information would be welcome!

-this time from Australian Book Review.

An ever-rattling mind

A short-lived, influential choreographer

by Lee Christofis •

April 2023, no. 452

Reading Ashley Killar’s compelling biography, Cranko: The man and his choreography, feels like studying the modernisation of ballet in three countries, the way ballet eats up lives as often as it forms families of peers and lovers, and the unending devotion required for creativity to flourish. It is pleasing to learn how a determined man with an ever-rattling mind, backed by a calm, philosophical manager, could challenge opera house dominance to make the Stuttgart Ballet an independent entity, with its own school supported by a philanthropic institution named after the city’s first ballet master of the 1750s, Jean-Georges Noverre, whom David Garrick called ‘the Shakespeare of the dance’.

John Cranko’s primary concern was for ballet to be as alive as anything Shakespeare put on stage, and that’s how, during Stuttgart Ballet’s Australian tour in 1974, critics saw his two big ballets, The Taming of the Shrew (Scarlatti) and Onegin (Tchaikovsky-Stolze), as well as short works Jeu de Cartes(Stravinsky), Brouillards (Debussy), and Act Two of Swan Lake. A fourth ballet, Voluntaries (Poulenc), was created by guest artist Glen Tetley to honour Cranko, who had died on a flight back to Germany after a successful US tour in 1973, aged forty-five. Although Romeo and Juliet and Onegin remain in the Australian Ballet’s repertoire, Stuttgart Ballet has never returned to Australia.

Born in South Africa, Cranko was one of the most adventurous choreographers to graduate from London’s Royal Ballet School after World War II. A precocious child enthralled by music – such as Stravinsky’s Firebird, which his parents saw in London danced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1924 – he made puppets so cleverly that he was given a theatre for marionettes, for which he sewed colourful costumes by hand. Innately theatrical, imaginative, and mercurial, he was determined to make narrative ballets. His first was The Soldier’s Tale, inspired by Stravinsky’s 1918 score, made for the Capetown Ballet Club. He was just seventeen, and away from his Johannesburg home was exposed to a world of artists, gay bars, and camp chatter.

His father, Herbert Cranko, supported his endeavours, finding new mentors and encouraging his hunger for theatre and ballet, despite his wife’s initial disapproval. In time, working hard as a student, then as a member of Sadlers Wells Theatre Ballet (now the Royal Ballet), Cranko was mentored by their insightful ballet mistress, Peggy van Praagh, and observed two Diaghilev favourites, Tamara Karsavina and Léonide Massine, coaching dancers for opening nights. In thirteen years Cranko created some forty ballets for the Wells, Royal Ballet and Royal Opera companies, including Pineapple Poll, a romantic comedy by young Australian conductor Charles Mackerras, to a pastiche from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy Operas, and The Prince of the Pagodas, with new music by Benjamin Britten infused with Balinese gamelans. Many more productions would follow with many designers, beginning with his first boyfriend, Hanns Ebensten.

By 1959, still mourning his father, who had died the previous year, Cranko was burning out and soon became persona non grata. Several flops, and the sniping at the Royal Ballet, fuelled by artistic director Ninette de Valois, had depressed him, as did his shaming for public procuring. He pleaded guilty, was fined, and released. Collectively these burdens drove Cranko from England to Stuttgart, where he had friends and the potential to reposition himself.

Ashley Killar is another Royal Ballet School graduate. In 1962, he began his peripatetic career at the Stuttgart Ballet, where Cranko was expanding the repertoire and promoting, expressionism, and a culturally diverse ensemble. His first three-act ballet Romeo and Juliet was in its final rehearsal stage. Battling snowstorms, the ‘green’ Killar arrived just in time to watch the rehearsal and to pass his audition the following day. His crystalline memories of those weeks, and the success of Romeo, are carefully laid out, juxtaposing the man who needed a family of artists to care for him with the man determined to revolutionise the world’s conventional expectations, who shaped every one of his dancers to be better and braver in every ballet and still be themselves, no matter how delicate or strong they were.

Privately, Cranko was dreadfully lonely. The early years of drinking into the night with dancers and friends in the local Greek Café had passed as his workload expanded. Without his general manager, Dr Walter Schäfer, his personal manager Dieter Gräfe, and all his principals behind him, he would not have lasted long. Critics in Germany were as caustic as the British, until they appreciated Cranko’s agenda. In the United States, Balanchine and the New Yorker’s spiky Arlene Croce dumped on him, while showbiz potentate Sol Hurok provided the Stuttgart dancers with many stages to satisfy the audiences who clamoured for them.

Depression and fatigue dominated Cranko’s last years. Killar is sensitive about the early friendships that collapsed. This was followed by the suicide of his music arranger, Kurt-Heinz Stolze, and the death of his adored stepmother. Even artists John Piper and his wife, Myfanwy, his first ‘family’ away from home, faded from his life.

In a more analytic mode, Killar investigates selected ballets to understand how Cranko succeeded or failed to achieve his expectations. As an observant insider and experienced director, Killar is well placed to put each work in context. A collection of letters, like the political timeline in the repertoire catalogue, illustrate the conditions in which each work was made. This may seem rather clinical, but it is greatly illuminating and reveals how Cranko changed the aesthetics of European ballet and produced a new breed of gifted choreographers, dancers, and designers. 

Cranks

During Cranko’s career, his quest for poetic images took many and various paths. Cranks was a revue that he devised, wrote and staged. He teamed up with the composer John Addison whose plangent musical wit was a perfect match for the show’s zany inventions. 

I’m trying to brush up my very rusty German language skills before our visit to Stuttgart later this year. As you probably know, those little pronouns der, die and das – der Mann, die Frau, das Wetter – signify the gender of everything from bird to bee to table to chair. Novices like me soon begin to ask why, oh why is there no real logic to the given genders? You’d think ‘the girl’ would be the feminine ‘die’ but no, it’s das Mädchen and the coffee shop is das café. Strange, in a language that is otherwise so ordered.

My copy of the DVD of Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew arrived the other day. Well filmed, with the  myriad of jokes (some of which can be easily missed in a stage performance) piling up. The many moments of tenderness come over well, too. Amazing how a fifty year old comedy is still so fresh!

That’s all for now.

Best wishes,

Ashley

PS I recently put together some memorabilia about Napac Dance Company on the web. The company was based in Durban, capital of Natal Kwa-Zulu in South Africa. During our second year, guests included Patricia Neary, Jonas Kage and Deborah Dobson. Another guest that year was Reid Anderson, who came to mount Cranko’s  Brouillards and The Lady and the Fool. (Reid later became director of Stuttgart Ballet, until his retirement in 2017.)

The photos and articles about Napac Dance Co on the web have already prompted quite a few responses from former dancers and others connected with the Natal Performing Arts Council in the 1980s. One of them was the theatre’s music librarian, Robin Gordon-Powell. He now works in the music library at the Royal Opera House in London –  in the very same job that my father used to do! Small world, indeed.

The ballet icon’s life and work undergo a forensic examination that pulls no punches *****

High praise from Cape Town, where Cranko made his first ballets.

Rapturous reviews and lovely complements from around the world are starting to come in, using words like ‘mesmerising’ (Sichel) ‘superbly written’ (Chisholm) and meticulous detail (Shennan). And I was chuffed to hear from David Hallberg, artistic director of Australian Ballet who wrote “bravo on such a great accomplishment. My deep congratulations…”

Veteran dance writer Shiela Chisholm writes from Cape Town : “Research supplies facts. But research alone cannot produce a work of this calibre that describes Cranko’s ballets, backed by magnificent photographs, and details stories behind them so knowledgeably that it brings them alive into one’s reading room ….
In a lifetime of reading biographies I have never once read one that so vividly paints such clarity defining portraits of a man’s genius – on all Arts related subjects – love affairs, wit and idiosyncrasies. Unlike many biographies (and auto-biographies) this is a real page turner. A superbly written book bringing alive a man and his life works……”

Since Cranko died nearly fifty years ago, about 18 of his ballets have been preserved, mainly in Stuttgart. Of course, there were many that did not survive, some valuable but somehow lost. An important one was Harlequin in April – hailed by several writers in the 1950s as one of Cranko’s finest of the era. Last performed in 1959 it is now irretrievably lost.

In Cape Town, while choreographing his second ballet (Primavera), Cranko told his friend and designer Hanns Ebensten to refer to John Piper’s style. He was adamant that the design should not suggest Boticelli’s famous picture: “nothing to do with seashore or shells at all”.

A few years later when Cranko was living in London and choreographing for Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet he became close to John Piper and  his wife Myfanwy. They were like family to Cranko; he would often go down to the Pipers’ farmhouse near Henley to discuss ideas for his ballets, and Piper designed seven of them.

Cranko had in mind a fairly universal subject for Harlequin in April – Everyman’s journey through life: his birth, aspirations, disappointments and death, told through Commedia del’Arte characters; the protagonists were to be directly descended from Arlecchino, Columbina and the hapless Pedrolino.  The scenario that evolved fitted perfectly with the precepts of Piper’s romantic modernism. There can be no doubt that it was Piper’s concept for the stage design of Harlequin in April that helped cement Cranko’s disparate ideas, and the ballet was to become an important milestone in his career.

The set depicted a stage within a stage. It had a torn and tattered red velvet curtain which rose to reveal a romantic landscape with a gloomy void behind. The columns of the painted proscenium, their fluting and capitals expressed in line drawing rather than relief, were blackened and burnt.

The ballet was subtitled ‘Pantomime with Divertissements’, and originally the only indication of a plot consisted of some lines in the cast list describing the characters: Pierrot is the fool, the human muddler, sometimes likeable, sometimes interfering. Harlequin here represents human aspiration re-born with the flowers in April. This aspiration makes it possible for him to break away from the plants, who are earthbound and self-sufficient… The Unicorn, traditional guardian of chastity, represents the barrier which separated Harlequin from the perpetual promise of Columbine, his ideal. 

The original printed programme also quoted ten lines from the first two stanzas of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem eulogised by mid-century intellectuals. The quotation started with the well-known ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land…’. Far from lending the intended gravitas, the quotation added nothing but bewilderment about the ballet’s meaning. However, ‘understanding’ the poem proved to be unnecessary for most audiences, whose imaginations were stirred by the strange beauty of the ballet.

This ‘Pantomime with Divertissements’ marked a turning point in Cranko’s work while being quintessentially of its time. We can obtain at least a hazy sense of the qualities of the ballet with the help of the few photographs and by listening to Richard Arnell’s fine music.  It is a tragedy that no recording of the movement of Harlequin was made, even though, by the time of the 1959 revival, both film and notation were already in use at Covent Garden. By then Cranko’s reputation in England was in decline, but the loss of this ballet is a great pity.

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Read this excerpt, and explore the other info on this website, to solve the Crossword!

CHILDHOOD

John’s Parents – Rustenburg – Separation – Puppetry – Ballet Lessons

The plains to the north-west of Johannesburg, city of gold, extend far beyond the labyrinth of mines and the ugly spoil heaps. The sweeping grasslands of the highveld where giraffe, springbok and zebra herds once roamed unfurl to meet the Magaliesberg mountain range. There, nestling into a fertile valley of the foothills lay the community of Rustenburg. Occasional settlers would reach the area with their oxen and horses. Seventy miles of dirt tracks isolated them from Johannesburg, and the major seaport of Cape Town was many weeks’ trek to the south.

At first Rustenburg grew unhurriedly, but when, soon after the First World War, prospectors  discovered platinum and iron ore deposits in the region, speculators from far and wide began to arrive. They came from the coal and tin mines of Europe, and some of the more skilled men became mine managers. Others who followed during the 1920s found use for their experience as engineers, builders, solicitors, and the like; their wives made homes as best they could in the new environment. Indian families arrived from the sugar fields of Natal, the so-called Coloureds, mixed race people from the Cape, migrated north, and Chinese traders opened shops. Not unexpectedly, the adventurers, crooks and philanderers came too.

The managers brought in indigenous Africans to do the hardest physical work, some of whom had already laboured in the diamond pits of the Kimberley and the gold mines of Johannesburg. Virtually slaves, they found themselves relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy by the Coloureds, Indians and the new immigrants and their families from Europe, not to mention the long-established Boers, who considered themselves more virtuous than everyone else.

John’s father, Herbert Cranko later wrote that the white people, who then numbered half the population of Rustenburg, were ‘of many different origins and races, and also bitterly divided’.

*

Herbert’s father Frederick Cranko (formerly Krankoor) married Bilhah Solomon Jacobson, a matriarch who raised their six children in the Jewish faith. Herbert was the youngest. The family scattered to the USA and Australasia as well as throughout South Africa, and Herbert visited Australia when he was about sixteen – the beginning of his love of travel. He qualified in law before going to fight in France from 1917, but, once home again he began to practise law with one of his elder brothers. Before long he went off to Vienna, ostensibly for further law studies, but, reading between the lines of his journal, this was a time of sowing wild oats. Back in Johannesburg, the debonair Herbert met a divorcee, Grace Martin. According to Grace ‘lightning struck’, and after a courtship of only three weeks, they married. She must have hoped that her new husband would provide security for herself and her six-year-old daughter, Peggy.

Grace seems to have craved bourgeois respectability, but adventurers surrounded her. Her sister, Stella van Druten, was married to Major Chaplin Court Treatt, who planned to lead the first expedition by motor vehicles from the Cape to Cairo. Stella enthusiastically supported him, and they found a kindred spirit in Herbert, who readily offered to help with planning. Detailed arrangements had to be made for the convoy’s supplies on its route through the red-coloured, British areas on the map; but first they needed to seek financial sponsorship from British businesses. Armed with a letter of support from the prime minister, Jan Smuts, the two couples and young Peg boarded a ship to England. Soon after their arrival in London in 1924, the Crankos saw performances by Diaghilev’s ultra-fashionable Ballets Russes. The romantic Les Sylphides, Le Tricorne with its amazing Picasso designs, and the fabled Petrouchka captivated them. More ballet was on offer in 1925. Anna Pavlova and her company performed at Covent Garden for the whole of October, and the great dancer enchanted everyone who saw her. The Ballets Russes returned to the London Coliseum for two long seasons, and the South African couple booked for as many performances as they could afford. There was the glamorous fairy tale Aurora’s Wedding, and the new Les Biches, presented in London for the first time, and they did not want to miss seeing the Russian warriors in Polovtsian Dances. Ballet became a shared, abiding passion for Herbert and Grace, and they sent Grace’s daughter Peg to classes with Princess Serafina Astafieva at her studio on the King’s Road.

By the middle of 1926, the Cape to Cairo expedition successfully accomplished, Herbert’s work in London was complete. Reluctantly, he returned to South Africa where he was to arrange a tour of lectures about his brother-in-law’s pioneering adventure, illustrated by slides and moving pictures.

Herbert had intended to re-join his wife and stepdaughter, probably to set up home in London, but when he received Grace’s cablegram to say she was pregnant he reconsidered, no doubt anxious about how he would provide for his growing family. He decided to set up a country law practice in Rustenburg, where his eldest brother ran a hotel; the town was expanding rapidly, and Herbert had an eye for the main chance. He cabled Grace that she and Peg should return on the next available ship.

Reunited, they settled into the modest hotel that had once belonged to Herbert’s mother, the Rustenburg Grand, to await the birth of the new baby. The intoxicating thrill of London’s theatres seemed a million miles away.

*

Herbert grew fond of Rustenburg and the surrounding area; his law practice, which represented people from all backgrounds, grew to extend ‘from the middle veld north of the Magaliesberg Mountains to the bank of the Crocodile River bordering Bechuanaland’. Expecting to ‘suffer the tedium of a few years living in the backfield’, Herbert found that, ‘against all expectations I had wandered into a bewilderingly interesting, exciting and varied world’.

Herbert was no longer religious, and Grace had ‘accepted Herbert’s assurances that the Crankos were not Jews’. However, she made sure that their son, born in Rustenberg’s hospital on 15 August 1927, was ‘circumcised by the doctor not by a rabbi.’ She stressed that John ‘was baptised in the Church of England. So, by all standards except for his paternal grandmother he was of Christian religion’.

Grace wrote that John was a bubbly infant, always talking to himself, and that he ‘found everything a huge joke’. In early childhood he was never far from his adored horses, dogs, cats, and other animals, in a sunny, outdoor life. He heard euphoric accounts of exotic ballets from his parents, and some of the first music he listened to was a gramophone record of The Firebird.

John grew up as part of South Africa’s dominant classes; theirs was a life of relative privilege, a life eased by the comforts bought by the cheap labour of maids and gardeners. According to Grace, it was only because she chose to take a clerical post in the town that she employed a nursemaid for John. ‘In those days of growing up I was not allowed’ [by Herbert] ‘to check or discipline John in any way, and he always had white nannies so you see John was not left to the tender mercies of Black servants at any time.’ Grace did employ a white nanny from Switzerland for a while, but later John was most certainly left in the care of an indigenous black woman, like nearly every other white South African child.

Rustenburg was particularly conservative and divided, the whites living in the town, the blacks on the periphery. The streets of the white area were subject to a curfew after nine in the evening, and Black people were required by law to carry special documents from their employers, officials or the police. If, from time to time, the Crankos’ maid Evelyn did not appear for work at the Cranko household, it meant that the police had detained her for being without her pass. Herbert would have to vouch for her release from custody.

When John, as a small child, went with his father on trips to visit clients at outlying kraals and farmsteads, he quickly saw that in the eyes of adults, the indigenous African was subordinate to even the most ineffectual of masters. John talked of his youth shortly before he died, and he remembered his family’s maid especially well; ‘Evelyn was, for me, almost a mother figure, psychologically very important’. She and other black South Africans were the first to teach him art. He learned how to paint stones with natural colours from the earth. Evelyn and the very young John made clay model figures together, and she showed him how the long thorns from acacia trees could become the horns of miniature oxen.

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