Maude Lloyd

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Maude Lloyd (16 August 1908 – 26 November 2004) was a South African ballet dancer and tutor who immigrated to England and became a central figure in early British ballet.

She had a fruitful second career as a dance critic, as well as writing under the name Alexander Bland, which she shared with her husband.

Early life and training

Maude Lloyd was born in Cape Town, South Africa's southernmost capital and legislative capital. It had long been one of the world's most multicultural cities, with migrants and refugees from many countries. Helen Webb, a 1912 graduate from England, founded her own school of "fancy dancing" (i.e. classical ballet) and then introduced dance to the South African College of Music's curriculum. Webb used the Cecchetti method of instructing her students in Cape Town, including the young Maude Lloyd, as a pupil of famed maestro Enrico Cecchetti in London. Lloyd went to London on a Webb grant to Marie Rambert, an old friend of Webb's and a well-known ballet instructor at her school in Notting Hill, after years of teaching Webb and appearing in recitals staged at the town hall. Lloyd immigrated to England in 1924 or 1925, when she was 16 or 17, and immediately enrolled in Rambert's academy. She returned to South Africa in 1927 and spent three years at Webb's academy before deciding that her destiny lay elsewhere.

Later life

Lloyd married Nigel Gosling, an art and dance critic, in 1939 and went into retirement to avoid the war years while still focusing on welfare work. She began writing reviews of dance performances for his magazine Ballet when Richard Buckle encouraged her to begin writing about dance performances for his publication Ballet, co-working with her husband. The pair, who are described as "highly tumultuous" and his brother Alexander, who is not, referred to as "hopelessly volatile" and his brother Alexander, find the arrangement congenial. The Goslings took over in 1955, when Buckle left his position as dance critic for The Observer, a weekly newspaper published in New York, and they continued on until Nigel's death in 1982. They not only wrote articles for the newspaper but also edited, edited, or contributed to ten books on ballet and dance, four of which dealt with Rudolf Nureyev's life and work together.

Nureyev danced with the Kirov Ballet in Paris for the first time before he left the West in June 1961. Margot Fonteyn begged the young Russian virtuoso to attend a gala for the Royal Academy of Dance in London shortly after. They came to regard him with utmost regard as he came to this with a will. They praised him for his first Covent Garden appearance, describing him as "a balletic rocket, a wild animal loose in the drawing room." They gave him free reign of their Kensington home and assisted him in adjusting to life in a new world. The friendship deepened over time as there was genuine admiration and admiration on both directions. Nureyev became the son of the Goslings' late middle age after Nicholas married and moved away. They became his surrogate parents, providing him with wisdom, affection, and hospitality until his and his families' lives came to an end.

Maude Lloyd had a wonderful marriage with Nigel Gosling, so his death was a tragic loss to her, as it was to Nureyev, who had admired Gosling's intelligence, history, and quiet major. Lloyd lived for another 20 years, owing to Nureyev and others' care and admiration. All who knew her were extremely admired and admired from her salad days to old age. Despite the inability of both sight and hearing, she lived out her days in elegance and vigour at 95. In the presence of family and friends, she died peacefully at her Kensington home.

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Dancing career

Lloyd was one of Rambert's pupils who became founding members of her Ballet Club, the performing group from which Ballet Rambert's development was to grow. She appeared in repertory performances with the Camargo Society, as well as appearing in several West End theaters and on tour tours outside London. She appeared regularly in Rambert's Ballet Club's Sunday performances in Notting Hill Gate, from 1930 to 1970. Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, and Andrée Howard, three younger choreographers, all of whom would respond to Lloyd's technical proficiency, as well as her intelligence, grace, and sensitivity by playing her characters. With occasional absences, including occasional briefs, to dance with other British companies and to visit South Africa once more in 1932, Lloyd remained with Ballet Rambert until 1940. Pearl Argyle and Alicia Markova, the company's first ballerinas, appeared in several of their original roles, but then she moved into new ones of her own.

She was instantly attracted to Antony Tudor in 1930, and he to her. She and Hugh Laing became one of his muses, inspiring him to create a number of films focusing on her particular attributes. "Not only was she charming, with perfectly curved feet, but she also performed with a rich, natural expressiveness that fed Tudor's psychological realism with which Tudor was working." No one of the many Tudor works in which she appeared in leading roles has been more enduring than Jardin aux Lilas (Lilac Garden), which premiered in 1936. Caroline's portrayal of her character in "The Man She Must Marry (Tudor) was "a beautifully arranged exposition of Edwardian life's simmering passions and dutiful restraint. Dark Elegies, another Tudor masterpiece set to Mahler's song cycle, was followed by a tender, mournful pas de deux to the second song in 1937. She has also appeared in the classical repertory, performing Aurora in Rambert's interpretation of Aurora's Wedding, the Prelude in Les Sylphides, and Odette in a one-act version of Swan Lake. She appeared in a more boisterous role in La Goulue, Ashton's The Lady of Shallot and Howard's Cinderella, as the can-can dancer La Goulue. One of Lloyd's repertory writers characterized her as having "a noble serenity and a deep expressiveness in connection with sparkling gifts of comedy."

Tudor penned out a spat with Rambert in 1938 and his troupe reformed his own company, which he referred to as the London Ballet. Lloyd was one of the Rambert dancers who became founding members of the company. She appeared in two of the film's most memorable performances. In Tudor's Gala Performance, she displayed both elegance and wit, and in Howard's La Fête Étrange, a tense, dreamlike tale about an adolescent girl, she captures the lust of an adolescent boy's beauty. (The Boy was portrayed by young Frank Staff, a fellow South African and former student of Lloyd's in Cape Town). Lloyd and Peggy van Praagh directed and danced in the company until the blitz, causing almost all the London theaters to close after the outbreak of war with Germany in September 1939 and Tudor's departure for greener, and safer pastures in America. Lloyd retired from the stage when the London Ballet first dissolved and was absorbed back into Ballet Rambert in 1940.

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