Edouard Borovansky 1902-1959

In a remarkably short time the Borovanskys’ students were ready for their first public
performance. With several other local schools they participated in ‘A First Season of Ballet’, presented by Gertrude Johnson’s National Theatre Movement at the Princess Theatre on 25 and 26 July 1939. Their contributions were Étude, to Debussy’s music, and Petite Mozartiana, both choreographed by Borovansky. His dancers included fellow teachers Serge Bousloff (also from the Covent Garden company) and Eunice Weston, plus his star pupils Edna Busse and Reg Bartram – and the Borovanskys themselves. Apparently Borovansky hated the whole thing: he vowed that never again would he work with other schools in an ‘amateur concert’.

In 1940 the Melbourne Ballet Club was formed. Its members built a small stage in the Borovanskys’ largest studio, facilitating intimate ‘workshop’ performances of new pieces by young local talent such as Laurel Martyn and Dorothy Stevenson, who were attracted by Edouard Borovansky’s infectious enthusiasm and commitment. December 1940 saw the Borovansky Australian Ballet present a two-night season at the Comedy Theatre. Its repertoire included Vltava, which Borovansky choreographed to Smetana’s tone poem, in a moving tribute to his beleaguered homeland.

Borovansky presented three short seasons at the Princess in 1941-42. The following year his company was sufficiently mature for J.C. Williamson’s to present it for a week’s run at Her Majesty’s in April. This was Borovansky’s first fully professional season and the first to be staged with a ‘live’ orchestra. The highlight of the program was the Australian premiere of Walton’s Façade. A return season at the Comedy in December included what was in effect the first all-Australian ballet: Sea Legend, choreographed by Dorothy Stevenson to a score commissioned from Esther Rofe, with décor by Alan McCulloch.

The year 1944 brought two landmarks for Borovansky: he became a naturalised Australian, and J.C. Williamson’s backed an Australian tour that took his company from Melbourne to Adelaide, Hobart, Launceston, Sydney and Brisbane, and then to New Zealand. From then until 1961 – except for occasional unfortunate breaks – the Borovansky Ballet was a permanent and popular feature of J.C. Williamson’s programming – even to the extent of ‘The Firm’ shoe-horning them into the operettas The Dancing Years and Gay Rosalinda in 1946. Nevertheless, Borovansky’s dancers never enjoyed the security of permanent employment, and the company’s seasons were possible only because of the patronage of J.C. Williamson’s and financial underpinning by the Education in Music and Dramatic Arts Society.