Building a Ballet
In 1957 Blanaid Ó Brolcháin, niece of Joseph Plunkett, invited former Imperial & State Prima Ballerina Madame Nadine Nicholeva Legat to Dublin to help find a teacher of Russian-style ballet for the ballet school her daughter Ester attended. This led to an unlikely match with one of Legat’s former pupils, Patricia Ryan, the unconventional wife of Dublin artist and literary publisher John Ryan.
This documentary traces the seven years of intense creativity that followed, during which Patricia Ryan and her exceptional students transformed their small ballet school, season by season, into the now almost entirely forgotten ‘National Ballet Company’.
It explores several of the company’s most important productions, including original ballets based on collaborations with Patrick Kavanagh, Donagh MacDonagh and composer AJ Potter, and considers off-stage dynamics such as Patricia Ryan’s affair with artist Patrick Collins and her professional relationship with Legat. It considers the implications of the company’s eventual collapse for Ryan and for her dancers, and will leave the listener wondering why women’s artistic legacies such as this are so often forgotten.
Drawing on the private collection of Ryan’s daughter Penelope Collins, it features unpublished letters from Legat, Ninette de Valois, Patrick Collins, Samuel Beckett and Micheál Mac Liammóir – read by actors Ingrid Craigie, Jonathan White and Mark Doherty. Contributors include Penelope Collins, ballet historian Victoria O’Brien, and dancers Geraldine Morris, Joan Wilson, Ester O’Brolchain & Jim Hughes. Extracts from the unpublished memoirs of Patricia Ryan are read by Ryan’s granddaughter actor Simone Collins.
Producer and Narrator: Joanna Marsden
Producer for RTÉ lyric fm: Eoin O Kelly
Commissioned for RTÉ lyric fm with support from the Coimisiún Na Meán Sound and Vision Fund and RTÉ Independent Radio Productions from the television license fee.
RTÉ lyric fm, Sunday 10th March, 6pm-7pm
