Harry Haythorne, the second artistic director of the Queensland Ballet (1976– 1979) and longest serving director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet (1981–1992), died peacefully on 24 November, soon after celebrating his 88th birthday. His life and art had many parts – ballet, variety, musicals and education – which he leap-frogged with remarkable adaptability. We will remember him vividly as the roller-skating tapper in Graeme Murphy’s dazzling entertainment, Tivoli (2001), created on the dancers of the Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company, when Harry was 75!
Harry was the second child of parents who loved to dance and held weekly dances where Harry watched, learned, and improvised his earliest moves. While attending Pulteney Grammar School he also studied piano, singing and ballet. Always inventing, he even watched the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo at Adelaide’s Theatre Royal specifically to find new steps. At age 14 and armed with piano accordion and roller skates, he became a professional vaudevillian, touring South Australia and beyond with Harold Raymond’s Varieties.
After RAAF service in Townsville Harry returned to Adelaide to teach and soon decided to take serious classes with Joanne Priest to achieve his goal – to join the Tivoli. But discovering Ballet Rambert’s modern productions in a Melbourne season led him, instead, to London and the studios of Anna Northcote and Stanislas Idzikowky in 1949.
At Idzikowsky’s suggestion, Harry auditioned for the Metropolitan Ballet where he met several rising stars: John Lanchbery, Svetlana Beriosova, Erik Bruhn and Poul Gnatt (later founder of the RNZB). Ballerinas Rosella Hightower and Celia Franca created roles on him, including his first for BBC Television. Guest artists included Ballets Russes stars, Alexandra Danilova and Frederick Franklin, and Leonide Massine, whose assistant he became in 1960 at the Balletto Europeo in Italy. After two subsequent years with the International Ballet, Harry launched into a frantic decade of brilliant variety shows, studying Labanotation, teaching and dancing in opera ballets and musicals including Can Can and The Pajama Game.
A crippling accident sent him back to Australia. Treated by a chiropractor, he was soon active again and accepted Eric Edgley’s surprise invitation to choreograph a show for Winifred Atwell, the Trinidadian pianist, before returning to Britain. The Edgley connection facilitated the 1974 Australasian tour of the Scottish Ballet - from the late 1960s, Harry was assistant artistic director to Peter Darrell at this company. Here, as earlier in Massine’s company and Walter Gore’s London Ballet, Harry found the formula that shaped his Australasian directorships: commitment to the classics and new works from emerging and established artists, strong performance qualities, and connection with audiences.
Works by the young Murphy and Don Asker and already established Garth Welch were matched by imports, none more important than Hans Brenaa’s staging of Bournonville’s La Sylphide, the ballet’s Australian premiere. The New Zealand achievements included Harry’s complete Swan Lake, the company’s first, and exciting new works by contemporary choreographers Douglas Wright and Mary Jane O’Reilly.
Harry had many more significant achievements and a millions stories to tell. A hard taskmaster and a loyal friend, he was one of our best advocates for dance of the theatre, for authentic artistry and the duty to entertain.
- Lee Christofis