Laurel Martyn OBE
Dancer, choreographer, teacher
Born Toowoomba, July 23 1916.
Died Melbourne, October 16 2013 aged 97.
A true pioneer of Australian dance, Laurel Martyn has died peacefully at the remarkable age of 97. Born Laurel Gill, Martyn trained with Kathleen Hamilton in Toowoomba and Marjorie Hollinshed Brisbane before going to London in 1933. Her brilliance led to several awards and in 1936 she joined the Vic-Wells (Sadler’s Wells) Ballet – the first Australian woman accepted into the company led by fellow Australian Robert Helpmann and Margot Fonteyn, with whom she went Paris to study under Egorova and Kchessinska. By 1938 Martyn was a soloist but came home that year after her father died. She later taught in Melbourne for Jennie Brenan before Edouard Borovansky enticed her into his burgeoning company in 1940, staying with him as a principal dancer, choreographer and teacher until her marriage to
Changi survivor Lloyd Lawton in 1945 – a loving partnership ending only with Lloyd’s death in 2003.
An invitation in 1946 to direct the Melbourne Ballet Club’s performing group, Ballet Guild (Victorian Ballet Company (1963), Ballet Victoria (1967)), which she led until 1973, was a major career change. From the first Martyn aimed to give audiences significant works, both classics and original ballets created and performed by Australians, and her outstanding success made a major contribution Australian dance. Her composers included Dorian Le Gallienne, Verdon Williams, Margaret Sutherland and Esther Rofe; Erica McGilchrist, Kenneth Rowell, Ann Church and John Truscott were among her artists.
An award-winning choreographer, her favourite work was En Saga (1941), a sombre, powerful depiction of the agonies of war danced to music by Sibelius. (Coincidentally, in 1944 it was on the program of the first ballet performance I attended. It has stayed with me ever since.) She created over 25 wide-ranging works for the Guild, dancing in several herself. L’Amour Enchantée, a fairytale of a princess who joins her spirit-lover beneath the waters of a lake (1950); The Sentimental Bloke (1952), giving danced lives to C.J Dennis’s characters; Voyageur (1956), depicting love and loss among migratory geese, and Sylvia (1962), reviving a four-act classic not before seen in Australia, indicate the wide range of her creativity.
Former students and dancers speak of Martyn’s great warm-heartedness. Janet Karin, now an Australian Ballet School teacher, says she was ‘very theatrically minded; everything had to have meaning, not merely technique’. The late academic and dance writer Robin Grove spoke of how ‘wonderfully generous she was with her time and expertise’ when he began choreographing, giving him her best dancers.
Always looking ahead, she took dance into country schools, produced ballet for television from its earliest days, and, a gifted teacher, she eagerly transmitted her ideas. A dance education pioneer, she taught students from the beginning as dance artists, wanting them to be professionals, and developed her own curricula for children. In 1989 she established a diploma of dance teaching and management, a world first, at Box Hill TAFE. This, and her educational methods published in several books, continues to inspire teachers and students.
Indefatigable, Martyn held important positions in several dance organisations. She also made guest appearances for the Australian Ballet, including Mar in Robert Ray’s The Sentimental Bloke (1985) and Giselle’s mother in Giselle (1986), and revived Fokine’s Carnaval (1991), in which David McAllister, now the company’s artistic director, danced Harlequin. ‘It was extremely exciting to work with her’, he says. ‘She was so encouraging, with a great eye for detail and theatricality’.
Laurel Martyn received an OBE in 1976, and in 1997 the inaugural Australian Dance Award for lifetime achievement. Charismatic dancer, innovative choreographer, influential educator, her contribution to Australian dance cannot be overestimated.
-- ALAN BRISSENDEN
A memorial service will be held on Saturday November 2. For details, see here