Dancer You Will Know

By Clive Barnes
Dance and Dancers
May 1953

Valerie Taylor

Born in Ealing, London.  Studied first under Margaret Clarke, Ealing, later under Phyllis Bedells.  During this time she held a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dancing.  She studied for one year at the Sadler’s Wells School before joining the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in January, 1949.

Principal creation: Alice in Dream Children (for Sadler’s Wells Choreographers’ Group).

Principal roles: Fairy of the Woodland Glades in The Sleeping Beauty; Spanish Dance in Swan Lake; Red Girl in  Les Patinuers; Foxtrot in Façade.

Last year Valerie Taylor emerged from the corps de ballet to dance the Fairy of the Woodland Glades in The Sleeping Beauty.  All six of the Fairy variations are among the most searching tests of classical dancing in the repertory.  This particular variation demands the most feathery of bourrees, firm balance and exquisite arm movements.  The poise and delicacy of Valerie Taylor’s dancing in his role have made her performances of the part among the most distinguished I can recall.  These beautiful variations so often get undistinguished performances that it is a pleasure to always find one which realizes the true meaning of classicism.

There is about all her dancing a lack of self-consciousness that makes her as equally at home in the abstracted zombieism of the Façade foxtrot as in the sham Hispanic posturing of the Spanish Dance in Swan Lake.  As a Red Girl in Les Patineurs She is as pretty as a Christmas card.

Her only created role to date has come in Franklin White’s ballet Dream Children.  Here, partnered by Ronald Hynd, she danced with some distinction a difficult pas de deux.

She is unlikely ever to lead a company, but given luck and the opportunity to acquire more experience she should one day become one of that band of senior soloists, loosely referred to anatomically as “the backbone of the company.”