Miss O: My Life in Dance

Susan Free teaches movement in the drama program at the University of
Toronto.

As Director of Canada’s National Ballet School for over 25 years, as
well as (at different times) Ballet Mistress and Associate Artistic
Director of the National Ballet, Betty Oliphant has been an instrumental
figure in the development of ballet in this country. Miss O: My Life in
Dance is at once an autobiography and a fascinating account of how
Canadian ballet evolved from amateur to professional status.

Written in a frank but dispassionate manner, the book reveals a woman
driven by her single-minded mission to train ballet dancers to meet the
highest international standards. Almost every important Canadian ballet
dancer to date experienced the rigors of Oliphant’s teaching at some
point in his or her career. Without ever coming across as gossipy,
Oliphant provides insights into the controversies and crises of the
ballet world. She describes her sometimes difficult relationships with
her associate Celia Franca; with famous students such as Karen Kain and
Evelyn Hart; and with such well-known Eastern bloc defectors as Rudolf
Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

One consequence of Oliphant’s perfectionism was that her personal
relationships generally languished at the margins of her life. Although
she is open about her clinical depression, which resulted from
neglecting her personal needs, her account of her personal life also
tends to languish at the margins of the more vivid descriptions of her
professional life.

Some readers may be disconcerted by the book’s nonchronological
structure (after an initial history of Oliphant’s childhood and dance
training in England, the narrative is organized by subject and therefore
skips around in a way that is sometimes confusing), but true ballet
enthusiasts will relish this account by a leading figure in Canadian
ballet.