DANZ QUARTERLY Issue 22 - January, February, March 2011
JOAN IRVINE : a life of dance
1 September 1922 – 15 June 2010
By Jo Thorpe
‘It’s a very fascinating life. It’s exhausting, but it grips you. The whole dance thing – if it happens to be your interest – it can take over your life very easily.’
So ends six and a half hours of Joan Irvine’s oral history, recorded when she was 85 for the National Dance Archive. The tapes describe a life chock-full of dance – from the age of three when she would ask the girls across the road to show her what they had learnt in their ballet classes, to her first dancing lessons as a nine year-old, her first time teaching as a ‘very, very thin, but wiry’ 18 year-old, and on through a career teaching three generations of pupils spanning 68 years and working as an RAD examiner for 32 of those.
It’s a remarkable story told by a woman who, from the age of three or four, had ‘always wanted to know what was happening in the world’. Joan Irvine’s lively intelligence shines through as in her clear, precise diction she evokes another era – one in which ‘everybody kept fowls’, when people would sit on the veranda in the sunshine in evenings and knit over cups of tea. When people from England were called ‘homies’. When women had different aprons for different times of the day – a sacking apron for washing, graduating to a starched white one for afternoon teas. ‘Those teas were huge, but there weren’t fat people. I had never even seen a fat person in my life in the 40’s. In those “earthquake days” everyone did a great deal of physical labour.’
Joan – or Noni as her family called her because her grandmother didn’t like the name Joan – was born in Taradale on September 1st, 1922, the oldest of five girls. She came from a very long-lived family. Her paternal grandmother died, not from old age, but from choking on a fish bone from a trout someone had given the family for Sunday lunch. ‘Her head dropped on to the table and she died. She was 104 years old.’ On her mother’s side, her last aunt died aged 98, refusing to go into ‘one of those places’ (rest homes), still growing her own vegetables at 96 and refusing to accept Meals on Wheels (‘too much dessert, cake and slices of afternoon tea.’)
The whole family had very erect posture. ‘We tended to be fleet-footed, nippy on our feet. We all moved quickly’ – an attribute which saw her father being made a messenger in World War 1. ‘He just ran to start with when he was sent to Cairo, North Africa. Then, on the Western Front, he rose to the magnificence of a bicycle acquired in a French village – and in due course he got to a motorcycle.’ The early chain-driven truck he bought on his return from the war had a tray which became the stage for the concerts, dances and plays Joan and her sister, Nancy, made up. ‘My sister and I were great reciters.’
The whole family were also great readers. Joan’s mother had ‘gone against all the rules’ by saying she wanted to go to secondary school. Her parents were horrified, but her father finally allowed her to go – ‘not to Napier Girls High School, because there they taught girls mathematics and science, but to Technical College where they were taught housewifely skills like how to be a charming hostess.’
Joan’s parents played tennis and went to church functions, balls and dances. ‘Everybody could waltz in those days. My parents could get up and dance a very smooth waltz. Then they would get up and do the old-fashioned quadrilles …. they loved highland dancing. We all did it … Concerts were a very big part of life. We would go to all the Inglesides (Scottish social evenings) and we learnt some reel too, and old-time dancing. …
‘We danced as part of life, long before I went to lessons’.
‘I was dancing a lot from when I was five. The two little girls over the road went to dancing and from when I was little I would say, “Show me what you did today”. I’d go home and show my parents and by the time I was actually enrolled, I could do Highland fling, sword dancing, Irish jig, a bit of tap, bit of Spanish, exercises for the arms and feet – all thanks to those two little girls’.
‘We were always dancing on the Sound Shell on Marine Parade. We grew up on the Sound Shell.’
Schooling
Joan was a very, very small child for her age and didn’t start school until she was six. It was the Depression and there was a shortage of teachers, so parents were allowed to keep their children home till they were six. In addition, she had anaemia and every day from the age of three, she had to have a chop for lunch to ‘thicken her blood.’
As a youngster aged three or four, Joan had wanted to be able to read. She used to sit on the front veranda and wait for the newspaper to arrive, even though she couldn’t read it. Her mother would reassure her by saying that once she got to school she would be able to read. When she did finally have her first day of school, she went out and got the paper. Later, her mother found her clutching the paper and heartbroken because she still couldn’t read it. ‘I must have thought, “I must know what’s in the paper, what’s happening”. I wanted to read that paper so desperately.’ Soon though, she was reading, ‘before you could blink.’
Her parents borrowed library books and often read till two in the morning, even though they had hard, manual work the next day. There were librarians in the family and Joan was always top of the class. She made dux (as did her sister and her aunts Mabel and Gwen). ‘I had an absolute craving to read everything.’
Joan got her books from the Headmaster’s school library – a locked glass cupboard in which the only books were classics. ‘My grandfather had a great love of Charles Dickens and I arrived at high school having read everything Dickens had written. I was fed a diet of classics and Dickens’.
Taradale was a big school. Children came a long distance (two or three on horseback) and ‘lined up every morning to salute the flag as a boy played the bugle’. Joan remembers some children having to queue to be given a white enamel mug with a blue rim for their mug of soup, ‘probably their only meal of the day’. She also recalls the family of one of the girls whose father was a solicitor. When the bank foreclosed on that family’s mortgage, they were ordered out of their home and made ‘to go and live in a car case up on the camping ground’.
Napier earthquake
Joan was 8 when ‘all Napier just about fell in’. It was her sister’s first day at school and her mother, who had been doing the laundry in the outside washhouse ‘drove the old truck over all the bricks when they were still falling – still in her sacking apron. People said later that she didn’t even seem to see the bricks falling down. She was going to save her children.’
‘The earthquake bucketed on. Father got us all organised and put up a tent with a number of awnings. The menfolk slept on the truck and the ladies in the tent, all jammed in with the children. The ground shook and heaved and rattled and banged. Earthquakes are noisy things. … It was terrible the way it went up and down. I’ll never ever forget it … I could see the tennis nets. It was like looking at the sea, going up and down like the sea.’ Everyone gathered in the park as the rumour spread that a tidal wave was coming. ‘We lived in tents for six weeks’.
Her first dancing lessons were given to her by her parents for her 9th birthday present.
When I started, people were surprised. They thought I had been dancing forever.’
‘My first classes were a great disappointment to me. The teacher, (Miss Jean Lee), left me sitting there. Then she got me to hold my hand on a chair and learn some foot positions. (I knew them already!) Then the class did everything and I felt like saying, “I can do that too, can I join in”? But of course you didn’t speak out in those days. Oh, I was so disappointed!’ (By the second lesson, the teacher decided Joan and Nancy showed promise and told their parents they should be able to do more dancing).
Dancing class lasted ‘for two and a half hours at least. Our teacher believed once we were there, she may as well teach us as much as possible. We did ‘fancy dancing’ (ballet), ‘balancing exercises,’ (centre practices, adage) tap, a bit of Spanish – you think of it, we did it.’
After the earthquake, lessons were given in the teacher’s upstairs bedroom. ‘We practically touched each other and could only do static exercises (arms) and tap exercises.’ When it came to dancing in groups, if it was not raining, those in one group went onto the little balcony ‘pressed together like sandwiches’ till they could go in and have their turn. Later, the teacher built a studio in her backyard with room for parents to sit in the front (knitting).
At home there was ‘a spare room with a scrubbed floor, a wind-up gramophone, highland records, good cheerful, danceable music. We’d dance in there’.
Teaching
In 1939, the family moved to Dannevirke where her dance teaching began in the September term of 1940. ‘Girls from school in those days went into service, or worked at Harris’s cap factory or Rothmans’.
‘I took up teaching because I didn’t want to work in a bank. Within ten minutes of starting the first week’s class I was hooked.
Joan was 18 years old and weighed six stone. ‘I was a late grower, small-boned and very, very thin. But wiry’. ‘I suddenly had to become a ‘something’.
She taught two groups of children (6 juniors, 6 seniors) in the supper room of the Oddfellows Hall which had ‘a good scrubbed floor’. At first, she took her grandfather’s wind-up wooden gramophone, but by the second week she had a pianist.
Her students wore little ankle socks, and later, a little black circular skirt. ‘You could get ballet shoes – beautiful ones actually’.
She believed it was important to keep a certain friendly formality in the class and was always known as ‘Miss Irvine’ by her pupils: ‘If you’re going to learn dance, you have a mental discipline and that formality is important.’ She never addressed even her pupils’ parents by their Christian names.
Patriotic concerts
Her classes grew quickly. ‘There was a war on, they grabbed me straight away. They needed a teacher for patriotic concerts. There I was, down at the Council Chamber with the Mayor, councillors, representatives of Maori, Town Women’s Guilds – all the ladies were knitting (they were never idle) and here was me, little me, a young thing still in my school uniform (it was something to wear!! They were hard times.) We would organise a concert or a ball for a fundraiser. A farewell for the next batch of soldiers going overseas’.
Building on the Health and Beauty movement in Britain at that time, Joan advertised that she would also take a ‘dance and exercise class for young ladies’. Those girls found themselves on the stage ‘before you could blink’, dressed in white pleated skirts, white bloomers (‘we were pretty daring’- just to knee height’) and a sash over one shoulder. ‘Those young ladies, they really shone! I was quite proud of them after a while.’
Dannevirke was now a military camp and there were hundreds of men in training. ‘We’d go down to the rec hall – singers, orchestras, instrumentalists – all these concerts brought out people’s talents. At interval, the soldiers in the rafters (the place was jammed) would whistle. One man always sang On the Road to Mandalay, another man always recited a certain poem. We were ‘The Fun Dancers’. At half time, a detail would come marching up the hall and we’d all line up and march off to the latrines. You should have heard the whistles from all the soldiers. It was very embarrassing, but somewhat funny.’
Her own concerts
By 1942, Joan felt brave enough to have her own recital. ‘I had a beautiful pianist – and an orchestra too. I roped in all my friends (and their boyfriends) to help. I had to learn how to make scenery. We dyed butter muslin to put a green gauze in front of the stage. We did Little Mermaid and made a beautiful big shell out of flour and water paste. My sisters Elizabeth (only two years old) and Leonie (four), were pearls in this shell which was pulled open by a fishing line from the 60 foot fly-tower. We lined the shell with pink satin but the night before we opened up, the rats had been in and eaten all the lining. We didn’t know we had to put Lysol in the paste to stop the rats eating it! We had to do a pretty quick repair job’.
There were about 100 seats in the pit ‘with spindle backs and legs, red velvet seats. These were the cheaper seats and we kept these for sale on the night. People would queue to get them. The dress circle was beautiful – with mouldings, but a [challenging] raked stage’.
All the money from that first concert went to the Patriotic Fund. ‘It was the most they’d had in one go’. After the war was over, the proceeds from all Joan’s concerts went to the Crippled Children’s Society. ‘We would save up enough to get the doctor up from Lower Hutt hospital to operate on someone we were trying to help.’
Growth of the Joan Irvine School of Dancing
Soon Joan was going to Pahiatua every week to teach. With the war over, petrol became available and her father said she could take his Pontiac. ‘They were mostly metal roads, very dusty and gravely’ – and train tracks were a problem. Joan taught in the community hall which had a wooden floor. She taught till 9 pm and then stayed overnight with the grandparents of one of her pupils who lived next door. ‘They were darlings. They always made me a hot dinner.’
Soon, there were pupils from Woodville wanting to learn too, so her sister Margaret would come on the bus with sandwiches and a thermos and they would teach in the Women’s Institute Hall – highland, ballet, tap, Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced – then drive back to Dannevirke, run to the studio at 5.45, rush into the office where ‘mother would have sent up something to eat or drink’, before changing into her ‘New Look’ red velvet dress and high heels to begin teaching ballroom at 6 pm. ‘I’d teach the 3rd formers at 6, the 4th formers at 7, and at 8, the 8-10 really keen ones’. When she finally finished at 9 pm ‘mother would have dinner ready’.
When the dance teacher in Waipukurau moved away, Joan opened up a branch of her school there, taught by student teacher, Robyn Carlton-Kelly, who later became assistant teacher then business partner in the Joan Irvine School of Dancing.
By the early 60’s, ‘quite a lot had been coming over from Palmerston North. They asked me to come to them and teach.’ So she and Robyn taught two or three days a week in Palmerston North. ‘I gave all the money from our concerts to the Crippled Children’s Society. Every year, we had a recital, yearly in Dannevirke, every second year in Pahiatua. From then on, everything went to the CCS - $3000 from the Dannevirke recital, $3-4000 from Palmerston North.
‘But it never occurred to me until about four years ago, to say, once in five years, “that will be $6000 for Miss Irvine instead of the CCS”. From 1948 on, every recital went to CCS. They made me a Life Member. I think I was always doing such interesting things. Now I wish I had a few of those thousands!”
First trip to England
In 1957, Joan was awarded a government bursary to continue her studies in England. She and Nancy set off for their first trip overseas in May of that year. The Suez was closed and they sailed from Auckland on the P & O Line to Australia. In Sydney, they stayed in a Kings Cross hotel for four days. ‘It was the first time out of NZ for most of us. Sydney opened our eyes to the rest of the world.’ Then it was on to Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth – and Cape Town. ‘If you want to see something truly beautiful, sail into Cape Town when the sun’s coming up in the morning. It was the most beautiful sight. I’ll never forget it.’
The boat continued up the west coast of Africa, and Joan and others got off at the Canary Islands (via lighters and rope ladders.) Here she learned to bargain, experiencing pangs of guilt at getting an embroidered tablecloth so cheap. ‘We paid so little’. She also bought a tortoiseshell mantilla comb. ‘I had jet black hair, a red organza evening dress I’d made myself (we had to sew everything for ballet), bare shoulders, and I bought a big black lace mantilla to go with it’.
They arrived in England in June and had ‘perfect weather for weeks’. While Nancy took office jobs, Joan went to daily classes taught by Ruth French – ‘the most elegant, beautiful looking woman you ever saw’. French had danced with Anna Pavlova and written three books on dance. She taught in an old hall with a real parquet floor. ‘It was like landing on concrete!’ There were eight in the class from different countries – France, Iceland, America, and another New Zealander. Students had to be there half an hour before class to practise and get warmed up. ‘It was dark and cold in London in winter … there we were, on this hard, hard floor, practising our fouettes every morning. We all beavered away’. Ruth French wore court shoes and ‘beautiful dresses with a straight elegant line. She expected you to be good. She would come to the dressing room and rebuke us for not rubbing ourselves down with eau de cologne to “close the pores”’. (Joan plucked up the courage to tell her it was too expensive.)
After lunch they would go to other classes either at the Imperial Society or the Royal Academy of Dancing. ‘You could go to the RA and learn anything – Irish, contemporary, baby classes. The Imperial Society was an older organization. They examined everything – ballroom, tap, contemporary, Spanish, Indian dance, jazz, modern, hip hop, America square dancing – you name it, highland, the national. I was doing a lot of national so as to become qualified. I got my Licentiate for the national’.
On Saturday nights they’d go to musicals, operas, the ballet, sitting up in the gods watching Nureyev and Fonteyn. And on Sundays, they’d get a train to Oxford or Cambridge for one pound and do the cheap Sunday conducted tours.
‘I’ve had a very interesting life.
Israel and Bangkok
On the way home from that first trip to England, Joan went to Israel ‘between the Three-Day War and the Egyptian war’ to do a series of teachers courses, firstly in Tel Aviv (in the Arts Centre in a huge beautiful studio five stories underground!) then in Haifa and Jerusalem where she met a woman who’d been a little girl in class in Russia when Pavlova had been a Senior. When Joan was about to leave Jerusalem, the group she was with pulled up at the airport just as the passenger lounge blew up. They had to sit in the desert till 10 pm on railway sleepers (from which she contracted an eye infection and was told she couldn’t board the plane the next day). ‘I told them I had to be in Bangkok. I had booked into the Hilton at my own expense as I needed to learn Thai dancing for [my production of] The King and I. The Hilton offered lessons in Thai dancing in the basement which was done up most beautifully.’
She finally persuaded them to allow her on to the plane and when she got to Bangkok, fell into bed exhausted. Her room was huge, with floor-to-ceiling curtains of woven silk and a very high stud with a Murano glass chandelier. This chandelier fell on her legs during the night. ‘I could hear tinkles, water running on my feet … I rang the bell and soon there were 14 people in the bedroom, with water coming through the roof’. The mishap had been caused by ‘a drunk American’ in the room above who had decided to run a bath but fallen asleep and the water had ‘melted’ the plaster in the ceiling.
RAD examiner – her first tour to Invercargill
Joan became an international dance examiner for the Royal Academy in 1959 and remained one for 32 years. (Examiners were compulsorily retired at the age of 70.) She describes her first tour as one ‘I’ll never forget’ – a gruelling six-week tour to Invercargill. Every day she would arrive in a town and start at 8 am. If it took till 7 pm to get through the students, then she went till 7 pm – and chopped a bit off the lunch break. Then she’d take a bus to the next town, arriving at nine at night. ‘With 6 o’clock closing and no ethnic restaurants open, I would report to the night porter who would get the remains of the [bar or counter] lunches – a huge white tea pot, a few pigs’ trotters, no vegetables, hot toast dripping with butter and two or three slices of ham. Then I had to write up results for the whole day. There used to be nine sections in the work and examiners were required to comment on the whole nine. If I examined 30 children, I had to write up 30 results that night and read them over the next morning’. She did not get a half-day off until the six weeks were over.
That first tour saw Joan spending two weeks in Christchurch and two in Invercargill. ‘I had to go to all those outlying towns … I’ve never been so cold in my life.’ A highlight was the Bluff oysters – oyster soup for morning tea, and at night the entrée at the Grand Hotel was a dozen raw huge oysters, then a roast dinner.
‘In those early days, the teacher would cook cake for afternoon tea – they really looked after the visiting examiner. Everyone knew how to cook. Then along came supermarkets and standards dropped! But they were a relief for overworked teachers who had to ready the students, keep them calm, dress them …’
Joan examined around NZ. ‘At first the results were sent to Britain to be processed and there was a long wait for the results to come back on ships’. Today, they are sent to England to be ‘moderated’ and the wait is three to four weeks’.
She also examined internationally and recalls the gifted NZ pianist, Eli Gray-Smith, who would travel the world with the examiners. ‘He played in Russia and for Balanchine in New York.’ ‘NZ examiners seem to get around the world perhaps more than a lot of others’.
Cambodia and China
Because Joan had ‘grown up on National Geographics’, she loved to visit other countries on the way to the Assembly in England. (‘I didn’t go every year. We had to go at our own expense and spend six weeks there, so we had to save for one or two years.’)
She went to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat when it was ‘newly unearthed, six months before Pol Pot and there was war in Vietnam’. She describes this as ‘the most magic magic experience’ where the cockroaches were ‘so big that their feet made clacking noises on those stone cobbles’ and she had to help out a group of visiting gynaecologists who’d discovered that when they got to Pnom Penn the banks were closed and she gave them some of her American dollars which she fished out from where they were hidden in her suspender belt in a silk envelope!
Another time, she made a three-week visit to China. ‘China was becoming more capitalist. It decided they would allow people to be private dance teachers and asked the Royal Academy in London to get a delegation from all forms of dancing – not just ballet – and from different countries. There were two New Zealanders – chosen from London’. The delegation visited historical spots – a ‘glorious’ 14th century restaurant and the Great Wall (which was spoiled for her by the intense cold. Joan had Raynaud’s disease and says she was ‘born cold’).
‘We spent every day with dancers … China has 2000 performing ballet companies. Dance training there had followed the Russian method (Vaganova) but they have developed their own style. During Mao’s time, they created very nationalistic ballets’. She observed classes, took notes, saw a great deal of Chinese national dance and was impressed by the ‘amazing training’ and the ‘focused attitude of students’. She went into the acrobatic school, arts kindergartens –‘ a wonderful experience … the wonderful application of every child. The way they are trying, beaming from ear to ear, and trying so hard to do their best.’
In 1979, Miss Irvine received a QSM for her services to dance and was still teaching at 85. Many of her pupils became teachers, and several became examiners.
Joan never married.
‘I think I was just so frantically busy. I was always doing about three people’s work and saving up and dashing off to the next thing … I never found anyone who was as interesting as what I was doing.’
She remembers her Aunt Mabel saying, ‘Never marry anyone that you couldn’t look at at breakfast time and be pleased he was there. If you were still pleased to see him a breakfast time, he was probably the right one for you.’ Listening to Joan, I have no doubt that this strong, intelligent and spirited woman had found dance was ‘the right one’ for her.
Source: Oral history recorded by Ann Packer for the National Dance Archive, June/July 2008, when Joan was in the Rahiri Lifestyle Village, Dannevirke. Joan died in Dannevirke on June 15, 2010, aged 87. The 13 sides of tapes are held in the Oral History section of the National Library of NZ, Wellington, and can accessed on request.
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