Patricia Deane-Gray has devoted her life to the study, performance and teaching of Classical Ballet, and is widely credited with introducing classical dance to Bermuda.
A dancer with the acclaimed Ballet Legat in London and a soloist with the Yugoslav National Theatre during the early 1950s, Mme. Gray returned home in 1955, and married Donald Deane-Gray. She founded the School of Russian Ballet in Bermuda the same year, serving as director of the organisation for 45 years. She founded the Bermuda Ballet Association in 1962 with Mme. Ana Roje, and served as president of the organisation. She also founded the Bermuda Civic Ballet in 1972, danced with the company and served as director until 2002. She continues to sit on its board of trustees.
A review of the Bermudian dance students who benefited from her instruction includes many accomplished dancers and dance teachers who have performed or led dance groups in Bermuda, the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada, Croatia and Russia.
She was born Patricia Sherwood, the daughter of George and Mabel Sherwood, of the Sherwood Manor, a small hotel located in Fairylands, Pembroke.
“I was born dancing,” Mme. Gray said. “I remember that my mother used to go to tea with the ladies. I was about 18-months-old, and I would find curtains, go behind them—and then open them and come out to perform. They couldn’t hold me down.”
She remembers dancing from the age of two under the tutelage of Madam Amelia Smith. “I must have been very small,” she wrote in 1984. “My tunic, still in Mummy’s trunk, would hardly fit my doll.”
At the age of four, she attended ballet class, and recalls galloping around holding hands in a circle until she spun out of the circle and went flying around the room. She always maintained that was her first lesson in dance—and, thereafter, she always stood next to the teacher.
Young Patricia became a pupil of every dance teacher who visited the Island, and she began performing at the Colonial Opera House on Victoria Street, Hamilton, where she danced the Minuet with Florence Floyd, and the Irish jig. She recalls many performances with Trixi Halliwell, who was known to some as Mrs. Stubbins. During the war years, she and the other dancers gave performances at Dockyard, at Trinity Hall, Hamilton, and at The Catholic Hall with Anthony Ferraz accompanying them on piano. Diana Greene (Diel) was her teacher for several years, and Connie Bainbridge was a mentor.
“From ‘flame’, to ‘Grecian imp’, ‘flower’ to ‘Minuette’, ‘mosquito’ to ‘bat’, I danced wherever and whenever I had the opportunity,” she says.
Educated at Bermuda High School for Girls, Mme. Gray learned elocution, diction, acting and pantomime from teachers, Eleanor Brass and Bainbridge.
She also danced at events organised by the Bermuda Art Association, co-founded by Christine Diel. Their annual Arts Ball featured dance, and living recreations of famous paintings, which Mme. Gray danced and choreographed with Diel. It was during those performances that Mme. Gray met Bermudian dancer Ray Tanva, and he became her first partner; together they established the ‘Ballet Workshop’ before he left for the United Kingdom to become a professional dancer.
She continued to dance at every opportunity, performing at Kindley Field and on ZBM-TV, on stage behind the ‘Water Show’ at Langton pool, in outdoor productions of Shakespeare at the Botanical Gardens, in Jerry Wilmott’s Christmas Show, and at the Annual Fetes presented by the Lady Cubitt Compassionate Association. “I remember dancing in the Bermudiana Gardens, Government House Gardens, Bloomfield Gardens, and any other place they gave me a chance to perform,” Mme. Gray said.
Arthur Murray opened a dance studio in Bermuda in 1948 with teacher Lil McCrealis and, aged just 14, Mme. Gray was both pupil and teacher at the studio.
In 1950, she travelled to London where she studied with Nadine Nikolaeva Legat (the wife of Nicolas Legat), as well as with Valentin Provitch, Ana Roje and Oskar Harmos, at the Legat School of Ballet. She danced with the Legat Ballet Company for the 1951-52 season in England and continental Europe.
Later, she enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she also studied ballet with Madame Cleo Nordi, as well as opera and theatre.
Her meeting with Roje, prima ballerina with the Yugoslav National Theatre, led to an invitation to Yugoslavia (now Croatia) to study at the International Ballet School. She became a soloist with the Yugoslav National Theatre in Split for the 1952-54 seasons, and in the summer of 1954 represented Yugoslavia at a performance at the United Nations in New York on the occasion of the dedication of a statue by Yugoslav sculptor Antun Augustincic. His sculpture, Peace (or Horsewoman), still stands outside the UN building.
She also danced in New York, under Roje, at Ballet Russe, before returning to London to obtain her teacher’s degree from the Federation of Russian Ballet, certification by Mathilde Kschessinska.
During her studies away from Bermuda, Mme. Gray spent her holidays at home, and each year she passed on her knowledge in dance classes. In 1961, in order to make ends meet, Mme. Gray added the Peter Pan nursery school in the studio in the mornings, which helped to subsidise the School of Russian Ballet, which held classes in the afternoon and evenings. “I began the school with the idea that no other child born on our Island who wanted to dance would be unprepared for a professional career, if that was their goal,” she said. “Let’s face it, when I left Bermuda I was totally unprepared and, as I discovered, there is ‘dancing’ and there is ‘dancing’.”
Once she was back in Bermuda, Mme. Gray and Tanva became a team, and danced at the Castle Harbour, Bermudiana, Belmont and Inverurie hotels. They were the “Pat and Ray” floor show, because at that time it was not possible to create a ballet company on the Island. She also travelled to New York, and danced with her former partner from her Yugoslav National Theatre days, Myles Marsden. She performed on live television and assisted Roje as she taught at the Boston Studio and gave lectures on the Legat system of teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
When Tanva left the Island to pursue a career in dance, Mme. Gray began teaching dance in the Island’s schools, for the Board of Education.
She invited Roje to Bermuda in 1957 to assess the standard of the local students during a performance of Act II of Swan Lake, which Mme. Gray danced with Marsden with local corps de ballet at the Opera House. Roje returned in 1958 and gave a performance at the Bermuda High School’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, under the auspices of the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society (BMDS). This was to be the beginning of Roje’s long association with Bermuda, a partnership that was to have a profound effect on the Island’s dance development. “Until this time, Bermuda had no visiting dance companies. Our young people had only a school standard to inspire them,” Mme. Gray said.
Roje was impressed, and in 1959, she returned to Bermuda to stage the first semi-professional production of Giselle with local corps de ballet to mark the Island’s 350th anniversary. This performance, at a specially constructed outdoor theatre at Prospect, was part of the first Bermuda Ballet Week, an event that proved to be a forerunner to the Bermuda Festival. “The most important aspect of this performance was the fact that for the first time local dancers who had been trained here on the Island were given a chance to perform at company level,” Mme. Gray recalls. “The performance was reviewed by Dance Magazine and Dance News. All those who saw that performance will keep the memory for years to come.” Over the next six years Bermuda Ballet Week was held annually, sponsored by ZBM and the BMDS and later by the Bermuda Ballet Association.
The BMDS established a Ballet Committee in 1961—leading members were Renee Northover, Elsbeth Gibson, Bob Clarke and John Profit. That year, Roje staged ‘Invitation to the Dance’, and Mme. Gray danced lead.
Mme. Gray established the Bermuda Ballet Association in 1962, with Roje as its honorary president. The organisation sought to promote ballet on the Island by providing education in dance, scholarships, showing films and giving lectures.
Encouraged by Roje, the School of Russian Ballet began to stage annual productions so that all the children of the school could participate in a full length Children’s Ballet.
In 1972, Mme. Gray formed the Bermuda Civic Ballet—and played a leading role in the group’s first full-length ballet, Devil in the Village, dancing Jela to Laurence Haider’s Mirko. The performance began a tradition of a major ballet being presented annually by the Civic Ballet with local dancers performing, first as corps de ballet, then as soloists, and finally dancing the lead parts as young ballerinas.
The Civic Company was invited to the International Youth Festival in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1979, and again in 1981. In 1979, the company performed in the south of England before heading north to Scotland.
Mme. Gray’s focus on education and opportunity for all students led to her offering scholarships to students who could not otherwise afford tuition. She also took young students to the Ana Roje International Summer School in Yugoslavia to further their dance education (from 1971 to 1988), and introduced examinations for dance students.
To help the students reach the necessary standards, she invited choreographers to Bermuda to give the dancers an opportunity to stretch their abilities—and also produced a syllabus for teaching based on the students’ capacity to learn.
“It’s all in the training,” she said. “If you don’t give dancers the knowledge, you won’t get the result. A dance teacher has a tremendous influence over the students. You must expect and sometimes demand results—and with discipline, they will always respond. If you train an athlete, ice skater, runner—or even someone who scrubs floors—in the art of ballet, they will become a more disciplined person. They will develop a stronger, more co-ordinated physical body, and the benefits will last a lifetime.”
Over the course of her career, Mme. Gray has served as president of the American Society of Russian Ballet, has been a representative of the Russian Ballet Society of London, and has served as international co-ordinator for the Legat Foundation (formed in 1995) travelling with the Legat Exhibit to Atlanta, Boston, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ljubljana, Vienna, Zagreb, Split, and Jackson, Mississippi. She has lectured on, and demonstrated the Legat teaching system internationally, and was invited to sit on the panel of judges at the Zagreb National Theatre for the International Dance Competition in 2010.
Mme. Gray conducted the Ana Roje International Summer School in Kastela, Croatia in 2010 and 2011.
She has been honoured by the Ministry of Education in Bermuda, as well as by the ADLEV Entertainment Awards, for her contributions to education and entertainment. In 2002, she was a recipient of the Bermuda Arts Council’s Founders Award.
Today, Mme. Gray lives in Bermuda, and still serves as international co-ordinator for the Legat Foundation for Russian Ballet, and as director of the Ana Roje International Summer School.
