Irene Apinée and Jury Gotshalks, Grace Tinning, Don Gillies

Irene Apinée and Jury Gotshalks were dancers with the Latvian Opera Ballet in Riga prior to the Second World War. After the Russian invasion of Latvia, Jury was forced into slave labour and the two were separated. They found each other at the end of the war in a displaced persons camp in western Germany. With other displaced artists, they created the Latvian Exile Ballet touring displaced persons camps, performing for cigarettes and other items that they could trade for food and materials. Irene used the same pointe shoes for two years. They starched gauze with potato water to make tutus and used parachute silk for other costumes. In 1948, the Gotshalks and their young son were sponsored by the Halifax Music Conservatory to immigrate to Canada and set up a ballet school in Halifax. By 1950, they had trained a core group of senior students to perform with them at the 1950 Canadian Ballet Festival as the Gotshalks Halifax Ballet. In 1951, Jury and Irene became charter members of the National Ballet of Canada while they also juggled operating their company from afar for another season. They also danced on CBC television and with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in the 1960s.

Grace Tinning – was the social pages editor of the Regina Leader-Post in the 1930s. She had graduated from Rupert’s Land College in Winnipeg and had also passed her solo performer and piano teacher examinations at the Toronto Conservatory of Music. Her early dance training was with Dorothy Rowell in Regina and then later at the Mary Wigman School in New York. It is likely that her Eurhythmics training came from the Toronto Conservatory of Music, where Madeleine Boss Lasserre taught Eurhythmics. Tinning was one of the first movement instructors at the Banff School of Fine Arts teaching in 1936 and 1937, and possibly as early as 1935. In Regina, she led a dance group focussed on expressive movement and Eurhythmics, embracing the foundations of movement developed by the forerunners of modern dance such as Isadora Duncan. She was also involved in the Regina Little Theatre Society in the 1930s.

Don Gillies trained with Boris Volkoff in the 1940s and danced in the Volkoff Canadian Ballet at several of the Canadian Ballet Festivals. In the early 1950s he went to England on a scholarship from the Volkoff company to train further and eventually earned a position in the Sadler’s Wells Junior Ballet. He also began to choreograph at this time, staging his work independently in London, where he also performed in Gene Kelly’s film Invitation to the Dance. He returned to Canada in the mid-1950s and began to choreograph for Janet Baldwin’s company for the Canadian Ballet Festivals. In the 1960s, he was an acclaimed choreographer and performer for CBC television, primarily for The Wayne and Shuster Show. In the 1970s and ’80s, he did considerable work choreographing musicals in Ontario and Nova Scotia for both professional and amateur productions, and eventually settled in Nova Scotia where he was a notable teacher of master classes for Dance Nova Scotia.