'Stepping out': Canada's early ballet companies 1939-1963
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation studies the early years of Canada's three largest ballet companies, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (est. 1939), the National Ballet of Canada (1951), and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens (1952). The first half presents the beginnings of each ballet group and its artistic director(s). The second half considers the “world behind the curtain,” particularly the role of Canadian patrons in establishing and maintaining the companies, and the challenges of the unusually fragmented, three-way ballet scene which emerged in Canada. The dissertation ends in 1963, when, with annual Canada Council funding, all three companies were assured of their survival. To date, most Canadian ballet histories have taken a “great woman” approach, emphasizing above all the skill and determination of the founding women. Here, that approach is challenged, though not entirely discarded. The contributions of the founding artistic directors are fully acknowledged, but the larger story of their organizations is also brought to light, beginning with the thriving amateur ballet scene which laid much of the groundwork for the professional groups. One or more sample ballets are described and deconstructed for each company. The small-scale, practical style of private patronage which was found in Winnipeg and Toronto is contrasted with the institutional, public patronage model found in Montrèal. Ballet audiences and critics are identified and evaluated. The three companies' financial problems during the 1950s and early 1960s are closely examined, with a special emphasis on the year 1959–60. The Canada Council's difficult relationship with the three ballet organizations is explored and resolved. Some of the key findings were the importance of small-scale, practical patronage in English Canada and institutional patronage in Quèbec; the strong loyalty to region, and the different approaches of those regions; the dynamism of individual immigrants and their quick acceptance as experts in the arts; the critical importance of Canada's proximity to U.S. charitable foundations, audiences, and expertise; the opportunities for women in ballet organizations, but also the class structures which limited them; and the use of high culture to “civilize” a city, province, or country.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".