Mona Inglesby

Mona Inglesby (3 May 1918 – 6 October 2006), was a British ballet dancer, choreographer, director of the touring company International Ballet, and saved the Sergeyev Collection for posterity.

Early life and training

Mona Inglesby was born in London of a British mother and a Dutch businessman father, Beatrix Anne Inglesby and Julius Cato Vredenburg. She started dancing very young, according to one of her early biographers, appearing on stage for the first time at age five at La Scala. She was soon appearing with the Ballet Club (which became Ballet Rambert in 1934) at the Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate and at 15 she danced the part of Papillon in Mikhail Fokine's Carnaval, alongside actors Frederick Ashton as Pierrot, Harold Turner as Harlequin, Alicia Markova as Columbine and Antony Tudor as Eusebius. However she became dissatisfied with the Cecchetti method as taught by Rambert and took lessons in the traditional Maryinsky system from Lubov Egorova, Mathilde Kschessinska and Olga Preobrajenska in Paris and Nicholas Legat in London. This strained her relationship with Marie Rambert.

Career as a dancer

Her association with Ballet Rambert ended when Egorova obtained for her an invitation to dance with de Basil's Original Ballet Russe company in its London season at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1939. and with a £5,000 loan from her father she formed the company Choreographic Productions Ltd, to perform under the name of International Ballet. She started with a small orchestra, but larger than Sadler's Wells could muster, and 21 and the virtuoso star Harold Turner at the head. Among her initial artistes were the future Sadler's Wells Ballet and The Red Shoes star Moira Shearer, then 15, and the future choreographer Maurice Béjart. One of her main designers was Doris Zinkeisen Under her direction the International Ballet made its debut in the Alhambra Theatre Glasgow on 19 May 1941, with a full orchestra.

Personal life

On tour in Swansea in late 1944 she met Captain (later Major) Edwin Derrington, known as Derry. They married in 1946. Soon after the marriage Derry took the post of Administrator in International Ballet. He instituted the education programme, consisting of lectures, workshops and special school performances.

They had one son, Peter.

Later life and death

After she closed International Ballet at the end of 1953, Inglesby retired with her husband to a cottage in Robertsbridge, Sussex. In 2000 Sergei Vikharev, a choreographer and dancer at the Maryinsky ballet, visited her there to acknowledge the part she had played in preserving the Sergeyev notations of the Maryinsky's core 19th-century classical repertoire for posterity. The Maryinsky (known as the Kirov Ballet in and for a short time after Soviet times) had used them to reconstruct the original Petipa choreography for their 1999 production of Sleeping Beauty, which the company brought to London in 2000.

Derry died in 1986. Inglesby died at Bexhill-on-Sea on 6 October 2006 aged 88. She was survived by her son.

She received no honours during her lifetime, but in 2012 a plaque was put up inside the artists' entrance of the Royal Festival Hall commemorating her achievements and those of International Ballet, as the company which had inaugurated the Festival Hall's opening season of 1951. A BBC Radio 4 documentary Black-Out Ballet, including interviews with Henry Danton and other surviving International Ballet dancers, was broadcast in November 2012.

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