“The idea is to draw more people into the world of ballet, expose them to a wide variety and bring classical ballet back to Venice,” says Gerardine Connolly, who has been working hard in recent years to create a new ballet company for the Italian city.
A successful Irish barrister with a long dedication to the arts, she and co-founder and artistic director Alessio Carbone are on an ambitious mission to revitalise dance in Venice. “It was once the ballet capital of the world, and in the 18th century there were more ballet theatres than in any other city. That rich heritage disappeared without a trace 30 years ago,” Connolly explains. “We want to revive the city’s dance past and reintroduce classical and neo classical ballet to Venetian audiences.”
Last July their company Il Balletto di Venezia made a promising debut in Palazzo Barbaro with three ballet excerpts, followed by a presentation in the medieval city of Vicenza that earned a standing ovation. They then travelled to in Messina in Sicily to give an open-air performance, and ended back in Venice with six shows in the church of San Vio, “where we opened the doors and allowed free entrance – there were queues all the way down the street”.
For Season Two in July, they have recruited 12 talented dancers from prominent ballet schools, including La Scala and Paris Opera as well as American Ballet Theatre. Nine short vignettes will be performed, each four to six minutes long and involving two dancers, followed by the whole troupe coming together for the finale.
“The main idea is to present a piece of work – not like a full ballet telling a story – so you go from excitement to melancholic to finale,” Connolly says.
It will open on July 6th in the 15th century Scuola Grande di San Rocco, famous for its Tintoretto paintings and frescoes, before travelling to Florence and Sardinia, finishing in Dublin at the Royal Irish Academy of Music on July 30th. It will be the first time a ballet has been staged at the academy.
How did an eminent Irish senior counsel, not a dancer herself, become involved in this venture? Some clues can be found in Connolly’s background. Born in Bangor, one of five siblings, she was educated at Sion Hill in Blackrock and, following in her brothers’ footsteps, trained at King’s Inn.
She loved ballet from an early age. “My mother was quite artistic and I loved to dance, but never went to ballet classes. It remained always there in my imagination, as did a love of music, and instead I became a classical guitarist. As a lawyer, ballet became my escape from the adversarial nature of the legal profession,” Connolly says.
During her 20s and 30s, Connolly would go to Paris nearly every weekend “and head straight up to Opera Bastille to watch ballet – it was my way of finding an equilibrium in my life,” she says. Her apartment was “floor to ceiling ballet catalogues from the Palais Garnier”, which she kept for 15 years before moving to the Rue St Sulpice “and the ballet world continued”.
She married the acclaimed sculptor Patrick O’Reilly, who she met in Fitzwilliam Square, and the couple bought an apartment in Venice in the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, once home to Henry James for several weeks in 1892. She remembers the thrill of discovering the city with friends, including the late architect John Meagher and Liberato Santoro Brienza, then professor of aesthetics in UCD. “We fell deeply in love with the city, and would go there at least once a month,” she recalls. When friends who lived there asked her what she was going to do in Venice, she replied: “There’s no ballet here, so I’m going to start a ballet company.”
At a performance of the opera La Dame Aux Camelias in Venice, Connolly was introduced to Alessio Carbone, “and we just connected”. A renowned ballet dancer, Carbone had a long career at the Paris Opera from 1997 until his retirement in 2020.
From ballet royalty, he began his training at his parents’ school in Venice. His father is a renowned ballet director in La Scala and other Italian opera houses, his mother a star dancer, his sister a ballerina and a brother a flamenco dancer. “Alessio and I then arranged to meet in the Gritti Palace hotel and discussed the idea of starting a ballet company in Venice. It was the beginning of a beautiful collaboration,” Connolly explains.
Carbone had already founded a dance company in 2016 in an attempt to breathe some classical dance life back into his native city, as well as directing and organising productions for various festivals and theatres the world over.
He was also involved with community projects, teaching dance workshops for underprivileged children in Brazil, performing in hospices for the terminally ill, and organising a ballet to raise funds for the Red Cross efforts in Ukraine. “He knows all the ballet masters, the dancers and the opera houses and is brilliant in terms of knowledge and artistic integrity,” says Connolly.
They plan to scout directly with renowned schools, offering gifted graduates without employment the opportunity of work. They hope to capitalise on the pure classical technique typical of young graduates, often lost when they enter companies with a heavily modern repertoire. “We want to create a desirable place for international dance artists to evolve, bring a high-level international audience to Venice and place ballet once again centre stage,” Connolly says describing the ambitious intentions of this not-for-profit company.
Her own favourite ballet is Giselle. “If I can ever put that one on, I will hang up my boots,” Connolly says. “I am always drawn to the melancholic, and that’s what resonates with me. I am also attracted to anything very moralistic – Giselle is very philosophical and so beautiful. Modern dance doesn’t resonate for me in the same way. My heart and soul is in classical, and that is where I am transported. I go into a trance watching the death of the swan in Swan Lake.”
Supremely stylish in appearance, she cuts an impressive figure at every level and now travels between Dublin and Venice having stepped back from legal work. “I went ahead with this not knowing what I was facing,” Connolly says, “but I knew that whatever it cost, it was going to be fine. I didn’t understand the extensive work and responsibility until it was all over, but we got there.”
Like another pioneering Irishwoman, Ninette de Valois from Wicklow who founded the Royal Ballet and the Turkish State Ballet, Connolly has set her aims high and obstacles have not dampened her determination to succeed.
Sponsorship, both private and public, is now forthcoming including from the Moszkowski Foundation in the US, Temple Recruitment and the Ronan Group, enabling financial security for the company for at least three years, “but it’s a major project and I am still in shock”, Connolly adds with a laugh. “I can see this family getting huge – all the dancers want to come back, so let it balloon now.”
Il Balletto di Venezia opens in Venice on July 5th, travels to Moncalvo, Sardinia, Florence and Treviso, closing in Dublin at the RIAM on July 30th. See @ballettodivenezia on Instagram
