William Chappell (dancer)


William Chappell was a British dancer, ballet designer and director. He is noted for being a pioneering dancer within the companies that formed the basis of the modern British ballet, and was also a celebrated theatrical designer for more than 40 ballets or revues, including many of the early works of Sir Frederick Ashton and Dame Ninette de Valois. He also developed a distinctive writing style displayed in voluminous correspondence and in books on ballet, theatre design and on the life of his long-time friend Edward Burra.
The Oxford Dictionary of Dance described him as '..an enormously versatile talent'.

Early life

Chappell was born in Wolverhampton, the son of theatrical manager Archibald Chappell and his wife Edith Eva Clara Black. Edith, the daughter of an army officer, was raised in Ceylon and India; in pursuing a career in repertory acting, she moved away from her upper-middle-class roots and married twice to fellow actors, by the first of whom she had a daughter, Hermina, the second time being to Archibald Chappell, by whom she had two daughters, Dorothea and Honor, followed by Billy. Chappell was acutely aware of his apparently 'déclassé’ origins; whereas his mother's brother had maintained a conventional upper-middle-class life, being a tea-planter in Ceylon and able to provide his son, Patrick with a private school and Oxford University education, Chappell studied at Balham Grammar School.
After his father deserted the family when he was still a baby, Chappell and his mother moved to Balham, London, where she pursued a career as a fashion journalist. Edith's daughter by her first marriage, romantic novelist Hermina Black, Chappell's half-sister, was living nearby in Wandsworth. Chappell studied at the Chelsea School of Art where aged fourteen he met fellow students Edward Burra, Barbara Ker-Seymer and Clover Pritchard forging life-long friendships.
Clover de Pertinez recalls of their early meeting:
'Chelsea Poly was under the influence of Augustus John. Raggle-taggle gypsies were all the go. Not for me, though, or for Burra, Barbara Ker-Seymer and William Chappell. We aspired to the smooth chic and sophistication to be seen on the covers of Vogue by Erte and George Lepape, to be found in the novels of Ronald Firbank, Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Moraud, Jean Giradoux, and above all in Diaghilev's Russian Ballets.'
Chappell did not take up dancing seriously until he was seventeen when he studied under Marie Rambert, whom he met through his friend Frederick Ashton.
This awareness of his background leads to a distinctive self-deprecating tone detectable throughout his writings. For example in his book Studies in Ballet he finds he needs to justify his writing by listing 'any pertinent reasons I might have for raising my voice or flourishing my pen':

  1. I had been a dancer myself.
  2. I had worked with English and Russian companies.
  3. I had suffered in ballet class under Rambert, de Valois, Nijinska and Sergueef.
  4. I had created roles in ballet and performed in most of the classics.
  5. I had worked in the same corps de ballet with Lichine, Shabelevsky, Jasinsky, Verchinina, and Ashton.
  6. I had partnered Karsavina, Lopokova, Markova, Fonteyn, Argyle, May and Brae.
  7. I had a wide and practical knowledge of ballet design and costume.
  8. I knew dancers as people as well as performers.
Even this list is not complete. In his contribution to Peter Brinson's collection of talks The Ballet in Britain under the heading Problems of Ballet Design he lists the various people with whom he worked, took class, rehearsed and performed which reads like a Who's Who of the 1930's ballet world.. For example he states he was taught his role in L'Apres-midi d'un Faune by Woizikovsky.

Career

Dance

Chappell recalls in his discussion Problems of Ballet Design in the collectionThe Ballet in Britain 'I was one of those monstrous children given to prancing around whenever anyone played the piano. I had a sort of urge for dancing'. He continues:
'Then I lost interest in the dance and decided I wanted to be an artist. I went to art school and was full of splendid ideas about becoming a painter - ideas, I am afraid, not founded on anything very much. While I was at art school a friend took me to see Marie Rambert. She was strict and firm, and made me do an arabesque. It was a very bad one; she banged me on the back and said,'Hold up your head!' Still, there were so few male dancers in those days she was delighted to have anybody, even me, so I started having classes... after a while I decided I was not going to be a very good painter so I took my dancing more seriously and started going to her classes properly.'
Chappell notes that the only other male pupil Rambert had at the time was Frederick Ashton. Ashton and Billy Chappell were life-long friends. Their early careers were closely connected and Chappell played an important role in providing friendship and support at critical moments in Ashton's career. In 1928 Ashton had moved to Paris to work with the Ida Rubenstein Company. Ashton was lonely, living in Montmartre in a flat belonging to the composer Lennox Berkeley. Chappell was passing through Paris at the time with Burra and they called on Ashton. Ashton was insistent that Chappell, now training with Rambert, should join the Rubenstein company under Nijinska's formidable leadership. He recalled:
'He nagged and nagged at me until finally I agreed. I thought she'd never take me because I was hopeless - I was so untaught at that period and really wasn't any good. But I went along and made a terrible exhibition of myself and the next thing I knew I was in. It didn't really matter that I was no good as she was determined to have me for Fred's sake. She liked him so much that she was prepared to overlook my faults just to please him.'
Thus was formed a link between Ashton and Chappell and Najinska who brought with her a complete - revolutionary - philosophy of dance, ballet and movement. Ashton recalled for Julia Kavanagh the excitement and demands of the Najinska class:
'Her classes were fascinating. They were never the same. She'd decide to do everything in waltz rhythm one day or everything in Spanish rhythm or syncopated rhythm. She brought the music to class, all worked out. But the pianist didn't sit going tum, tum, tum, she came with tomes and would one day do a whole class of Chopin with the most wonderful adages, another say a whole class of Bach, another day there'd be a whole class of nothing but tangos.'

For two years Chappell and Ashton toured Europe with Ida Rubenstein's company under the direction of Massine and Nijinska. Chappell returned to London in 1929 to dance with Rambert's Ballet Club, the Camargo Society and Ninette de Valois's Vic-Wells Ballet becoming one of the founding dancers of British ballet. Throughout the 1930s he created more than forty roles for Rambert and Vic-Wells including:
  • The Rake's friend in de Valois's The Rake's Progress
  • The popular song in Ashton's Facade
  • The title role in Ashton's The Lord of Burleigh
  • The recreation of two Nijinsky roles, Le Spectre de la rose and the faun in L'Apres-midi d'un faune
In a memorial tribute at the end of his life the dance writer Peter Brinston summed up Chappell's dancing career with the words:
'He was a creative spirit which helped to found the national ballet we have today.'

He was the first dancer to partner Margo Fonteyn, who, in her autobiography recalls:
'At fifteeen-and-a-half my romantic heart was as soft as butter. It was not long before I developed a crush on William Chappell, who was so much the kindest of the awe-inspiring adults around me and who had such blue eyes. He was gentle, he never shouted, and would reprove Helpmann for some of his biting obervations with the words, 'Don't mock people, Bobby - it's wicked'... Happily for me, the crush coincided with the rehearsals of my first principle part, in a ballet called 'Rio Grande - or a Day in a Southern Port. Billy Chappell was a sailor and I was the girl he picked up. Thus I was provided most opportunely with an excuse to regard him affectionately while acting my role.'
Rio Grande was the first production to showcase Burra's designs on stage - choreographed by Ashton and performed by the Carmargo Society premiered on November 29 1931.

Design

His flair as a designer was encouraged by Rambert and for this he is also remembered. In parallel with his dance career he designed more than 40 ballets or revues, including many of the early works of Ashton and de Valois including:
also
  • The Blue bird ,
  • Frank Staff's The Seasons and the dance suite Tartans
  • Mona Inglesby's Amoras and costume design for Everyman
His designs for Les Patineurs remained in the repertory and his conception for Les Rendezvous, although frequently revised, continues. He brought his vast experience of ballet design to opera, musical theatre, revues and drama, as both director and designer.
Chappell's work has appeared in costume design exhibitions for example in the 2013 show British Ballet Design of the 1930s