Music For the Ballet - Exhibition
May I congratulate Alan Foley and Paul McCarthy and all those involved in this splendid performance of such brilliance, virtuosity, colour and magic. I know I speak for the entire family when I say how deeply moved we are that Alan arranged for a revival of a section of my father’s Golden Bell of Ko for this most special evening, which is part of Cork City Ballet’s contribution to the Fleischmann centenary celebrations of 2010. We thank Yuri for having recreated the dance with such insight, and your beautiful dancers for having performed so exquisitely. Our best thanks to you, Alan, Sinead, Paul, Tim. It is marvellous to see the cooperation between the distinguished guest dancers, the talented dancers of Cork City Ballet, of the Cork School of Dance, the Irish Youth Ballet and of Colaiste Stiofain Naofa. It is I suppose that spirit which makes such miracles possible even in these dire times.
I cannot think of anything which would have given Miss Moriarty and my father more joy than to have seen the wonderful production this evening and to know that Domy Reiter-Soffer has travelled from Tel Aviv by circuitous routes over Britain and Ireland to get here today in time to open our exhibition The Music for the Ballet. The material for the exhibition was selected by my sisters Anne and Maeve (who spent the best part of two years going through the Fleischmann papers containing perhaps 200,000 items); it was designed by Aloys Fleischmann`s grandson, Max Fleischmann, who has digitised 20,000 documents from the collection. The Cork Lyons Club very kindly sponsored the exhibition, which will be open until the end of the week, will then travel to Cork City Library and from thence to Kerry School of Music in Tralee. When we began the work we had intended to focus on the five ballets written by our father for Miss Moriarty`s companies. But when we realised the highly significant role she played in providing a forum for Irish musicians to compose for a new genre, commissioning 18 new works and using in all the works of 30 Irish composers for the hundred ballets she created, we felt we had to widen our perspective.
It is my special privilege tonight to introduce to you Domy Reiter-Soffer, the Israeli dancer, choreographer, play producer, opera producer and painter, who has just returned from a most successful production of Beauty and the Beast in Denver USA. Domy had a close friendship with Joan Denise Moriarty and with my father for thirty years. He first came to Cork in 1962 as a dancer with Irish Theatre Ballet, Ireland’s first professional ballet company, when he travelled to every town in Ireland north, south, east and west that had a stage big enough for the company to perform on. From 1973 he was artistic advisor and choreographer to Miss Moriarty’s second professional company, the Irish Ballet Company, later called Irish National Ballet, and he created some of the most wonderful works in the company’s repertoire. I think dancers of all three of Miss Moriarty`s companies are with us here tonight. Domy shared the work, the struggle, the anxieties and the triumphs of the late 1970s and 1980s. Very many of the works he created for Miss Moriarty’s companies were revived by him for dance companies all round the world. The one ballet he has not revived is the swan song of Irish National Ballet: his magnificent ballet Oscar, the last work performed by INB, set to The Garden of Fand by Arnold Bax, a composition Miss Moriarty herself had hoped to choreograph.
Domy, we are deeply grateful to you for having honoured this event with your presence in tribute to the memories of Miss Moriarty and Aloys Fleischmann – may I call on you to officially open the exhibition The Music for the Ballet?
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