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Heritage
Louise is proudly a second generation ballet teacher. Her mother Mardi, born 1909 and her sister Isabelle, born 1907, both danced and taught in Auckland through the social revolutions of 1920’s, on through the Great Depression of the 1930’s until World War 2. The highlight of their young ballet years was seeing the legendary Pavlova onstage in Auckland on her antipodean tour of 1926.
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Mardi began ballet lessons with Invercargill born Cecil Hall who started her Auckland studio in 1914 after studying ballet and related arts in London and Paris. Mardi and her sister Isabelle first featured in Cecil’s recitals in 1922 and in the first Auckland Competitions in 1925. Performing onstage in Operatic Society shows at His Majesties Theatre Queen St, in cabarets at the Click Clak Club at the Rialto in Newmarket, the Dixieland in Pt Chevalier and the Peter Pan in Lorne St. Dancing in prologue fantasy items devised as part of silent movie screenings and by 1929, when the talkies came to the newly built Civic Theatre, the sisters danced to the Wulitzer organ beneath a twinkling star-studded ceiling. Mardi and Isabelle established studios and prepared both themselves and their students for the first formal Royal Academy and British Ballet Organisation exam sessions, for competitions and staged recitals until the Second World War