MARIA FAY  1928  -  2019

Maria Fay and her husband Peter arrived in this country in 1957 after fleeing from their invaded country of Hungary.

Maria was a principal dancer with the Budapest State ballet Company. She took a great interest in the National dances of the various Eastern European countries that she visited when on tour and devised a syllabus of character classwork for the trained classical dancer. One of the first people to offer work to Maria was Kathleen Gordon (then Director of the RAD) who asked Maria to choreograph some character dances for the Academy’s Grades 1 to 5 syllabus.

Some of these dances remained in the syllabus until 1991. In the early 60s Miss Gordon asked Maria to teach her character classwork to the teacher’s course at the Academy. Shortly afterwards Ninette de Valois asked her to teach character work at the Royal Ballet School and Valerie Adams persuaded her to do the same for the Royal Ballet School’s teacher’s course.

In 1973 Maria was asked to join Keith Lester in developing the Dance Education Syllabus for which she devised 3 levels of character classwork and dances.

Alongside this, Maria was building a reputation internationally as a classical ballet teacher. She was one of the first teachers to be invited to China to teach the National Ballet Company and in this country she coached many of the principal dancers of the 60s, 70s and early 80s.

Maria wrote many articles for the Dancing Times, produced a video of her floor barre, taught a non-hearing student to become a professional dancer and generally influenced many teachers and students with her thoughtful, innovative and dynamic approach to developing the best possible classical dancers.

The Academy is pleased to recognise that most of the character dances in the present Syllabus from Grades 1 to 5 and the character enchainements and dances from Grades 6 -8 have been based and developed from the character classwork of Maria Fay.

Valerie Sunderland FRAD