Toby Fine (6 December 1932, Cape Town, South Africa - November 2010, Lugano, Switzerland) was a South African ballet dancer. She was a member of both the New York City Ballet and Johannesburg Festival Ballet Company.
Fine, the daughter of Issy and Paula Fine, was born in Cape Town. She attended Athlone High School in Johannesburg before enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dance in London where she gained her Advanced Honours Diploma and Solo Seal. In 1949 she was awarded the Adeline Genée Cup for the best dancer in Southern Africa and won the SA Ballet Open Competition in 1946, 1947, 1948 and 1949. [1]
She was a soloist for the New York City Ballet for a season after George Balanchine, then director of the company, picked her to replace an injured dancer for a performance at the Royal Opera House and kept her. [2] After two years Fine returned to South Africa and became the Prima Ballerina for the Johannesburg Festival Ballet Company where she danced in Swan Lake alongside Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes.
After returning to Cape Town, she married David Bloomberg on 24 February 1957 and they had two children together. He was later the Mayor of Cape Town from 1973 to 1975. When Fine grew unwell, they moved to the UK in 1988 where she had a successful kidney transplant. [2] They then settled in Lugano, Switzerland where Fine died in 2010. The Bloomberg family set up the Toby Fine Ballet Fund in her memory. The fund sponsors ballet performances and provides scholarships to dancers. [3] [4]
Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) is an American professional ballet company and school based in Harlem, New York City. It was founded in 1969 under the directorship of Arthur Mitchell and later partnered with Karel Shook. Milton Rosenstock served as the company's music director from 1981 to 1992. The artistic director has been Robert Garland since 2022. The DTH is renowned for being both "the first Black classical ballet company", and "the first major ballet company to prioritize Black dancers".
Dame Catherine Margaret Mary Scott, was a South African-born pioneering ballet dancer who found fame as a teacher, choreographer, and school administrator in Australia. As the first director of the Australian Ballet School, she is recognised as one of the founders of the strong ballet tradition of her adopted country.
Phyllis Spira was a South African ballet dancer who began her career with the Royal Ballet in England. Upon returning to South Africa, she spent twenty-eight years as prima ballerina of CAPAB Ballet, a professional company in Cape Town named for the Cape Performing Arts Board. In 1984 she was named the first South African Prima Ballerina Assoluta.
Tracy Li is a South African ballet dancer of Chinese origin. She trained at The Christine Liao School of Ballet before receiving a scholarship from The Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club to study at the Australian Ballet School. At age 16, she joined the Hong Kong Ballet, before she left in 1992 for Durban, South Africa. She joined Napac Dance Company; however, she left the following year to join the Cape Town City Ballet, where she held the rank of senior principal. She was known for her partnership with Daniel Rajna and together they regularly toured as guest artists in Zimbabwe and Hong Kong. They were also both invited to the 2004 Miami Dance Festival. She retired in August 2007 after performances of Camille.
The Cape Town City Ballet Company, formerly known as the CAPAB Ballet Company, is a dance company based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Elizabeth Triegaardt is a South African ballet dancer, now retired. She is professor emerita of the University of Cape Town School of Dance and an honorary executive director of the Cape Town City Ballet.
Dulcie Howes was a South African ballet dancer, teacher, choreographer, and company director. During her performing career, she was considered the prima ballerina assoluta of South African ballet. In 1934, she established the company that evolved into today's Cape Town City Ballet.
David Poole was a South African ballet dancer, choreographer, teacher, and company director. During his thirty-year association with dance companies in Cape Town, he had "a profound effect on ballet in South Africa. He is internationally recognised as a significant figure in the world of dance.
The Maynardville Open-Air Theater is an outdoor theatre in Maynardville Park, Wynberg, Cape Town, South Africa. It seats 720 people and is known for its annual Shakespeare in the Park plays.
Nandipha Mntambo is a South African artist who has become famous for her sculptures, videos and photographs that focus on human female body and identity by using natural, organic materials. Her art style has been self described as eclectic and androgynous. She is best known for her cowhide sculptures that connects the human form to nature.
Mamela Nyamza is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, curator, director and activist in South Africa. She is trained in a variety of styles of dance including ballet, modern dance, African dance, the Horton technique, Spanish dance, jazz, movement and mime, flying low technique, release technique, gumboot dance and Butoh. Her style of dance and choreography blends aspects of traditional and contemporary dances. Nyamza has performed nationally and internationally. She has choreographed autobiographical, political, and social pieces both on her own and in collaboration with other artists. She draws inspiration from her daily life and her childhood growing up in Gugulethu, as well as her identity as a homosexual, Black, South African woman. She uses her platform to share some of the traumas faced by South African lesbians, such as corrective rape. Additionally, she has created various community outreach projects that have spread dance to different communities within South Africa, including the University of Stellenbosch's Project Move 1524, a group that uses dance therapy to educate on issues relating to HIV/AIDS, domestic violence and drug abuse.
Yvonne Mounsey was a South African-American ballet dancer and teacher. Described as "a dancer of glamour, wit, and striking presence," she spent ten years with the New York City Ballet (1949–1959), where she created important roles in the works of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a South African writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally. She is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, as the biracial daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father who was adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa. She has written: "I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side. After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification." She has also said: "Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up." As Tishani Doshi observes in the New Indian Express: "Much of her work is concerned with race, sexuality, class and gender within the South African context."
Frank Staff was a South African ballet dancer, choreographer, producer, and company director. He was a major figure in the history of European theatrical dance in South Africa.
Petrus Bosman was a South African ballet dancer, teacher, choreographer, and répétiteur, active in England, France, and the United States.
Faith de Villiers was a South African dancer, producer, choreographer, teacher, company director, and adjudicator. Active primarily in the northern province of the Transvaal, she is recognized as one of the most influential pioneers of ballet in South Africa.
iQhiya is a network of young black women artists based in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. They specialise in a broad range of artistic disciplines including performance art, video, photography, sculpture and other mediums.
Yen Han is a principal soloist of Ballett Zürich. In addition to her career as a ballerina, she serves as artistic director and choreographer for her own ballet school, theYen Han Dance Center, in Zürich, Switzerland.
Sethembile Msezane is a South African visual artist, public speaker and performer who is known for her work within fine arts. Msezane uses her interdisciplinary practice which combines photography, film, sculpture, and drawing to explore issues focused on spirituality, politics and African knowledge systems. Part of her works focus has been on the process of myth-making and its influence on constructing history as well the absence of the black female body in both narrative and physical spaces of historical commemoration. Msezanes work is held in galleries in South Africa as well as internationally and has won awards and nominations. Msezane is a member of the iQhiya Collective, a network of black women artists originating from Cape Town, Johannesburg and across South Africa.
David Bloomberg was a former Mayor of Cape Town, lawyer, anti-apartheid campaigner, theatre columnist, theatre director and author.