Appreciation: Olivia Dow

Kristina Chetcuti writes:

Olivia Dow never needed to raise her voice. Three days a week, parents would deposit their daughters-in-tutus at her ballet studio and watch them flock in. Inside, order reigned, maintained by Olivia’s calm authority. A look was usually enough, sometimes a single word: “Girls.”

For generations of young dancers in Malta, Olivia was ballet. Not simply the steps and positions, but the discipline that underpinned them. She believed fervently that discipline was not something imposed on children but something given to them: a skill that would serve them long after they had abandoned pointe shoes and tutus.

Not that she expected all her pupils to make the stage their profession. Quite the opposite.

“Not all the girls will become prima ballerinas,” she liked to say.

Most would not. But they would leave with something useful nevertheless: grace, confidence, perseverance and respect. Ballet, in her view, was preparation for life.

Dance had shaped her own life from the beginning. Born to parents living in Malaysia, she was sent away to boarding school in England at the age of five. The decision was prompted partly by political uncertainty, but also by a little girl’s determination to dance. Her grandmother had taken her to a ballet performance in Edinburgh and she was entranced, and that fascination became a vocation.

She studied under Tatiana Nicolaevna Legat, among the most celebrated ballerinas of her generation and the wife of Nicolai Legat, the ballet master of the Russian Imperial Ballet. The Legat method, rooted in the traditions of Russian classical ballet, prized discipline, musicality and technical precision. Olivia absorbed it all. Decades later, she would still speak of Madame Legat with a mixture of gratitude and awe.

Whatever you do in life, you have to love it and enjoy doing it

Her pupils in Malta became inheritors of that lineage. As principal of the School of Russian Ballet that she set up in 1993, she spent decades passing on the methods she had learnt as a girl. Every plié, every exercise at the barre, every correction carried traces of a tradition stretching back through Imperial Russia to St Petersburg.

Yet Olivia was never interested in producing dancers alone. She wanted to cultivate audiences as well. Even students who stayed only a few months, she believed, would carry an understanding of the arts throughout their lives. They might never dance professionally, but they would attend performances, appreciate music and recognise beauty when they encountered it. The arts would remain part of them.

Her own path to Malta was accidental. In 1974 she arrived on a short dance contract. Like many who come intending to stay briefly, she remained. Here she met John, the man who would become both her husband and creative partner. Together they produced performances and built a life centred on dance.

Asked once what she had sacrificed for her art, she seemed puzzled by the question: “Nothing and nobody,” she replied. “I always did what I love and so I never felt I had to sacrifice anything.” The answer revealed much about her.

Many artists recount lives marked by difficult choices and painful compromises. Olivia saw things differently. She had spent her life doing exactly what she wanted to do and with the person she wanted to do it alongside. The great exception came when John died. Asked about the low point of her career, she paused for a long time before answering quietly: “You can write when I lost my better half.”

Even then, she carried on. There was work to do, students to teach and performances to mount. The old theatrical cliché that the show must go on was one she understood perfectly. Her philosophy was disarmingly simple. “Whatever you do in life, you have to love it and enjoy doing it,” she said. “That’s how you’ll be good at it.”

Thousands of children passed through her studio, till she retired along with the school’s closure in COVID-time. Today, Olivia Dow’s legacy lives on in every dancer she taught, every performance she inspired, and every life she touched. For many of them, the stage has given way to real life; some are now teachers, vets, doctors, or on the way to become so. Whatever their path, Olivia would recognise them instantly: their discipline, their resilience and their love of the arts. They are the ones standing tall.