Maria Fay was a renowned classical dancer and teacher who enjoyed a long and fruitful association with Royal Ballet School after her flight from Hungary at the time of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. This is Maria Fay's third and final book published shortly after her death in 2019 and covers the evolution of her approach to teaching character dance to classical ballet dancers. First written some years ago, but never published, it includes an entertaining narrative account, together with descriptions and analysis of exercises for seven different character dance styles: Hungarian Court, Polish, Hungarian Gypsy, Russian, Romanian, Georgian, and Hungarian Peasant. Her particular system has formed the foundation of classes taught in recent times at the Royal Ballet School by her former students Amanda Maxwell and Tania Fairbairn. This historical record of an important strand of work by the renowned Hungarian dancer, teacher, choreographer and coach will be of interest to the dance community worldwide.
The publication of this narrative marks the completion of the circle of Maria Fay's work in the U.K. since her arrival here as a refugee in 1956. Having had a successful career as a dancer in Hungary she was, first and foremost, a classical teacher and coach of great importance working with many companies and schools world-wide. Her experiences of helping so many dancers over the decades then led to the development of the Maria Fay floor barre, designed for purposes of daily strengthening and when necessary, as a constituent of the rehabilitation process after injury. She has written extensively, and made films about these two strands of her work. But, until now Maria had not addressed on paper the third, and very significant element of her contribution to our profession, which was the development of her particular way of teaching character dance to classical dancers. Today, just as decades ago when her mind first turned to this issue, artistically and technically this is an important strand of classical teaching. It took some time to persuade Maria that this work could be written about in a way that artists and their teachers would find valuable, as well as being important to have a record over and above that carried in the heads of those of us who advocate her methods. Disciples can interpret, cherish the principles and indeed bring new thinking, but at the end of the day we are not actually Maria herself.
