Welcome
An Audience With… six women, dancers spanning three generations, who shared one common passion: dance.
An Audience With… began as an invitation from Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre to dance artist Janice Parker, who was offered free reign to create new work. Janice decided to contact performers who had, at one time or another, danced on the Festival Theatre stage in its original incarnation as The Edinburgh Empire. This online resource has been set up as a digital home to value and celebrate that work.
We particularly shine a light on our four Variety Theatre dancers – Marie Duthie (née Pyper), June Don Murray, Doreen Leighton-Ward, and Betty Clarkson – all born in the 20s and early 30s, each with a stellar career in Variety Theatre who kept dancing and contributing throughout their long lives.
Marie was one half of The Raymond Sisters travelling the length and breadth of the country on the Moss Bros. circuit. There is a programme in the Festival Theatre archives dated 27th November 1944 where the Raymond Sisters were the second act of the night; June is from a long theatrical lineage and was a chorus dancer. Her impresario father drew pictures of the stars of the day on the kitchen table using charcoal from the chimney. A few of her father’s drawings remain in Festival Theatre’s archive too; Doreen, also a chorus-line dancer, successfully initiated a strike with the help of Equity, negotiated a pay rise and the first-ever contracts for chorus-line dancers in Scotland. She appears in a photograph in Festival Theatre’s archive of a show called ‘Giggles and Girls’; And Betty was one half of the Clarkson and Leslie duo who toured and performed worldwide. Betty learned to tap-dance on the Festival Theatre’s stage, taught by a dancer performing there and who was lodging at her parent’s theatrical boarding house. He snuck her in and gave her lessons.
Our aim with the website is not only to reflect or conserve but to tell the story of our ever-evolving work that unfolded and delighted over our four great years together at the Festival Theatre. We share the experience of different generations of dancers, value the agency and contribution of older dancers, take pride in our collaborative open-ended way of working, shine a light on the accomplishments and achievements of the women in their long and varied careers, and honour our extended ‘family’ of supporters, guests and contributors who joined us in many various ways along the way.
You will find pages that tell the story of each of the four women, their careers and achievements, photographs from our four years together alongside photographs of and from each woman’s personal archive, extracts from our working diary that detail what we got up to, some video footage edited from our informal documentation, and we’ve included reviews and audience feedback from our live events and performances.
In our time together, we also made a full-length film, created a book, developed two live performances, created a podcast, sound-loops, and a mini-film, took some of our work on the road, hosted events and many teaching workshops in the art of tap-dance. There also exists loads of unedited film footage and voice recordings, treasured and in Janice’s archive for when the time is right. In the meantime, like everything in An Audience With… we hope we have created a place where dancers and lovers of dance and Variety Theatre can come together to celebrate and share our passion and our practice – and importantly – to honour a present that is built on the shoulders we stand on. We hope you enjoy.
This website has been created and maintained thanks to contributions from the families of Marie, June, Doreen and Betty and anonymous donors.
Credits
Photo Credits
- Greg MacVean
- Janice Parker
- Niall Walker
- Phil Wilkinson
An Audience With... 