Cork Music Archive

Moriarty was the central figure of ballet in Ireland for a quarter of a century. The dancer, traditional musician, teacher, choreographer founded the country’s first professional ballet company in Cork in 1959; for in all 21 years her professional dancers toured Ireland, bringing extracts from classical ballet, contemporary works and her own original Irish choreography all over the country. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before.

She was brought up in England; studied ballet with Marie Rambert; was a prize-winning Irish step-dancer and player of the war pipes. In 1933 the family returned to their native Mallow, County Cork, where she began to teach. In November 1940 she set up the Moriarty School of Dancing in Cork. In 1947 her Cork Ballet Company gave its first performance at the Cork Opera House, accompanied by the Cork Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer Aloys Fleischmann. From 1948-1993 it gave an annual Ballet Week in Cork, also bringing the shows to towns in Munster. From 1956 productions were directed by guest producers with international principal dancers in the classical repertoire.

In 1959 Moriarty founded Ireland’s first professional ballet company, Irish Theatre Ballet, to bring ballet to the four provinces of Ireland where it had never been seen before. Rambert and Markova were the patrons, Stanley Judson the first ballet master. It was part-funded by the Arts Council, which in 1963 insisted the company merge with Patricia Ryan’s Dublin National Ballet in the vain hope of solving the financial problems besetting both companies; in March 1964 it had to close.

Moriarty persisted. 1973 saw the founding of the second professional company, Irish Ballet Company, later re-named Irish National Ballet, under the patronage of Ninette de Valois. From 1974-89 it toured the country. Moriarty’s greatest success was her Playboy of the Western World, performed in Dublin, Belfast, New York, London and Rennes accompanied live by The Chieftains.

In the mid-1980s the Irish economy was in severe recession, government funding to the arts was significantly reduced and Irish National Ballet now a heavy burden for the Arts Council, which developed new dance policies and was critical of Moriarty. She resigned in 1985 in the hope of saving the company, but funding was withdrawn in 1988, in 1989 the company disbanded. Moriarty died on 24 January 1992, shortly before the opening of the dance centre, Firkin Crane, the historical building  restored for her company.

Moriarty created some 150 ballets for her three companies. Of those, twenty were traditional dances, and thirty ballets specifically Irish in theme and form, often with new music commissioned from Irish composers. In 1979 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the National University of Ireland. November 1993 saw her company’s final Ballet Week, with President Mary Robinson attending the opening. In 2012 the centenary of her birth was celebrated in Cork; her legacy remains in her schools, the work in Ireland of her former dancers, and in Cork City Ballet directed by her student Alan Foley.