PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

Fairies at the bottom of the garden, c.1933

Junior School dance performance, directed by Eileen Brenan.

Eileen Brenan was an elegant, rather large lady but beautifully light on her feet as she guided the girls through their steps. Dancing with her was an experience, as she would clasp her student partner and in a commanding way say to her pianist, ‘A slow fox trot, Kathleen’, and away they would go. As she grew older she would sit in the middle of St Cecilia’s Hall with a stick in hand, beating out the rhythm of the tune. When preparing for concerts Eileen Brenan worked closely with Eileen O’Keefe, an elocution and drama teacher. Eileen O’Keefe took elocution classes and individual lessons in the art of speech, preparing students for speech examinations held by the Trinity College of Music. Eileen O’Keefe ran her own speech training and dramatic art studio, The Standard School, in the Oxford Chambers, Bourke Street, Melbourne. Her studio was affiliated with the Victorian branch of the English Verse Speaking Association. She taught voice production and eurhythmics, conducted verse-speaking choirs with Grecian-style dancing and literature classes and directed plays for the dramatic art classes at the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium. It was said of Eileen O’Keefe that she drank glasses of water and let them off as steam. The combined Brenan and O’Keefe productions were first rate. A tour de force took place on 3 November 1939, when the girls performed in a novel concert that showcased twenty-five artworks by European Grand Masters over six centuries. The girls posed in a series of tableaux interspersed with incidental music:

A delightful surprise was the bringing of two pictures to life. The little dancer in the Millais ‘Minuet’ [by Sir John Everett Millais] danced daintily and resumed her pose. Similarly the Empress Eugénie and her court [by Franz Xavier Winterhalter] became gradually animated and performed a graceful ballet. The dancing in these numbers and in a polka and peasant dances was performed with poise. Miss Elizabeth Healy and the Empress Eugénie group moved with an airy grace that had the lightness of thistledown: the work had the mark of an expert.