Archives Hub feature for September 2025

Among some of the more unusual items in our collections there is a dustbin lid repurposed as a shield and photographs of a group of women in long tunics dancing at the Acropolis in Athens.

These items open a window into Revived Greek Dance, a dance method based on Ancient Greek culture which evolved and flourished during the early twentieth century. It influenced a generation of dance educators and practitioners, including the founders of the Guildford School of Acting, Bice Bellairs and Pauline Grant.

The Guildford School of Acting (GSA), now part of the University of Surrey, celebrates its 90^th anniversary this year and to mark this milestone, we created a display here on campus which explored the origins of Revived Greek Dance.

In this feature post, we introduce our collections which link to Revived Greek Dance: the Bice Bellairs Collection and the Classical Greek Dance Collection and showcase some of the highlights we used for our display, exploring the roots of this fascinating dance technique and how it influenced the study of dance and drama here at the University of Surrey.

Revived Greek Dance

Revived Greek Dance, later known as Classical Greek Dance, was a dance method founded by Ruby Ginner (1886-1978), a dancer and dance educator.

As a young student, Ginner trained under Elsie Fogerty, founder of the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art. Ginner developed an interest in ancient Greek culture, drawing inspiration from the art and sculptures held at the British Museum. Ginner’s research led her to investigate how ancient dances evolved out of everyday occupations such as sowing, weaving or fishing. She identified different styles of movement from Greek art and drama and developed these into a system of dance: for example, Bacchic (uninhibited and improvised dance based on Dionysiac ritual) or Choric (a group of dancers moving as one as the chorus in Greek plays). Ginner put an emphasis on silent dance, with dancers suggesting emotion through gesture. Music was used selectively or not at all, with musicians following the dance rather than leading it

In the 1910s, Ginner founded the company ‘Grecian Dancers’, which began giving performances in London and across the country. Around the same time, she began teaching her technique of Revived Greek Dance, first under Fogerty and later starting the Ruby Ginner School of Dance, with a studio in the Royal Albert Hall. 

Of this period, Ginner would later say: “We were all very young and very bad but we gave performances at Cambridge, Eastbourne and the old Tivoli, London, and met with success everywhere’. (Ginner, 1925, ‘The Link’, Vol 1 No. 3, p.26, Ref. BB/K/1/3)

This period also saw the beginning of Ginner’s collaboration with Irene Mawer (1893-1962). Mawer was initially one of Ginner’s Greek Dance students and it became clear that she had a natural talent for mime and conveying emotion without words. The two women began working together, with Ginner providing the dance expertise and Mawer leading on mime and drama. With their shared strengths, they created and performed their own productions, such as the mime play Et Puis Bonsoir in 1916. They also choreographed and performed the dances for revivals of Greek tragedies such as Medea with Sybil Thorndike in 1920.

Ginner’s school grew throughout the mid-1910s and by 1916, Ginner had partnered with Mawer to form the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama. Based originally in London, the school was evacuated to Devon during the war and finally moved to Cheltenham. Ginner and Mawer’s students were mostly girls and young women, who often joined the Ginner-Mawer Company after their studies.  The youngest children were nicknamed ‘Bobblies’ and included among their number Bice (pronounced ‘Beechy’) Bellairs, who with Pauline Grant, also an alumna of the Ginner-Mawer School, founded the GSA in 1935.

Creating the Display

In creating the display for the GSA anniversary, we wanted to provide a window into the world in which Bellairs and Grant had developed their skills. Fortunately, we have a wealth of information about Revived Greek Dance, in the form of the Bice Bellairs and Classical Greek Dance Collections.

The Bice Bellairs Collection contains material given by Ruby Ginner to Bellairs or collected by Bellairs herself as a former student. It includes photograph albums, scrap books and programmes.

The Classical Greek Dance Collection was created in 2008 by the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD) at the University of Surrey to house material collected by pupils of Ruby Ginner. Equally rich, it includes programmes, photographs and pupil’s lesson notes relating to Classical Greek Dance.

For information about the growth of Revived Greek Dance, we looked at the varied resources of the press cuttings and programmes that were collected into scrapbooks (ref. BB/N). Here we found not just performance details, but also how the movement was perceived by the wider world: by 1915, Revived Greek Dance was clearly getting noticed enough for one newspaper to produce a cartoon highlighting the perils of the weather affecting their outside performances!

While the programmes and cuttings gave information, the photographic records provided depth. The early days of the Revived Greek Dance movement were homegrown, and we are lucky enough to have photos, notably from the Pauline Grant Album (ref. BB/F/1), capturing Ginner, Mawer and their pupils practicing or performing in gardens and parks, barefoot and wearing simple tunics.

The photographic resources also include a wonderful album documenting the Ginner-Mawer Company’s visit to Greece in 1930 to perform at a dance festival.
For the company, this visit represented a pilgrimage to the ancient sites that had inspired the creation of the Revived Greek Dance technique, and photographs show the company performing in theatres and temples.

We’re also incredibly lucky to have as part of the Classical Greek Dance Collection some original props used by dancers. This sword and shield are thought to have been made by Freda Crockett, an alumna of the Ginner-Mawer School who was well-known for making her own props. The shield is probably a repurposed dustbin lid, and with the sword would have been used to stage pyrrhic dances – military-style dances based on original depictions of warriors.

Lastly, we linked the modern Guildford School of Acting with its early roots in Revived Greek Dance. GSA founder Bice Bellairs appears as a young performer – one of the ‘Bobblies’ – in several of the Ginner-Mawer Company programmes.

Bellairs used the training she had undergone as a pupil of Ginner and Mawer and applied it to her own teaching methods. Over fifty years later, the GSA mounted a recreation of On Mount Lycaeus based on Bellairs’ memories of the dance first performed in 1930 by the Ginner-Mawer Company.

These collections provide a fascinating insight into a little-known part of early 20th century British dance history, which still has relevance today. We hope that it will continue to be used by dance, education and social researchers and historians.

Rachel White
Principal Archivist
Archives and Special Collections
University of Surrey

Related links

Classical Greek Dance Collection, early 20th century-2000

Bice Bellairs Collection of Revived Greek Dance, 1869-1977

Descriptions of other collections held by University of Surrey Archives and Special Collections can be found on Archives Hub here:
https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/locations/5c9a11a1-d2e4-33c6-9161-1238e0ee2635

All images copyright University of Surrey Archives and Special Collections and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holder.