Talk:Margaret Craske

Birth Date
Many sites give Margaret Craske's birth date. . The primary source is the 1901 Census for Suffolk, England. Mary M.(Margaret) Craske - born 26th Nov.1892 Suffolk, England (1901 Census ; 8 yrs.old ) Dazedbythebell (talk) 11:38, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Dancing With Love
I have a question for editor Justlettersandnumbers. Why do you replace Ms. Craske's name beside her book Still Dancing With Love with a dash rather than her name? Dazedbythebell (talk) 11:46, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
 * It's a standard practice in bibliographies (though uncommon in Wikipedia). It avoids needless repetition. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 14:09, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I corrected the format per WP:BIBLIOGRAPHY. Hoverfish Talk 15:27, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
 * That page is not intended to be prescriptive, as the multiplicity of different bibliographic styles in use there makes abundantly clear. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 19:05, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Why have you reverted my edits? Hoverfish Talk 01:42, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Because,, you apparently made them based on the mistaken premise that the first of the many bibliographic styles shown at WP:BIBLIOGRAPHY was in some way definitive or prescriptive. If you look further down the page you will see that many other styles are also used there. I restored consistency of bibliographic style between references and publications. And no, that does not constitute article ownership. Nor, to reply a comment of yours elsewhere, do I have any objection to well-referenced content being added here. I do have a pronounced objection to material directly copied from copyright sources, and removed some stuff for that reason.
 * To reply further to the question asked above, the long dash template does the same as the   parameter in cite book, but does it slightly better. See WP:BIBLIOGRAPHY for examples. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 11:31, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://books.google.it/books?id=42g8Hp-xA48C&pg=PA110 (The Oxford Dictionary of Dance). Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 18:55, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Recent over-writing of the article
This page was recently blanked and then over-written with a larger but considerably less encyclopaedic text. I reverted that change, but am placing that larger text here, behind the tasteful green bar below, in case any part of it or any of the many references might be found useful.

Margaret Craske (26 November 1892 – 18 February 1990) was a British ballet dancer, choreographer, teacher, and writer. She is most remembered as a leading authority on the Cecchetti method of teaching ballet and as a disciple of the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba.

Early life and career
Margaret Mary Craske was born in Norfolk, a low-lying county on the eastern coast of England. The daughter of Edmund and Hannah Craske, she was an athletic child who became interested in dance. She began her ballet training with a local teacher in 1908, when she was sixteen. In 1918, when the celebrated maestro Enrico Cecchetti opened his ballet school in London, Craske was persuaded by a friend to join his classes. Under his tutelage, she flourished, becoming a proficient dancer and a committed devotee of his method of teaching.

In the early 1920s, during a London season of Sergei Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes, he called on Cecchetti for English students to augment his company of mainly Russian dancers. Craske, dubbed Margareta Krasova for the occasion, was one of Cecchetti's pupils who danced for a short time with the company. Thereafter she choreographed ballet numbers for various musical shows and toured the English provinces in a small troupe, including Ninette de Valois, that played in music halls and variety theaters. Her stage career was a short one, coming to an end when a serious foot injury forced her to give up performing. Upon Cecchetti's retirement in 1923, Craske took over teaching at his studio and began the career as a pedagogue for which she would become widely known.

After Cecchetti's death in November 1928, Craske and her friends Cyril Beaumont, Stanislas Idzikowsky, and Friderica Derra de Moroda decided to codify his method so it could continue to be used by ballet teachers to perfect the technique of their pupils. The publications that resulted from their collaborations included two books on allegro technique by Craske and coauthors as well as other important technical manuals. These books are the basis of the Cecchetti method still used today to train dancers in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa.

After Diaghilev's death in 1929, Craske formed a partnership with Mabel Ryan to open the Craske-Ryan School at 46 West Street, off Cambridge Circus, in London. Ryan was also a former pupil of Cecchetti's and, like Craske, was totally dedicated to his method and memory. Their school quickly became a center for aspiring dancers as well as professionals. Ryan taught the classes for children and for elementary and intermediate students, while Craske taught the popular morning classes for professionals. A diminutive woman, with an austere manner but a sharp sense of humor, she was known for the consistency and clarity of her classes. Many well-known dancers of the time studied with her, including Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Anton Dolin, Peggy van Praagh, Mary Skeaping, Keith Lester, and the young Margot Fonteyn.

In 1931, at Eastertide, Craske went to a retreat in Devonshire in search of quiet and rest. There she learned about Meher Baba, the silent spiritual master from India. Several months later, she was invited to meet him at a private home in London. On first glance she saw him as "a vision of gentleness, grace, and love that touched the heart immeasurably." Soon won over to his personal manner and his non-denominational teaching, she became a devoted follower, viewing him as "the embodiment of Love and Life." Years later, she recalled this meeting as "the most important moment of my life." Not long after their meeting in 1931, Craske traveled to India to study with him, remaining there for some months. In 1939, just before England declared war on Nazi Germany, she returned to India to continue her spiritual training at an ashram in Nasik that Meher Baba had established for his Western disciples.

Spiritual interlude
Craske spent the next seven years in Meher Baba's ashrams in India, in Nasik and Meherabad, south of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. As part of her spiritual training, demanded by Meher Baba, she did her ballet barre exercises every day, clinging to a pole holding up the roof of a dung-covered porch. Then she did "center practice," the second half of all ballet classes, of enchainements from the syllabus of the Cecchetti method. She remained in India until 1946, returning to England only after World War II was over in Europe and peace had been declared. For the rest of her life she believed in two masters: Enrico Cecchetti, her dance master, and Meher Baba, her spiritual master.

Later life and career
Upon her return to London, Craske contacted Ninette de Valois, who asked her to teach some company classes at the studios of the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet). There she met some of her former students, including New York–based Antony Tudor, who was in London on tour with Ballet Theater (now American Ballet Theater). At his suggestion, Craske was invited to become the company's ballet mistress and teacher. Mindful of Meher Baba's direction for her to become a "link" in America, she promptly accepted the invitation, viewing it as a synchronistic fulfillment of his order. She moved to the United States soon afterward, in 1946, and in 1947 began teaching and coaching the company, working with Alicia Alonso, Jerome Robbins, Nora Kaye, and other members of the ensemble.

In 1950, the directors of Ballet Theater and the Metropolitan Opera decided to collaborate in opening a school at the Met, and Craske went there to teach. When it was formally named the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, she became its director and remained there for nearly the nest twenty years. Like Cecchetti, she stressed exact technique and attention to detail in her teaching, encouraging her students to attend to the quality of movement and the anatomical mechanics of the body. When the school closed in 1968, she joined Manhattan Festival Ballet as ballet mistress. She also served on the faculties of the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Dance, and, for many summers, the School at Jacob's Pillow in Becket, Massachusetts. When the Manhattan School closed in 1983, she went to Ballet School NY, where she taught until her retirement, at age ninety-four, in 1986.

During all these years, many professional dancers and choreographers were students of Miss Craske, as she was always called in class. Among the dancers who appreciate her analytical teaching style were such famous stars as Carolyn Brown, Melissa Hayden, Hugh Laing, Bruce Marks, Carmen Mathe, and Sallie Wilson. The choreographers influenced by Craske were even more numerous, including Gerald Arpino, Agnes de Mille, Viola Farber, Pauline Koner, Ron Sequoia, Paul Taylor, Glen Tetley, and James Waring. Besides benefitting from her technical training, many of her dance students learned about Meher Baba from her and became adherents of his spiritual guidance. Among them were Marie Adair, Jean Cebrun, Cathryn ("Skipper") Damon, Joe Fabian, Sura Geshen, Loren ("Tex") Hightower, Helen ("Bunty") Kelley, Cynthia Mays, Donald Mahler, Ella Marks, Brynar Mehl, Zebra Nevins, Peter Saul, and Naomi Westervelt.

Craske spent her final years at Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where she had been on the board of directors for many years. Although feeble, she still gave ballet classes in her living room. Upon her death in 1990, her ashes were interred at Meherabad Hill in India, in a grave chosen for her, close to Meher Baba's own tomb shrine. The inscription on her gravestone reads "Baba's dancer."

Published works

 * The Theory and Practice of Allegro in Classical Ballet (Cecchetti Method). With Cyril W. Beaumont as coauthor. London: Beaumont, 1930.
 * The Theory and Practice of Advanced Allegro in Classical Ballet (Cecchetti Method). With Friderica Derra de Moroda as coauthor. Edited and with a preface by Cyril W. Beaumont. London: Beaumont, 1956.
 * The Dance of Love: My Life with Meher Baba. North Myrtle Beach, S.C.: Sheriar Press, 1980.
 * Still Dancing with Love: More Stories of Life with Meher Baba. Myrtle Beach, S.C.: Sheriar Foundation, 1990.

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