Rowena Jackson, New Zealand’s first prima ballerina

Rowena Jackson was only 14 when in 1940 she set a world record by completing 121 consecutive fouettés en tournant sur place (spins on one foot) during a ballet class in Melbourne, Australia. Jackson was the first prima ballerina from New Zealand and when she returned to her homeland in 1958, crowds queued all night for tickets to see her dance.
She had made the front pages of the newspapers in London a decade earlier by stepping up from the corps de ballet during a performance of Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs with Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Margaret Dale, who was dancing the Blue Girl, had been suffering from flu and fainted after her pas de trois. Ninette de Valois, the company director, sought out Jackson. “She knew I could turn and she said, ‘Can you go on, Rowena?’” Jackson told a 1976 documentary for Nga Taonga, the New Zealand audio-visual archive. Despite not knowing the steps in full, “I flew on the stage, like a bird let out of a cage”.
Afterwards it was as if nothing had happened. “I was back in the corps de ballet straight after that,” she said. It was not until September 1951 that her next big opportunity arose. She had been billed to dance Act 3 in Swan Lake, with Nadia Nerina dancing Odette in Acts 2 and 4, but Nerina fell ill and Jackson took over the entire ballet at less than a day’s notice. She recalled: “De Valois came round afterwards and said, ‘I knew that you would do it.’”
Jackson remained no more than an occasional soloist, returning to dance the Blue Girl and achieving renown as Odette-Odile, often with Michael Somes as her Prince Siegfried. However, she was admired by audiences and critics alike. “Her lightning attack, pronounced physical control and brilliant timing, familiar above all from her dancing in Les Patineurs, were admirably applied to the part of the Black Swan,” noted a Times review of Swan Lake in 1956. “As Odile, she is even more dazzling.”
Rowena Othlie Jackson was born in 1926 in Invercargill, on the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, the daughter of William Jackson and his wife Lilian (née Solomon). Ballet was rarely seen in New Zealand at that time, though the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova toured the country in the year that Rowena was born.
She was eight when the family moved to Dunedin where, after a severe attack of bronchitis, it was suggested that dancing might help to restore her health and strength. “I was doing pirouettes like mad when I was ten,” she said. Others recalled her remarkable, contortionist-like flexibility. “My sister wouldn’t watch her dance because when she did her acrobatics, she thought she was going to break in half,” a childhood neighbour said in a 2016 interview.
The next stop was Epsom Girls Grammar School in Auckland, where at the age of 12 she performed for Anton Dolin and Irina Baronova who were visiting New Zealand with Colonel De Basil’s Ballet Russe. Dolin described her as “a brilliant talent” and promised to help her find fame in Europe. In 1939 a benefit concert was held at His Majesty’s Theatre, Auckland, to raise funds for her to continue her dance studies in Paris, but the war meant she could venture no farther than Melbourne and Sydney. In 1941 she was awarded the first Royal Academy of Dance scholarship in New Zealand. She also worked in a photography studio, touching up colour pictures with oils.
She eventually arrived in London in 1946, travelling on the same ship as Sir Keith Holyoake, the New Zealand prime minister. “He said to me ‘Rowena, is ballet very remunerative?’ I didn’t know what remunerative meant so I said, ‘well, yes and no’,” she recalled. She was accompanied by her mother, who kept house for them at their apartment in St John’s Wood, north London.
Jackson joined Sadler’s Wells Ballet as a probationary student in February 1947, winning the gold medal in that year’s Adeline Genée International Ballet Competition. However, money was tight and progress was depressingly slow. On one occasion she nervously inquired if it might be possible soon to join the second company, which was performing at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, only to be told: “Yes, Rowena, it will be a very long time.”
Despite such setbacks she was chosen for the Covent Garden company, which in 1956 became known as the Royal Ballet. Here again she was disheartened not to see her name on the cast sheet more often. On one occasion she confided to de Valois that she was contemplating giving up dance, possibly for nursing: “She said, ‘Rowena, do you ever stop to think of the tremendous pleasure that you give to so many thousands of people? You lift them out of their humdrum lives.’ This gave me renewed hope.”
In 1953 Jackson was promoted to prima ballerina, an occasion marked by dancing her first full-length Odette-Odile, and the following spring she took over from Beryl Grey as Queen of Fire in the Frederick Ashton and Malcolm Arnold Coronation ballet Homage to the Queen. However, later that year she and her dance partner Brian Ashbridge refused to go ahead with a performance of Les Sylphides at the Auckland Festival of the Arts in New Zealand because, she said, “the orchestra was so bad, so unrehearsed”.
Back in London a fellow member of the corps de ballet was Philip Chatfield from Hampshire, who had joined in 1941 when he was 14. “We both came up in the ranks together,” she said. They were married at Marylebone Presbyterian Church in February 1958 with Grey as matron of honour. Soon they were delighting audiences with their double acts, notably with Jackson in the title role in a performance of Giselle and Chatfield as Albrecht. She told how one of his tricks was using glue to make sure that his shoes hugged his stockings, “a habit he found hard to break”, she added.
Later that year the couple took part in the Royal Ballet’s tour of Australia and New Zealand, during which they decided to retire. They settled in her homeland, at various times running a coffee lounge, a beauty salon and a grocery store. “I did really miss the actual dancing, though I didn’t miss the life [of a ballerina],” she said.
In time Jackson became artistic director of the New Zealand Ballet Company and in 1972 she and Chatfield were appointed co-directors of the National Ballet School of New Zealand. They moved to the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, in 1993 teaching at the Ransley School, and in 2017 they were guests of honour during the Royal Ballet’s visit to Brisbane.
Jackson was a keen artist, often painting scenes along the coast, while in 1996 she was honoured in Invercargill with the opening of the Rowena Jackson Retirement Village. Chatfield died in 2021 and she is survived by their children, Paul and Rosetta. Meanwhile, according to Guinness World Records, the record for the greatest number of consecutive fouettés is now held by Delia Gray, who on June 2, 1991, completed 166 at the Playhouse in Harlow, Essex.
Rowena Jackson MBE, prima ballerina, was born on March 24, 1926. She died on August 15, 2024, aged 98