Dinner to honor founder of Greater Niagara Ballet Company
Niagara Falls dance company battles to keep ballet program alive
NIAGARA FALLS — In 1967, Mayor E. Dent Lackey told Beverley Feder, “My dear, this is going to be a great city, and a great city must have a great ballet.
“Would you form a ballet company?”
To which Feder replied, “I would love to.”
She founded the Greater Niagara Ballet Company, which has trained hundreds of ballet dancers, many of whom went on to dance professionally and become ballet teachers. It is the oldest ballet company in Western New York.
Feder and her husband, H. William, a former history teacher who works behind the scenes, will be honored at a dinner at 6 p. m. today in Como Restaurant, 2220 Pine Ave.
“We are honoring Beverley’s wonderful dedication,” said Julie Traver of Niagara Falls, a former principal dancer with the company and now a teacher at the Feder School of Classical Ballet. “It’s been a struggle for her to keep the company going all these years.”
Feder said it is a constant challenge to keep the ballet company up and dancing.
“I don’t want it to fold,” she said. “This is for the children and the community.”
The dinner also is a fundraiser for the company — a nonprofit corporation — and its annual “Nutcracker” ballet, which is in its 31st year of production and costs $40,000 to stage. The dinner will include mini-performances of the “Nutcracker.” Tickets are still available by calling (877) 236-8055 or can be bought at the door.
The Feder School of Classical Ballet, which rents space at 1201 Pine Ave. in the Niagara Arts and Cultural Center, trains 50 students each year, some of whom have gone on to dance for large companies in New York City and Toronto’s National Ballet.
“That was the best school at the time, and perhaps still is,” said Michele Hopkins of Cambridge, Ont., who was a student for 10 years and is now a choreographer in Toronto. “Mrs. Feder has an excellent reputation. I get offered teaching jobs solely on the basis that I studied with her.”
Feder is particularly skilled in teaching the Cecchetti method, a classical technique named for the Italian master Enrico Cecchetti that has been practiced by such ballet greats as Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijin-
ski and Isadore Duncan.
“Beverley’s an excellent teacher,” Sharon Laramie, a former principal dancer, said Thursday from her Waterloo, Ont., home. “It was a wonderful experience for me. The training I received enabled me to open my own successful studio.”
Traver, who has been teaching at the school for 20 years, started training there when she was 12.
“I trained at various schools, but I always came back,” Traver said. “The quality at other bigger schools was equal to Beverley’s training. She’s very knowledgeable and is very well known to other ballet schools.”
Feder is a fellow of London’s Imperial Society of Teachers and Dancing. She is an examiner with the USA Cecchetti Society, traveling to ballet schools nationwide to grade young dancers. She has been teaching ballet at Stella Niagara for more than 30 years.
Feder’s daughter, Cara Schrack of Baltimore, began training at the ballet school when she was 3 or 4 years old. She is now an education specialist with Save the Children.
“My mother is a fantastic teacher and very passionate about the arts,” Schrack said Thursday from New Mexico. “She has trained a lot of students over the years who have gone on to dance professionally and become teachers.”
The Feders have two other children, Kevin, a teacher in Albion, and Colleen Rohde, a school secretary in Lockport; and four grandchildren.
Beverley Feder was born in Niagara Falls and raised on the Ontario side of the border, where she lived for a time with Betty Oliphant, the founder of Toronto’s renowned National Ballet School.
She returned to the American side of the falls when she married H. William Feder, a history teacher and Niagara County legislator, and formed the Niagara Civic Ballet Company, later named the Greater Niagara Ballet Company.
Its first performance in 1967 was at the former LaSalle High School, with the Niagara Falls Philharmonic Society and in memory of Sarah Anne Thomas, a Buffalo dancer who died at 22 during a performance in St. Louis.
That was when Lackey asked Feder to form a “great ballet company.”
“And she did,” said her husband.
