Australia Dancing - Kellaway, Leon (c. 1905

Kellaway, Leon (c. 1905 - 1990)

Stringer, Walter: Portrait of Leon Kellaway, c. 1970

Leon Kellaway was born in London as Harold Lionel Jacks Kellaway, the youngest of four brothers. He spent his early years in Africa and had a theatrical upbringing but only took up formal dance training as a teenager. He studied in London, with Serafina Astafieva and Nicholas Legat. His first partner was Ivy Schilling and he appeared with her in musicals and variety shows in England, Australia and the United States. He subsequently danced and toured with Anna Pavlova's company, with Lydia Kyasht and with the Dandre-Levitoff tour that brought Olga Spessivtseva to Australia in 1934.

Kellaway settled in Australia at the end of the Spessivtseva tour and danced around the country in musical shows before opening his own school in Sydney in 1937. He started his own ballet company, Ballet Nationale, around the same time. The company, in which Lynne Golding, Moya Beaver and Henry Legerton were leading dancers, folded on the outbreak of WW II when the backing it had received from a private source was withdrawn. Kellaway went into musicals for Ernest C. Rolls and also worked for Rolls as ballet master. It was round then that he assumed his own name, having performed for years under the name Jan Kowsky (also Kowski and sometimes Kowskey).

Kellaway joined the Borovansky Ballet in the 1940s as ballet master and character dancer and worked with the company until 1955. He also held similar positions with the National Theatre Ballet and the Australian Ballet and was one of the Australian Ballet School's first teachers.

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Internet - Google
Articles - New York Public Library Dance Collection
Pictures - Picture Australia