"So it takes years to make a solid company"
About this Quote
Spoken by the founder of the Royal Ballet, the line carries the weight of hard-won experience. Ninette de Valois understood that a company is not assembled; it is grown. Talent can be recruited overnight, but cohesion, judgment, and identity take time to mature. Years are needed for dancers to absorb a shared style, for choreographers and musicians to develop a repertory that tests and defines the group, and for audiences to learn to trust what the name on the poster promises.
De Valois knew this from the ground up. After dancing with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, she returned to Britain with a blueprint for institution building. She opened a school in 1926, forged partnerships with Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells, and in 1931 shaped the Vic-Wells Ballet, a small troupe with long ambitions. Progress was incremental and often fragile. The company weathered wartime evacuations, relentless touring, and the daily grind of class, rehearsal, and performance. Only in 1946 did it secure a permanent home at Covent Garden, and only in 1956 did it earn the name the Royal Ballet. That arc clarifies her point: solidity is the product of decades.
The remark rebukes the fantasy of instant success. A company is a living ecology: people, practices, repertoire, governance, finance, and audience. Each element develops at a different pace, and the whole is only as strong as the slowest-maturing part. Time allows for the setting of standards and the building of a pipeline, for trust to accrue between artists and leadership, and for mistakes to be absorbed into institutional memory rather than erased by turnover. It also allows a signature to emerge, not by decree but by habit and shared conviction.
The lesson travels beyond ballet. Whether in the arts or in business, durability grows from patient, disciplined investment. Quick wins are intoxicating, but a solid company is the work of years, measured in craft refined, people formed, and a culture that holds when fashions shift.
De Valois knew this from the ground up. After dancing with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, she returned to Britain with a blueprint for institution building. She opened a school in 1926, forged partnerships with Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells, and in 1931 shaped the Vic-Wells Ballet, a small troupe with long ambitions. Progress was incremental and often fragile. The company weathered wartime evacuations, relentless touring, and the daily grind of class, rehearsal, and performance. Only in 1946 did it secure a permanent home at Covent Garden, and only in 1956 did it earn the name the Royal Ballet. That arc clarifies her point: solidity is the product of decades.
The remark rebukes the fantasy of instant success. A company is a living ecology: people, practices, repertoire, governance, finance, and audience. Each element develops at a different pace, and the whole is only as strong as the slowest-maturing part. Time allows for the setting of standards and the building of a pipeline, for trust to accrue between artists and leadership, and for mistakes to be absorbed into institutional memory rather than erased by turnover. It also allows a signature to emerge, not by decree but by habit and shared conviction.
The lesson travels beyond ballet. Whether in the arts or in business, durability grows from patient, disciplined investment. Quick wins are intoxicating, but a solid company is the work of years, measured in craft refined, people formed, and a culture that holds when fashions shift.
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| Topic | Startup |
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