PHOTO ESSAY

Most Valuable Players

Hockey card summaries of this year’s GG Performing Arts Awards winners

By Alec Scott

November 4, 2005

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PETER BONEHAM
Dancer, Choreographer
Born: Rochester, New York, 1934
Claims to fame: Dance was in the Boneham blood: growing up, Peter had a ballroom and tap-dancing uncle (“he modeled himself after Fred Astaire”) and a cousin who was a ballet fanatic. “Still, it was 1949, it was Rochester,” Peter says, “and it wasn’t easy to be a dancing boy.” In high school, he starred in the Rochester Civic Ballet, gravitating to New York City upon graduation. There, he studied under disciples of Balanchine and Diaghilev, and paid his rent by performing in clubs (the famed Latin Quarter) and in popular revues (at Radio City Music Hall). In 1963, at 29, he was hired by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal. Peter soon tired of ballet, and in 1966 co-founded the avant-garde dance troupe Le Groupe de la Place Royale. “In Montreal then, there was a thirst for novelty, for new, innovative music, art, dance — everything,” says Peter. The group moved its headquarters to Ottawa in the 1970s, and, in the mid-1980s, he started one of the world's first choreography academies.
Trivia: In the 1950s, Peter hoofed in variety shows put on for American troops.
Quotable quote: “What I hated about ballet was that you were a sheep — baa, baa, baa — you didn't question. Dance has got to be more than lifting your leg just so; it should say something about the times you're living in.”