‘I’ve never seen so much bunting in my entire life,” says Carolyn Rose Ramsay when we meet in Jersey, an island with the air of a perennial summer fete. In January, the Vancouver-born former dancer founded the Channel Islands’ first professional ballet company, Ballet d’Jèrri, here. Six months later they were performing at Spoleto arts festival in Italy. Can an island with the population of Woking sustain a national ballet company? And how did a Canadian end up launching it?
It started almost by accident, but making it work has been an act of determined design. Ramsay danced with the Cuban National Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte Carlo and the Norwegian National Ballet. She is immediately recognisable as a ballet dancer: upright posture, tidy, stylish appearance. She moans a little as she shifts in her chair. “My back’s killing me.” It is the telltale legacy of a prolapsed disc that expedited the end of her dancing career. Leaving ballet is like leaving the military: in a flash, you lose your life’s structure. So Ramsay’s strategy was to jump straight into a new project. She trained to be a pilot in Canada and got her licence. “But it turns out that I have too short an attention span to be in a small box that long,” she says. “So, I got into the operations side of aviation.”
