Ivor Forbes Guest


Ivor Forbes Guest DUniv MA FRAD was a British historian and writer, best known for his study of ballet. He was chairman of the Royal Academy of Dance for twenty three years and has been a Vice-President since 1993 and Secretary then Trustee of the Radcliffe Trust. In 1997 he was made a Doctor of the University by the University of Surrey, its highest honorary doctorate.
He was married to the movement notation expert Ann Hutchinson Guest and acted as a trustee of the Language of Dance Centre, which she founded.

Early life

Ivor Guest was born on 14 April 1920 in Chislehurst, Kent, England. Guest's father, Cecil Marmaduke Guest served as a lieutenant in the Transvaal Scottish in the First World War and was later made up to captain, serving with the South African Scottish in France, where he was gassed. Declared unfit for further service he remained in England. He married Ivor's mother, Christian Forbes-Tweedie on 30 July 1918.

Ballet historian

Guest's first book, Napoleon III in England, came from an interest in his birth town's association with the exiled Napoleon III. Then, despite a successful career as a lawyer, Guest spent holidays and other leisure time researching the ballet of the Second Empire in the archives of the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra in Paris, producing two volumes on the subject entitled The Ballet of the Second Empire.
He received tributes in Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research in 1995, the year of his 75th birthday; and in Dance Chronicle in 2001. Guest died in London on 30 March 2018, two weeks before his 98th birthday.

Publications

Guest's writing focuses primarily on the ballet in Paris, at the Opéra, in the years 1770 to 1870. He also chronicles the international careers of some of ballet's stars.

Ballet

In 1997, he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award for services to ballet which is the RAD's highest honour; he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2000 he received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.