Former ballerina Cecilia Hon self-publishes two books on her career

SINGAPORE – Retired dancer Cecilia Hon was prompted to document her dance legacy when two other cultural pioneers died with little commemoration in Singapore’s media.

The 83-year-old says: “There was so little news about Vernon Martinus’ passing back in September 2022. The same thing happened when Goh Soo Nee passed away in 2021. There was nothing in the newspaper. The same could happen to any one of us, so I wrote Balletmaker to preserve my legacy.”

Martinus, who died aged 90 in the United Kingdom, and Goh, who died aged 86 in Canada, were co-founders of the Singapore Ballet Academy (SBA) in 1958.

Hon thus self-published two books in the past year. Styled like a coffee-table book, Pas De Deux (2023) contains pictures of all her duet performances with various dance partners throughout the years. It is titled after the ballet terminology, which means “dance for two”.

She sold copies to some former students and friends, most of whom were interested in photographs of their own performances.

Seated on the sofa in her spacious house in Bukit Timah, the petite dancer is impeccably groomed in a simple but elegant dress with jewellery to match. Chatty and energetic, her eyes light up when she is talking about her career.

She tells The Straits Times: “I included some photos of my dancers, and they were so interested and happy to get the book that I thought, ‘Why not write about my own dance career?’ That’s how I started Balletmaker and self-published it in March.”

Balletmaker chronicles her life as a ballet dancer, choreographer and teacher. “I decided to write out the history of all my choreographies, my own dancing, sketches of the costumes, scenery and props, and how I trained the dancers. It’s not only about my dance partners. It also includes the two schools I started and the youth festivals – everything I’ve ever done.”

Born to an Indonesian mother and a Malaysian father, Hon began learning ballet in Penang at a young age.

Her father became a physics lecturer at the University of Singapore, so the family relocated here, where she continued her ballet training at Frances Poh’s dance school. Poh co-founded SBA with her husband Martinus and Goh.

Unlike most professional ballet dancers, Hon took an unconventional route, stepping away from dance during her secondary school years to focus on her studies.

Chuckling at the memory, she says: “I was happy enough because I used the extra time to play with the neighbourhood kids instead of actually studying.”

She rediscovered her passion in university when she got a chance to choreograph her own routine as the first faerie in a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“That’s when I started becoming more interested in ballet again, being on stage and performing, so I went back. I was so old compared with all the other people. I was really bad, like an adult beginner. Slowly, I worked hard and improved,” she says.

But ballet was not her only passion. At her father’s urging, she pursued a physics degree at the University of Grenoble in France and spent seven years teaching pre-university physics classes at Raffles Girls’ School (RGS) while also choreographing for SBA.

All her cousins are physicists, as is her younger brother Noel, who took most of the photographs in Pas De Deux and Balletmaker. But Hon and her younger sister Patricia, who moved to France in 1965 for a fellowship, pursued ballet.

Hon sees no division between art and science. “There’s a lot of creativity in physics, particularly the lab work, so I enjoyed that a lot. I used my physics knowledge to do lighting, scenery and props in my choreography.”

After leaving RGS, she continued choreographing for SBA and, later, became a part-time dance teacher for Singapore Broadcasting Corporation.

She says her ballet Metamorphosis was the first to use ultraviolet lighting, something she learnt from her father, to play with the costumes’ colours.

She founded the Havelock Dance Company for adult dancers in 1979, which ran for nearly a decade until she decided it was time to retire from dancing at age 57. To keep costs low, she made all the costumes for her dancers.

“There was often no one to help me. When I had teachers, I would give them a sample and they’d copy my designs. But when I was running Havelock, I did everything by myself,” she recalls.

After receiving a fellowship with distinction from London’s Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing in 1984, she began teaching and founded the Ballet Theatre Studio, which was later renamed the Cecilia Hon Ballet Theatre.

She retired fully from teaching around age 70 and has since focused on her Catholic faith.

On Singapore’s current ballet scene, the arts veteran offers these words of wisdom: “We already have a ballet company. What more of a future do we want other than more performances?

“The Government should step in to pay for free concerts to attract audiences because it’s too expensive these days. In my time, it was only $5, but the common people cannot afford tickets now.

“We should also do more televised dance performances and documentaries, just like when we had ballet on Channel 12 back in my day.”