Tony Jeff: Thalia Mara was an innovator

Tony Jeff HeadshotPosted by: Contributing columnist, CLARION LEDGER FEATURE, BUSINESS, November 18, 2016: Most people think of entrepreneurs as 20-something Silicon Valley types, and there are certainly lots of young entrepreneurs who fit that mold.  That’s actually not the case, though.  Studies suggest that the average entrepreneur is in their 40’s, and that even the most successful technology entrepreneurs are usually 30-somethings.  There are some older notable entrepreneurs, like Colonel Sanders who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken at age 65, but that’s notable precisely because it is rare.

In that context, it’s especially amazing that Thalia Mara, founder of the USA International Ballet Competition that is based in Jackson, Mississippi, started her nearly 30-year Mississippi career at the age of 65 – a career that recently landed her in the Mississippi Innovator’s Hall of Fame.

Although her founding of the first International Ballet Competition in America would be her crowning achievement, Thalia Mara left New York in 1975 with a less global, but still significantly lofty goal – to develop Mississippi’s first professional ballet company.

According to the remarkable information provided by the staff of the USA International Ballet Competition, Mara was born in Chicago and trained under Russian ballet masters.  By age 16, she was studying in Paris and touring internationally. Later she lived in New York, where she danced seven days a week during the Great Depression to cover her rent and living expenses.  She danced for the 1932 opening of Radio City Music Hall and later became a soloist with Fokine Ballet.

Mara was instrumental in developing teaching standards and a certifying organization for ballet teaching, and led summer workshops for teachers.  In 1963, she founded and directed the National Academy of Ballet in New York, an innovative primary-secondary school that offered complete academics with intense performing arts study. (As one of only two such accredited schools in the United States, its success fueled her support of the public Academic and Performing Arts school when she moved to Jackson.)

Thalia Mara came to Jackson at the invitation of the Ballet Guild to start Mississippi’s first professional ballet company.  The 24-member Jackson Ballet was able to become fully professional under her leadership and gained attention worldwide through the company’s dancers being invited to join prestigious ballet companies all over the world.

Pulling directly from her biography from the USA International Ballet Competition:

Determined that Jackson should host the first International Ballet Competition in America, she organized a national dance coalition, headed by Robert Joffrey and other dignitaries, and sold the concept to city and state leaders. Working with forward-thinking arts and civic groups, she accomplished what many said was impossible: Jackson joined the league of Varna, Bulgaria, and Moscow, Russia, as it hosted America’s first IBC in 1979. The competition received the sanction of the International Dance Theatre/International Dance Committee of UNESCO, and Jackson was designated as the official host city for the USA IBC by Joint Resolution of Congress. Every four years since 1979 the city transforms itself into an international dance center. The competition venue was named Thalia Mara Hall in honor of the IBC founder in 1996.

By founding the World Performance Series in 1999, Mara fulfilled her dream of exposing citizens to the highest standard of various art forms. “Without the arts, we’d all be savages,” she once commented as the Series brought the American Ballet Theatre, violinist Joshua Bell and other acclaimed performers to Jackson. Her name was known to students and teachers in other nations for the dozen books she authored, including several ballet textbooks published in the USA and England and translated into German, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese. Her legacy, the USA IBC, continues as one of the most respected ballet competitions in the world, furthering the highest standards of ballet while contributing an economic impact of an estimated $12 million to Mississippi. Among her many state, national and international awards were the Mississippi Governor’s Award in the Arts and designation as an “American Masterpiece” by the National Endowment for the Arts and Mississippi Arts Commission.

For nearly the last 30 years of her life, Jackson was Thalia Mara’s home and the creative center for her push to make the capitol city of Mississippi a center of the art’s community – until her death at age 92.  That’s an amazing innovator, for any age.

Visit www.MSInnovatorsHallofFame.com for more information on the Mississippi Innovators Hall of Fame and the inductees.