The Service of Thanksgiving for the Life and Work of Dame Alicia Markova DBE on 8 March saw a 'full house' at Westminster Abbey as dance-lovers from around the country and overseas gathered to celebrate the life of the first, great, British ballerina. The congregation spanned the decades of her remarkable career and included young students from English National Ballet School, Arts Educational Schools and London Studio Centre as well as some of the dancers who toured with Dame Alicia and her partner, Anton Dolin, in the Markova-Dolin Company and Festival Ballet, the company that is now English National Ballet.

Dame Alicia Markova, Prima Ballerina Assoluta, Founder and former President of English National Ballet

"The people's ballerina"
An appreciation by Jane Pritchard, Archive Consultant, English National Ballet

Dame Alicia Markova, DBE (born Lilian Alicia Marks) was one of the greatest ballerinas of the twentieth century. The critic, Arnold Haskell described her as belonging 'to the royal family of the dance. A true descendant of Taglioni and Pavlova her name is a household word'. Her exquisite fragility and weightlessness was an illusion disguising a steel-like technique and strength and her beautiful feet and hands could dart or flow, shaping her movements in response to music.