Marina Keet obituary
My mother, Marina Keet, who has died aged 87, was a dancer, choreographer, dance historian and an inspirational teacher with a lifelong devotion to the regional folk culture of Spain. In 1989 she was made a dame of the Order of Queen Isabel of Spain (Lazo de Dama de la Orden de Isabel la Católica) for her services to the preservation of Spanish culture.
Born in Calvinia in the Karoo region of South Africa, to Helen (nee Buck), a homemaker, and Quartus Keet, a postmaster in the South African postal service, Marina started dancing at the age of 10 when her family moved to Stellenbosch, near Cape Town. She attended Rhenish girls’ primary and high schools in the town, leaving at 16 to take over the running of her former ballet teacher’s dance studio.
By 1955, Marina had saved up enough to travel to London for a year to study choreography with Marie Rambert, only to discover that the course had been disbanded. Walking away with no idea of what to do next, she heard sounds of clapping and stamping coming from a nearby building. It was a class with the Spanish dance teacher Elsa Brunelleschi, who Marina went on to train with and who introduced her to many influential dancers in Spain, including Luisillo. She had discovered her vocation.
In 1959, Marina married my father, Mikael Grut, whom she met when he was a student at the forestry school in Stellenbosch. They lived for two years in his native Stockholm before returning to Stellenbosch in time for my birth in 1961, followed by Edmund in 1963 and Nicolai in 1969. Marina taught Spanish dance and ballet history at the University of Cape Town, and choreographed a number of ambitious works for the UCT ballet company, including a flamenco Bolero and Misa Flamenca.
Marina was part of a network of teachers, many of whom had danced professionally in Spain. Together they devised a syllabus and examination system that put Spanish dance teaching on a par with the Royal Academy of Dance and Cecchetti methods for ballet. She was one of eight founding members of the Spanish Dance Society, formed in 1965, which today has centres all over the world, including Spain.
In 1977, Mikael and Marina moved their family to Rome, then in 1982 to Washington DC, where Marina taught at George Washington University and formed a vibrant company that performed regularly at venues including the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1994, they retired to Wimbledon, south-west London, and Marina embarked on an extraordinary period of productivity. She wrote (under her married name) The Bolero School: an Illustrated History of the Bolero, the Seguidillas and the Escuela Bolera (2002); Royal Swedish Ballet (2007), a 700-page history, which won her a gold medal from Sweden’s Carina Ari Foundation; and her autobiography, My Dancing Life (2017). At her 70th birthday celebrations my father said: “If you told Marina that she had to clean all the streets of London with a toothbrush, she would just say, ‘Give me the toothbrush’, and she would finish the job.”
Marina is survived by Mikael, and her three children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
