Artist Info
Peter Lancelot Williams OBE
Designer, journalist and dance critic. He founded and edited the monthly magazine Dance and Dancers for thirty years, wrote columns for national newspapers and was an influential chairman of various committees and trusts.
Educated at Harrow School and studied design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.
After working as a fashion designer and designer for swimwear company Jantzen, he made his first costume sketches for Designs with Strings, a ballet being created by American choreographer John Taras in 1947. He then designed for Michel Fokine's Prince Igor, also by the Metropolitan Ballet. For the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet, he did designs and the libretto for Andrée Howard's Selina.
During the late 1940s he worked as assistant editor of magazine Ballet, then founded Dance and Dancers in 1950, which he designed and edited until 1980.
He was dance critic for the Daily Mail newspaper from 1950 to 1953 and later the deputy critic for The Observer, from 1970 and became its main critic in 1982.
He wrote a number of books, including
Covent Garden: 25 Years of Opera and Ballet, Royal Opera House (1971)
Ballets et Danseurs dans le Monde (1973)
50 Years of Ballet Rambert, 1926–1976, with Clement Crisp and Anya Sainsbury (1976) Masterpieces of Ballet Design (1981)
From 1965 he served on the music panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Advisory Committee on Dance under the chairmanship of Ninette de Valois (1965-72).
Williams went on to become chairman of the drama and dance advisory committee of the British Council. Since 1975 he had been chairman of the Dancers' Pensions and Resettlement Fund.
He received his OBE on 1971.