As with ballet in the British Isles, de Valois exerted a great deal of influence on the development of ballet in Turkey, which had no prior history with the art form. The Turkish Government invited her to research the possibility of establishing a ballet school in the country, and she subsequently visited the country in the 1940s, going on to open a school following the same model as her Sadler's Wells Ballet School in London. Initially, very few people took the project seriously, but the school did become firmly established under the direction of Molly Lake and Travis Kemp, who in 1954 had undertaken to run it at de Valois' request; this ultimately led to the development of the Turkish State Ballet.