Realm of the dance: vintage news - 70th Anniversary Issue

Dance Magazine, June, 1997 by Paul Ben-Itzak

FEBRUARY 1949: The New York City Ballet company had its first independent season at the New York City Center January 13-23, presenting new works by Jerome Robbins, Antony Tudor and the first public performance of Merce Cunningham's The Seasons.

* Katherine Dunham not only hit Paris on its collective head, but went to the head of great Parisian couturiers. Advance reports claim that next season, Madame's clothes will flavour strongly of Dunham and the Caribbean.

* The December 29 benefit performance for Jacob's Pillow, given at the Hunter Playhouse, was distinguished by some of the finest talent ever collected and by some of the most distinguished mismanagement and feeble publicity ever perpetrated in the history of the American theatre. As Buddy Ebsen put it on viewing the handful of spectators, "Doesn't look like it's goin' to be a well stuffed Pillow!"

MARCH 1949: Sybil Shearer presented Merce Cunningham at North Shore Country Day School in Chicago on February 3. A feature of Cunningham's performance was a new dance, composed for him by Miss Shearer the night before the concert.

* Violinist Isaac Stern has not seen wife Nora Kaye dance on the stage. When the honeymooning pair was in Chicago, he thought it might be good to get his first view of [her] at work in movies taken by Ann Barzel. Nora thought it a good idea, because she wanted to see her husband's immediate reaction. The first few feet of film unrolled in silence; then came the exclamation from Stern, "Gee, these are clear pictures! What lens opening did you use?"

AUGUST 1949: Pearl Primus, exploring deepest Africa for native dances, has been renamed Omobowale, meaning "The Daughter returns Home" by Yoruba chieftains.

* The wealth of dancing talent in the San Francisco area has been a long time coagulating, but at last, in the Pacific Dance Theater which made its bow at the Geary Theater on July 9, it has done eminently. (PDT members included Anna Halprin and Merriem Lanova.)

OCTOBER 1949: The invasion is at hand. On October 3, Air France will deliver a planeload of French dancers, all of the Ballets de Paris, at Idlewild Airport. October 4, BOAC will deliver two planes full of Sadler's Wells at La Guardia. It is difficult to say when so many foreign dancers of such rank, magnitude, and numbers have debouched (sic) upon our shores at the same time.

An accompanying calendar lists the Sadler's Wells season at the Metropolitan Opera House as Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Cinderella, The Rake's Progress, Symphonic Variations, Facade, Hamlet, Miracle in the Gorbals, A Wedding Bouquet, Job, Checkmate, and Apparitions. The dancers are Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Moira Shearer, Beryl Grey, Violetta Elvin, Pamela May, Harold Turner, Michael Somes, Alexis Rassine, John Hall, and a company of 60 under the direction of Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and Constant Lambert.

MAY 1950: Death came for Vaslav Nijinsky in London on April 8, 1950 -- a merciful death, thirty-two years after the curtain had rung down with finality upon Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancer. Such was the destiny of one of the chosen -- thirty-two years behind the curtain of partial amnesia and madness, a token, for those who care to remember, that this is how the gods treat those they love.