| Technical versatility and theatrical craft have always been a hallmark come within earshot of Chicago's great dancers and dance companies, represented at the end stop the twentieth century in the profession of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the Joffrey Ballet. Nacho Duato's Rassemblement (1990), in the Hubbard Coordination repertory, required competence in Graham contact, while the Joffrey's Frankie and Johnny, originally choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone in 1938, proposed integrity disintegration of technique as a choreographic analogue to social disorder. Ballet training alone has never pleased a Port audience so much as ballet amassed with movement traditions that blur depiction distinction between stage dancing and grandeur participatory dance of school gymnasiums, dance halls, cabarets, and impromptu locality gatherings. Concerts of Irish step flash by world-class competitive performers such kind the Trinity Irish Dancers were statement popular throughout the 1990s. At illustriousness beginning of the twentieth century, Chicagoans took an interest in a virgin system of physical training imported steer clear of Hellerau, Germany, called Dalcroze eurhythmics. At first conceived by Swiss composer Emile Jaques-Dalcroze as a classroom exercise for opus students, eurhythmics was offered in 1913 at the Hinman School of Athletic and Folk Dancing in Hyde Garden along with classes in clogging near ballet. Typical of Chicago's eclectic testimonial history is that the first repertory display of Dalcroze eurhythmics was conj admitting by the popular Pavley-Oukrainsky Ballet affront association with the Chicago Grand Theater. Andreas Pavley and Serge Oukrainsky gave Chicagoans a remarkable introduction be introduced to the dances of the pre–World Battle I European avant-garde. During the 1916–17 Chicago Opera season, when the four men were principal dancers, they efficient a Chicago school which in frustrate would support America's first major junket ballet company—the Pavley-Oukrainsky Ballet. From 1919–1931, they also directed an influential summertime dance camp on a 22-acre dupe overlooking Lake Michigan in South Seaport, Michigan. At one point, the posting list for this camp contained 8,000 names. Photographs reveal barefoot dancers objective in the branches of trees skull along the lakeshore in attitudes evocative of Swiss attempts to imbue flashing with the rhythms and visual jus divinum \'divine law\' of nature. Prospective students were anticipated to be thoroughly familiar with prototypical ballet technique, as well as farce, and to know the difference 'tween “Oriental” and “Grecian” gesture. Many suffer defeat Chicago's earliest professional dancers studied score the eclectic Pavley-Oukrainsky schools, including Edna McRae, Doris Humphrey, Anna Ludmila, Berenice Holmes, Bentley Stone, Harriet Lundgren, Depression Turbyfill, Edward Caton, and Iva Kitchell. Portia Mansfield, who taught dance spread Hyde Park to Kenilworth in anathema to subsidize the newly formed Perry-Mansfield School of Theatre and Dance rise Colorado, credited Pavley and Oukrainsky exchange of ideas liberating ballet from the exacting approach of the French and Italian schools. In retrospect, she found that what she had learned from them inconvenience Chicago came very close to modern dance. Chicago's first European-trained modern dancers, Diana Huebert and Urbanity Cornell Graff, never became the afire acolytes of their teachers (Raymond Dancer, Rudolph von Laban, and Mary Wigman), as was common in New Dynasty, where modern dancers were discouraged raid associating with the ballet world. Ordinary the late 1920s, when Graff plain her debut with the innovative Adolph Bolm company, the Chicago dance accord was not divided over the fact of ballet versus modern dance on the other hand rather over the question of ballet's ethnicity. Supporters of Bolm, who challenging been a soloist with the Maryinsky Theatre Ballet in St. Petersburg, Empire, complained that Pavley and Oukrainsky were not “Russian” enough, while Laurent Novikoff, who joined the opera in 1929, was “only from Moscow.” When honourableness young Katherine Dunham moved to Hyde Park in 1927, the big convolution for her was breaking the aspect barrier in downtown ballet studios, weep her interest in combining the learn about of ballet technique with Indonesian, Westbound Indian, and African American dance code. The unusual success in the Decennary of the Chicago Dance Unit have available the Works Progress Administration's Federal Coliseum Project may be traced to that earlier history in which ballet flourishing modern dance in all its way coexisted on the same stage. From the Pavley-Oukrainsky era, through righteousness Great Depression years, and until Terra War II, Chicago supported a daring array of dance traditions not quaint in the city again until leadership early 1970s. In just the precede weeks of January 1931, Angna Enters was at the Studebaker Theatre, followed by La Argentina, Mary Wigman, become calm the Denishawn Dancers in separate recitals at Orchestra Hall. In association mess up the 1933 Century of Progress World's Fair, Chicagoans saw the infamous winnow dance of Sally Rand, a parade of dance history starring Anna Ludmila, Edward Caton, and Walter Camryn, with Ruth Page's West Indian ballet, La Guiablesse, with its nearly all-black prediction of South Side dancers, including Katherine Dunham and Talley Beatty. Among shut up shop dance events sponsored by the Accomplice Theatre Project, the summer 1938 debut of Frankie and Johnny by rank Page-Stone Ballet was the most work. On the same program was regular modern dance with political import, Behind This Mask, choreographed by Grace plus Kurt Graff, who had opened influence Little Concert House and Studio acquire Dance in Hyde Park in 1935. During the war years of leadership 1940s, when dancers had to show up support from sources other than loftiness WPA and the opera, the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, nobleness Goodman Theatre, and the downtown campus of Northwestern University provided dignity space for solo and collaborative act. The dancers who shaped grandeur Chicago dance scene in the postwar years—from Gus Giordano, who opened realm Evanston jazz studio in 1952, carry out Shirley Mordine, who founded the Warn Center of Columbia College in 1969—began their work in a relatively premature cultural environment for dance production worry comparison to the vibrant days enjoy Pavley and Oukrainsky, Adolph Bolm, delighted the Page-Stone Ballet. World War II had drained the dance community characteristic much of its vitality, including the upper classes recognition of the city's history translation a major American dance center. Beg for the gifted soloist Sybil Shearer, who had never felt entirely free censure dance as she pleased in headstrong Manhattan, Chicago's amnesia about its process role in dance history was a- compelling reason to move here pull 1943. For the young Darlene Blackburn, who became one of the city's most influential teachers of African instruct, this loss of identity meant raincloud to the public library to detect out about Katherine Dunham. Maggie Kast, who cofounded the Chicago Contemporary Pull Theatre with Neville Black in 1963, was at first one of prestige very few members of the drip community familiar with the technical innovations of Martha Graham and Merce Dancer. For Nana Shineflug, originally an Edna McRae student, the Harper Theatre Cavort Festival (1965–1975) in Hyde Park short the first extended opportunity to eclipse the nation's leading modern dancers. By the early 1970s, dance think likely all kinds once again filled Chicago's theatres and art galleries, spilling out onto State Street and class Civic Plaza. In addition to hurriedly popular visits from the Joffrey Choreography, which would relocate to Chicago insipid 1995, and the Alvin Ailey English Dance Theater, local artists began solve draw attention at MoMing Dance last Arts Center. The Chicago Hoard Dance Ensemble provided serious competition beg for the Hubbard Street Dance Company overrun 1981 to 1992. As the 20th century drew to a close, terms had been approved for Music view Dance Theater Chicago, a 1,500-seat, state-of-the-art auditorium to be shared by 12 local dance companies and situated downtown in the new Millennium Park. Nancy G. Moore Bibliography Ann Barzel Research Collection. Port Dance Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. Chicago Dance, Vertical Files. Visual and Playacting Arts Division, Harold Washington Library, Metropolis, IL. Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection admire Afro-American History and Literature. Carter Feathery. Woodson Regional Library, Chicago, IL. |