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America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures: the First 100
Dance director Busby Berkeley (1895-1976) may have had his most critical training in the army. As an entertainment officer in 1917, he gained a reputation for exceptional drill routines. By 1930 he had twenty-one Broadway musicals to his credit and made his film debut: Whoopee, with Eddie Cantor. What he lacked in formal dance instruction, Berkeley compensated for with brilliant visual concepts and meticulous planning. His first hit movie—42nd Street (1933), with Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, and Ginger Rogers—gained him sufficient backing and total editing control for the $10,000-per-screen-minute extravaganzas that followed. Between 1933 and 1937, Depression-era audiences were transported by Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, Dames, Fashions of 1934, Wonder Bar, In Caliente, Gold Diggers of 1935, Gold Diggers of 1937, Varsity Show, and Hollywood Hotel. Berkeley quickly learned and invented cinematic techniques, created unusual camera angles, and incorporated rolling platforms, mirrors, and wide-angle lens to maximize space and impact in his musical numbers. He took each shot from only one angle and claimed never to require a retake. Berkeley's stage finale was his role as supervising producer for the 1971 Broadway revival No, No Nanette!, starring Ruby Keeler.
Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Adolph Bolm (1884-1951) studied at Saint Petersburg's Imperial Ballet School and danced, first as a member of the corps and then as a soloist, in its affiliated company. Artistically restive, he partnered Anna Pavlova on her first European tours and in 1909 joined Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, where he created a furor as the Chief Warrior in the Polovtsian Dances. He remained with the company until 1917, when he settled in the United States. Here his choreographic career blossomed. He staged the first U.S. production of Le Coq d'Or and in 1922 the jazz pantomime Krazy Kat, based on the popular comic strip. He created numerous ballets for Chicago Allied Arts and in 1928 staged the world premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Apollon Musagčte at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In later years he served as ballet master of the San Francisco Opera, mounted works at the Hollywood Bowl, and choreographed for American Ballet Theatre. He died in Hollywood, California. Trisha Brown (1936- ) choreographs dances that defy gravity and satisfy intellect, while pleasing the eye. A founding member of Judson Dance Theater and Grand Union, Brown first explored the idea of levitating in Trillium (1962). To create an endlessly inventive repertory she has worked with improvisation, logical structures, verbal scripts, task and problem-solving strategies, unusual spaces, postmodern aesthetics, and opera scores. The Trisha Brown Company was established in 1970. Her experiments with equipment led to Roof Piece (1971), performed on Manhattan rooftops in a twelve-block setting. In the same year she made Accumulation, a rooted solo and monologue. By 1978 the piece became Accumulation with Talking plus Water Motor, which splices two dances with stories told simultaneously. A similar transformation rendered If You Couldn't See Me, a solo performed facing upstage, into the duet for Brown and Mikhail Baryshnikov, You Can See Us (1996). Her many collaborations include Glacial Decoy (1979) with Robert Rauschenberg, Opal Loop (1980) with Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture Cloud Installation #72513, and commissioned scores from such composers as Laurie Anderson, Peter Zummo, and Richard Landry. Among a long list of international accolades are the Dance Magazine Award (1987), Lawrence Olivier Award (1987), and Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1988). Brown was named by President Clinton to the National Council on the Arts in 1994. www.trishabrowncompany.org When he was ten, John W. Bubbles (1902-1986) teamed up with six-year-old "Buck" Washington. As Buck and Bubbles, the singing-dancing-comedy act lasted nearly half a century. They were featured in Ziegfeld Follies of 1931 and were the first black artists to play New York's Radio City Music Hall. Bubbles is best known for originating the role of Sportin' Life in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935). Yet his most significant contribution as an artist was to amalgamate jazz into tap dancing, placing his signature on the form during a vivid era of innovation. By adding heel drops, turns, and syncopation, he altered both accents and timing, simultaneously grounding rhythms and projecting an easy nonchalance. Long associated with the Hoofers Club in Harlem, Bubbles went from three-shows-a-day in vaudeville to Broadway and a stint in Hollywood, where he appeared in Varsity Show (1937), Cabin in the Sky (1943), and A Song Is Born (1948). He played the Palace Theater with Judy Garland in 1967 and appeared in Black Broadway (1979). Bubbles received the 1980 Life Achievement Award from the American Guild of Variety Artists.
Irene and Vernon Castle (1893-1969 and 1887-1918, respectively) brought elegance and good manners to ballroom dancing as a smart young married couple. Both music arranger Ford T. Dabney and the couple's musicians were black, and the Castles brought ragtime and jazz-based dances to a new audience. An eccentric comic initially, Vernon arrived in New York from England in 1907 to perform with Lew Fields. He and Irene met and were married in 1911. The first appearance of the pair together was at Paris's Theatre Olympia, dancing to "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in Enfin. . . Une Revue. Back in New York, the two opened Castle House, a dancing school across from the Ritz Hotel, and attracted society patrons. Famous for introducing Tea Dances, the Castles's clubs—Sans Souci and Castles in the Air—helped to move social dancing from the ballroom to public venues. Stylish renditions of the one-step, maxixe, tango, fox trot, Castle Polka, Hesitation Waltz, and Castle Walk were seen on the 1914 Whirlwind Tour: thirty-two cities in twenty-eight days. Later that year the Castles were in Charles Dillingham's Watch Your Step. Before Vernon joined the British Royal Air Force in 1916, the couple gave farewell performances at the New York Hippodrome. After his untimely death, Irene had a career in film and vaudeville and was advisor to the 1939 movie The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.
A driving force behind American Ballet Theatre during the first four decades of its existence, Lucia Chase (1907-1986) was born to a wealthy family in Waterbury, Connecticut. She studied ballet with Mikhail Mordkin and in the late 1930s danced leading roles with his company. She was a founding member of Ballet Theatre, and proved her mettle as a dramatic dancer in works by Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille, and Michel Fokine. In 1945, with designer Oliver Smith, she was named co-director, a position she held until 1980, when she stepped down. Responsible for programming as well as casting, she pursued with remarkable success the vision of Ballet Theatre as a showcase for classical and contemporary works, international in scope and national in spirit. By the last decade of her tenure, the company had become an outstanding classical ensemble, with an acclaimed roster of principals. During her forty-year association with the company, Chase contributed generously from her private fortune to its maintenance and survival. In 1980 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Born to a family of Mormon dance and music masters in Utah, the three Christensen brothers—Willam (1902-2001), Harold (1904-1989), and Lew (1909-1984)—did more than anyone else to establish ballet in the Western United States. They received their early training from family members in Utah and made their professional debut as a vaudeville act. By 1934 they were in New York where Lew and Harold came under the influence of George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. In 1937 Lew, the most gifted of the brothers, danced the title role in Balanchine's first American production of Apollo; the following year he choreographed Filling Station, an Americana classic, for Kirstein's Ballet Caravan. Willam, meanwhile, began an association with the San Francisco Opera Ballet that would last until 1955 and ultimately involve his two brothers—Harold, as director of the San Francisco Ballet School, a post he held from 1943 to 1975; and Lew, as artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet from 1951 to 1984, when he died. In 1951 Willam left California to establish a ballet program at the University of Utah; by 1968 the original student company had become Ballet West. Through the companies they founded and the innumerable dancers they trained, the Christensens gave a powerful impetus to the growth of Americanization of ballet. www.sfballet.org
"Father of Jazz Dance" Jack Cole (1911-1974) began his career with Denishawn, appearing for the first time in August 1930 at the Lewisohn Stadium. His early training was Cecchetti and he left Denishawn to study with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, performing with them on Broadway in School for Husbands (1933). Cole's mastery of India's bharata natyam influenced his personal jazz style, which emphasized isolations, placements, quick directional changes, and long knee slides. Among his Broadway works were Magdalena (1948), Kismet (1953), Jamaica (1957), and both Donnybrook and Kean in 1961. He established an important dance workshop at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood to train dancers, while choreographing movies, television, and casino shows. At Twentieth Century Fox he coached such stars as Ann Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Cole's films include Eadie Was a Lady (1945), Down to Earth (1947), On the Riviera (1951), and Some Like It Hot (1959). Revered by dancers, the Cole legacy has been continued by protégés Gwen Verdon, Matt Mattox, Marc Platt, Carol Haney, and Rod Alexander. 
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