4. Sextette

A. A SPANISH GYPSY

SUCH was the influence of The Swan on my approach to dance that, although she was no longer in our midst, I found myself being guided subconsciously by her direction. There were arrangements for a tour of Pavlova and a small company, for the season 1931-1932, not under my management. Death liquidated these arrangements. Had the tour been made, Pavlova was to have numbered among her company the famous Spanish gypsy dancer of the 1930’s, Vicente Escudero, one of the greatest Iberian dancers of all time.

Pavlova had championed Duncan and Wigman. I had brought them. I determined to bring Escudero to help round out the catholicity of my dance presentations. Spanish dancing had always intrigued me, and I had a soft spot for gypsies of all nationalities.

Escudero, who had been the partner of the ineffable Argentina, had earned a reputation which, to understate, bordered on the picturesque. Small, wiry, dark-skinned, with an aquiline nose, he wore his kinky, glossy black hair long to cover a lack-lustre bald spot. He, like most Spanish gypsies, claimed descent from the Moors, and there was about him more of the Arab than the Indian. As I watched him I could understand how he must have borne within him the stigma of the treatment Spain had meted out to his people; for it was not until the nineteenth century that the gypsies in Spain had any freedom at all. Until then, they were pariahs, hounded by the people, hounded by the law. Only within the last fifty-or-so years has the Spanish gypsy come into his own with the universal acknowledgment of being a creative artist, the originator of a highly individual and beautiful art.

Escudero was a Granada gypsy, a “gitano” from the white caves hollowed out in the Sacred Mountain. I point this out in order to distinguish him from his Sevillian cousins, the “flamenco.” His repertoire ranged through the Zapateado, the Soleares, the Alegrias, the Bulerias, the Tango, the Zamba. His special triumph was the Farruca.

It was on the 17th January, 1932, that I introduced Vicente Escudero to New York audiences at the 46th Street Theatre, where Wigman had had her triumph. A number of New York performances were given, followed by a brief tour, which, in turn, was succeeded by a longer coast-to-coast tour the following year. His company consisted of four besides himself: a pianist, a guitarist; the fiery, shrewish Carmita, his favorite; and the shy, gentle-voiced Carmela.

But it was Escudero’s sinister, communicative personality that drew and held audiences. His gypsy arrogance shone in his eyes, in the audacious tilt of his flat-brimmed hat, in his complete assurance; above all it stood out in his strutting masculinity. Eschewing castanets, for gypsy men consider their use effeminate, he moved sinuously but majestically, with the clean heel rhythm and crackling fingers that marked him as the outstanding gypsy dancer of his day and, quite possibly, of all time. For accompaniment there was no symphony orchestra, only the hoarse syncopation of a single guitar. Through half-parted lips shone the gleaming ivory of small, perfectly matched teeth.

For two successful seasons I toured Escudero across America, spreading a new and thrilling concept of the dance of Spain to excited audiences, audiences that reached a tremendous crescendo of fervor at the climax of his Farruca. No theatrical Farruca this, but a feline, animal dance straight from the ancient Spanish gypsy camp.

I had been forewarned to be on my guard. However, though his arrival in America had been preceded by tall tales of his completely unmanageable nature, Escudero proved to be one of the simplest, most tractable artists I ever have handled. There was on his part an utter freedom from the all too usual fits of “temperament,” a complete absence of the hysterics sometimes indulged in—and all too often—by artists of lesser talents. I happen to know, from other sources than Escudero, that he took a dim view of American food, hotels, and the railway train accommodations in the remoter parts of this great land. He never complained to me. Escudero had his troubles with Carmita and Carmela, as they vied with each other for position and his favors. But these troubles never were brought to my official attention. Like the head of a gypsy camp, he was the master. He ruled his little troupe and distributed both favors and discipline.

In 1935, Escudero made his last American appearance, when I presented the Continental Revue at the Little Theatre, now the New York Times Hall. Among those appearing with Escudero in this typical European entertainment were the French chanteuse, Lucienne Boyer, Mrs. Hurok, Lydia Chaliapine, Rafael, together with that comic genius, Nikita Balieff, as master of ceremonies.

Other and younger dancers of Spain continue to spread the gospel of the Iberian dance. I venture to believe that, highly talented though many of them are, I may say with incontrovertible truth, there has been only one Escudero.

B. A SWISS COMEDIAN

In 1931, a slight, short Swiss girl named Trudi Schoop with the dual talents of a dancer and a comedienne—a combination not too common—organized a company in her native Switzerland. She named it the Trudi Schoop Comic Ballet.

The Paris Archives Internationales de la Danse, formed in 1931 by Rolf de Maré, the Swedish dance patron who was responsible for the Swedish Ballet in the early ’twenties, in 1932 sponsored the first International Choreographic Competition in Paris. The prize-winning work in this initial competition was won by Kurt Joos for his now famous The Green Table. The second prize went to this hitherto almost unknown Trudi Schoop, for her comic creation, Fridolin.

In 1936, I brought her with her company for their first tour. Here again was a fresh and new form of dance entertainment. Tiny, with a shock of boyishly cut blonde hair, Trudi Schoop had the body of a young lad, and a schoolboy’s face alternating impishness with the benign innocence of the lad caught with sticky fingers and mouth streaked with jam.

Her repertoire consisted of theatre pieces rather than ballets in the accepted sense of the term. Trudi herself was a clown in the sense Charles Chaplin is a clown. Her range was tremendous. With a company trained by her in her own medium of gentle satire, she was an immediate success. Her productions had no décor, and there was a minimum of costume. But there was a maximum of effective mime, of wit, of satire. Her brother, Paul Schoop, was her composer, conductor, accompanist.

Trudi Schoop’s outstanding success was the prize-winning work, Fridolin. Schoop was Fridolin; Fridolin was Schoop. Fridolin was an innocent boy in a black Sunday suit and hat who stumbled and bumbled through a world not necessarily the best of all possible, wringing peals of laughter out of one catastrophe after another.

Other almost equally happy and successful works in her repertoire included Hurray for Love; The Blonde Marie, the tale of a servant girl who eventually becomes an operatic diva; and Want Ads, giving the background behind those particularly humorous items that still appear regularly in the “Agony Column” of The Times (London); you know, the sort of announcement that reads: “Honourable Lady (middle fifties) seeks acquaintance: object matrimony.”

The critical fraternity dubbed her the “funniest girl in the world”; the public adored her, and theatre folk made her their darling. Prior to the outbreak of the war, I sent Trudi and her Swiss Comedians across America. When, at last, war broke in all its fury, Schoop retired to her native Switzerland and disbanded her company. She did not reassemble it until 1946; and in 1947 I brought them over again for a long tour of the United States and Canada. On this most recent of her tours, in addition to her familiar repertoire, we made a departure by presenting an evening-long work, in three acts, called Barbara. This was, so far as I know, the first full-length work to be presented in dance form in many cities and towns of the North American continent. Full length, of course, in the sense that one work occupied a full evening for the telling of its story. This is another form of dance pioneering in which I am happy to have played a part.

Today Trudi Schoop, who has retired from the stage, lives with her sister in Hollywood.

C. A HINDU DEITY

Back in 1924, in London, I had watched a young Hindu dancer with Pavlova in her ballet, Hindu Wedding. I was struck by the quality of his movement and by the simple beauty of the dance of India.

His name was Uday Shan-Kar. From Pavlova I learned that he was the son of a Hindu producer of plays, that he had been trained by his father, and had worked so successfully in collaboration with him in the production of native Hindu mimed dramas that Pavlova had persuaded Shan-Kar to return to London to assist her in the production of an Indian ballet she had in mind, based on the Radna-Krishna legend. Pavlova succeeded in persuading him to dance in the work as well.

Later I saw him at the Paris Colonial Exposition, where, with his company which he had organized in India, he made a tremendous impression, subsequently achieving equal triumphs in England, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Switzerland. At the Paris Exposition I saw long Hindu dramas, running for hours, beautifully and sumptuously produced, but played with the greatest leisure. Since I am committed to candor in this account of my life in the dance, I must admit that I saw only parts of these danced dramas, took them in relays, for I must confess mine is a nature that cannot remain immobile for long stretches at a time before a theatre form as unfamiliar as the Indian was to me then.

Gradually I came to know it, and I realized that in India formal mime and dance are much more a part of the life of the people than they are with us. With the Indian, dance is not only an entertainment, but a highly stylised stage art; it plays an important part in religious ritual; it is a genuinely communal experience.

As night after night I watched parts of these symbolic dance dramas of Hindu mythology, fascinated by them, I searched for a formula whereby they might be made palatable and understandable to American audiences. I was certain that, as they were being danced in Paris, to music strange and unfamiliar to Western ears, going on for hours on end, the American public was not ready for them, and would not accept them.

I put the matter straight to Shan-Kar. I told him I wanted to bring him and his art to America. He told me he wanted to come. Possessed of a fine scholarship, a magnificent three-fold talent as producer, choreographer, and dancer-musician, he also possessed to a remarkable degree a sense of theatre showmanship and an intuition that enabled him to grasp and quickly understand the space and time limitations of the non-oriental theatre.

Shan-Kar’s association with Pavlova, together with his own fine intelligence, made his transition from the dance theatre of the Orient to an adaptation of it acceptable to the West a comparatively simple task for him.

His success in America exceeded my most optimistic predictions. Until the arrival of Shan-Kar, America had not been exposed to very much of the dance of India. Twenty years before, the English woman known as Roshanara had had a vogue in esoteric circles with her adaptations of the dances of India and the East. On the other hand, the male dancing of India was virtually unknown. As presented by Shan-Kar, this was revealed in an expressive mime, with an emphasis on the enigmatic face, the flat hand, using the upper part of the body as the chief medium of expression, together with the unique use of the neck and shoulders, not only for expression, but for accentuation of rhythm. New, also, to our audiences were the spread knees, a type of movement exclusive to the male Indian dancer.

Here was an art and an artist that seemingly had none of the conventional elements of a popular success. About him and his presentations there was nothing spectacular, nothing stunning, nothing exciting. Colour was there, to be sure; but the dancing and the general tone of the entertainment was all of a piece, on a single level, soothing, and with that elusive, almost indefinable quality: the serenity of the East.

Our associations, save for a brief period of mistrust on my part, have always been pleasant. In addition to the original tour of 1932, I brought him back in the season 1936-1937, and again in 1938-1939. The war, of course, intervened, and I was unable to bring him again until the season 1949-1950.

At the outbreak of the war, through the benefaction of the Elmhirst Foundation of Dartington Hall, England, an activity organized by the former Dorothy Straight, Shan-Kar was enabled to found a school for the dance and a center for research into Hindu lore, which he set up in Benares. One outcome of this research center was the production of a motion picture film dealing with this lore.

After seeing many of the Eastern dances and dancers who have been brought to Western Europe and the United States, I am convinced Uday Shan-Kar is still the outstanding exponent. I hope to bring him again for further tours, for I feel the more the American people are exposed to his performances, the better we shall understand the fine and delicate art of the East, and the East itself.

D. A SPANISH LADY

Although my taste for the dances of Spain had been whetted by my association with Escudero, I had long wished to present to America the artist whom I knew was the finest exponent of the feminine dance of the Iberian peninsula. The task was by no means an easy one, for her first American venture had been a fiasco. The lady from Spain was anything but eager to risk another North American venture.

Her name was Encarnacion Lopez. But it was as Argentinita that she was known to and loved by all lovers of the dance of Spain, and recognized by them as its outstanding interpreter of our time. Her story will bear re-telling. My enthusiasm, my utmost admiration for the Spanish dance, and for the great art of Argentinita is something that is not easy for me to express. Diaghileff is known to have said with that unequivocation for which he was noted: “There are two schools of dancing: the Classic Ballet, which is the foundation of all ballet; and the Spanish school.”

I would have put it differently by saying that Classic Ballet and the Spanish school are the two types of dancing closest to my heart.

My first view of Argentinita was at New York’s Majestic Theatre, in 1931, when she made her American début in Lew Leslie’s ill-fated International Revue. This performance, coincidentally enough, also brought forth for his first American appearance, the British dancer, Anton Dolin, who later also came under my management and who, like Argentinita, was to become a close personal friend. For Dolin, the opening night of the International Revue was certainly no very conspicuous beginning; for Argentinita, however, it was definitely a sad one. This charming, quiet-voiced lady of Spain knew that she was a great artist. Thrust into the hurly-burly of an ineptly produced Broadway revue, where all was shouting and screaming, Argentinita continued her quiet way and, artist that she was, avoided shouting and screaming her demands.

I was present at the opening performance. Although she was outwardly calm, collected, restrained, I could sense the ordeal through which Argentinita was going. In order to insure proper rhythmic support, she had brought her own orchestra conductor from Spain. This gentleman was able to speak little, if any, English. From where I sat I could see the musicians poring over their parts and could hear them commenting to each other about the music. Obviously the parts were in bad order and, equally obviously, there had been little or no rehearsal; and, moreover, it appeared the music was difficult to read at short notice.

It was one of those strange ironies of fate that ruined something that, properly handled, should and would have been a triumph. Yet it was not only the orchestra and the music that were at fault. Argentinita herself was shockingly presented, if she can honestly be said to have been presented at all. She made her entrance as a Spanish peasant, in a Spanish peasant costume which, though correct in every detail, was devoid of any effect of what the average audience thinks is Spanish. She was asked to dance in a peasant scene against a fantastic set purporting to be Spanish, surrounded by a bevy of Broadway showgirls in marvellous exotic costumes, also purporting to be Iberian, with trains yards in length, which were no more authentically Spanish, or meant to be, than were those of the tango danced by that well-known ball-room dancing team of Moss and Fontana, who came on later in the same scene.

Under such circumstances, success for Argentinita was out of the question. So bitter was her disappointment that she left the cast and the company two weeks after the opening. Later she gave a Sunday night recital in her own repertoire, and although I set to work immediately to persuade her that there was an audience for her in America, a great, enthusiastic audience, such were her doubts that it took me six years to do it. I knew she was a born star, for I recognized, shining in the tawdry setting of this revue, a vivacious theatre personality.

When Argentinita finally returned to America, in 1938, under my management, and made her appearance on 13th November of that year, at the Majestic Theatre, on the same stage where, seven years before, she had so utterly and tragically failed, this time to enthusiastic cheers and a highly approving press, she admitted I had been correct in my judgment and in my insistence that she return.

There is little point in recounting at this time her subsequent triumphs all over America, for her hold on the public increased with each appearance, and she is all too close to the memories of contemporary dance lovers. I have said that Argentinita was a great artist. That will bear repeating over and over again. Every gesture she made was feminine and beautiful and, to my mind, she portrayed everything that was lovely and most desirable. While her castanets may not actually have sung, they spoke of many lovely things. Argentinita was a symbol of the womanhood of Spain, warm, rich-blooded, wholesome, and I always felt certain there were not enough hats in the world, least of all in Spain, to throw at her feet to pay her the homage that was her due.

Argentinita was born of Spanish parents in Buenos Aires, in 1898, and taken back to Spain by them when she was four years old. At that early age she commenced her training in the Spanish dance in all its varied forms and styles, for she was equally at home in the Spanish Classic dance as she was in the Gypsy or Flamenco dances. Those who saw the poem she could make from las Soleares of Andulasia, the basic rhythm of all Spanish gypsy dances, know how she gave them the magic of a magic land; or the gay Alegrias, performed in the sinuous manner, rich with contrasts of slow, soft, and energetic movements, with the characteristic stamping, stomping, sole-tapping, clapping, and finger-snapping. It was in the Alegrias that Argentinita let her fancy roam with the slow tempo of the music. The European dance analysts had noted that here, as also at other times and places, Argentinita danced to please herself. When the tempo quickened, her mood changed to one of gaiety and abandon.

It is a difficult matter for me to pin down my memories of this splendid artist and her work: las Sevillianas, the national dance of Seville, danced by all classes and conditions of people, the Queen of Flamenco dances; or the Bulerias, the most typical of all gypsy dances, light and gay, the dance of the fiesta.

Argentinita was not only a dancer. She was an actress of the first order. She had been a member of Martinez Sierra’s interesting and vital creative theatre in Madrid. She sang Chansons Populaires in a curiously throaty, plaintive little voice that could, nevertheless, fill the largest theatre, despite the cameo-like quality of her art, fill even the Metropolitan Opera House, with the sound, the color, the atmosphere of Spain.

Dancer of Spain that she was, her repertoire was not by any means confined to the dance and music and life of the peoples of the Iberian peninsula. She traveled far afield for her material, through the towns and villages of South and Central America. Yet she was no mere copyist. Works and ideas she found were transmuted into terms of the theatre by means of a subtle alchemy. She had a deep knowledge of the entire Spanish dance tradition, and knew it all, understood its wide historical and regional changes. In her regional works, from Spanish folk to the heart of the Andes, she kept the flavor of the original, but personalized the dances. About them all was a fundamental honesty; nothing was done for show. There were no heroics; no athleticism. In addition to the Alegrias, Sevillianas, Fandangos, Jotas of Spain, the folk dances and folk songs of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and the remote places of Latin America and of its Indian villages were hers. None who ever saw her do it can ever quite obliterate the memory of El Huayno, implicit as it was with the stark dignity and nobility of the Inca woman, and called by one critic, “the greatest dance of our generation.”

I have a particularly fond memory of On the Route to Seville, in which a smoothie from the city outwitted and outdid the gypsies in larceny; and also I remember fondly that nostalgic picture of the Madrid of 1900, which she called, simply enough, In Old Madrid.

As our association developed and continued, I was happy to be able to extend the scope of her work and bring her from the solitary and non-theatrical dance recital platform on which, one after the other, from coast to coast, her journeys were a succession of triumphs, to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Here, with her own ensemble, chief among which was her exceptionally talented sister, Pilar Lopez, I placed them as guests with one ballet company or another—with Leonide Massine in Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat and in Capriccio Espangnol, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, on the choreography of which she collaborated with Massine.

In addition to these theatre adaptations of the dances of Spain, she danced in her own dances, both solo and with Pilar Lopez. She trained and developed excellent men, notably José Greco and Manolo Vargas. I am especially happy in having been instrumental in bringing to the stage two of her most interesting theatrical creations. One was the ballet she staged to de Falla’s El Amor Brujo, which I produced for her. The other was the Garcia Lorca El Café de Chinitas. Argentinita had been a devoted friend of the martyred Loyalist poet, and to bring his work to the American stage was a project close to her heart and a real labor of love. Argentinita belonged to a close little circle of scholars, poets, and composers, which included Martinez Sierra, Jacinto Benavente, and the extraordinarily brilliant, genius-touched Garcia Lorca.

The production of El Café de Chinitas was made possible during a Spanish festival I gave, one spring, at the Metropolitan Opera House. For this festival I engaged José Iturbi to conduct a large orchestra composed of members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Argentinita had succeeded in interesting the Marquis de Cuevas in the project. For El Café de Chinitas the Marquis commissioned settings and costumes from Salvador Dali. The result was one of the most effective and best considered works for the theatre emanating from Dali’s brush. Dali, like Argentinita, had been a friend of the martyred patriot-poet-composer. His profounder emotions touched, Dali designed as effective a setting as the Metropolitan Opera House has seen. The first of the two scenes was a tremendously high wall on which hung literally hundreds of guitars, a “graveyard of guitars,” as Dali phrased it; while the second scene, the Café de Chinitas itself, revealed the heroic torso of a female dancer with her arms upstretched in what could be interpreted as an attitude of the dance, or, if one chose, as a crucifixion. From where the hands held the castanets there dripped blood, as though the hands had been pierced. In terms of symbols, this was Dali’s representation of the crucifixion of his country by hideous civil war. This was Argentinita’s last production, and one of her happiest creations.

A victim of cancer, Argentinita died in New York on 24th September, 1945. I was at the hospital at the end, together with my friend and hers, Anton Dolin. Her doctors had long prescribed complete rest for her and special care. But her life was the dance, and stop she could not. Heroically she ignored her illness. If there was one thing about her more conspicuous than another, it was her tiny, dainty, slippered feet. No longer will they dart delicately into the lovely positions on the floor.

In Argentinita there was never either bitterness or unkindness to any one. I have seen, at first hand, Argentinita’s encouragement and unstinted help to others, and to lesser dancers. The success of others, whether it was the artists in her own programmes, or elsewhere, was a joy to her; nothing but the best was good enough. Her sister, Pilar Lopez, who survives her and who today dances with great success in Europe, carrying on her sister’s work, is a magnificent dancer. When the two sisters danced together, everything that could be done to make Pilar shine more brilliantly was done; and that, too, was the work of Argentinita. Her loyalty to me was something of which I am very proud.

Above all, it was the dignity and charm of the woman that played a great part in the superb image of the artist who was known as Argentinita.

E. A TERPSICHOREAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

The mixture of dance and song and anthropology, with a firm accent on sex, that struck a new note in the dance theatre, hailed from Chicago. Her name is Katherine Dunham. She is a dynamo of energy; she is elusive; she is unpredictable. She is a quite superb combination of exoticism and intellectuality.

Daughter of a French-Canadian and an American Negro, Katherine was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1914. Her theatrical experience has ranged from art museums to night clubs, from Broadway to London’s West End, to the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, to European triumphs. Her early life was spent and her first dancing was done in Chicago. She flashed across the American entertainment world comet-like. More recently she has confined her activities almost exclusively to England and Europe.

I had no part in her beginnings. By the time I undertook to manage her, she had assembled her own company of Negro dancers and had oscillated between the rarefied atmosphere of women’s clubs and concert halls, on the one hand, to night clubs and road houses, on the other. The atmosphere of the latter was both smoky and rowdy. Katherine Dunham, I suspect, is something of a split personality, so far as her art is concerned. Possessor of a fine mind, it would seem to have been one frequently in turmoil. On the one side, there is a keen intellectual side to it, evidenced by both a Bachelor of Philosophy and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago, two Rosenwald Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her Masters degree is in anthropology. These studies she pursued, as I have said, on the one hand. On the other, she studied and practiced the dance with an equal fierceness.

Her intellectual pursuits have been concerned, for the most part, with anthropological researches into the Negro dance. Her first choreographic venture was her collaboration with Ruth Page, in Chicago, in La Guiablesse, a ballet on a Martinique theme, with a score based on Martinique folk melodies by the American composer, William Grant Still, a work with an all-Negro cast, seen both at the Century of Progress Exhibition and the Chicago Opera House, in 1933. Dunham became active in the Federal Dance Theatre, and its Chicago director. It was when she was doing the dances for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union depression-time revue, Pins and Needles, that she tried a Sunday dance concert in New York at the Forty-eighth Street Theatre. So successful was it that it was repeated every Sunday for three months.

Turning to the theatre, she added acting and singing to dancing and choreography, both on the stage and in films, appearing as both actress and singer in Cabin in the Sky. She intrigued me, both by the quality of her work, her exoticism, and her loyalty to her little troupe, for the members of which she felt herself responsible. I first met her while she was appearing at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, in San Francisco. She was closing her engagement. She was down and out, trying to keep her group together. I arranged for an audition and, after seeing her with her group, undertook to see what could be done. Present with me at this audition were Agnes de Mille, then in San Francisco rehearsing with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo what was to become her first choreographic triumph, Rodeo, together with Alexandra Danilova and Frederick Franklin.

My idea in taking over her management was to try to help her transform her concert pieces into revue material, suitable not only to the country’s concert halls, but also to the theatre of Broadway and those road theatres that were becoming increasingly unoccupied because of the paucity of productions to keep them open. Certain purely theatrical elements were added, including some singers, one of them being a Cuban tenor; and, to supplement her native percussion players, a jazz group, recruited from veterans of the famous “Dixieland Band.”

We called the entertainment the Tropical Revue. The Tropical Revue was an immediate success at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York and, thanks to some quick work, I was able to secure additional time at the theatre and to extend the run to six weeks. This set up some sort of record for an entertainment of the kind. As an entertainment form it rested somewhere between revue and recital. Miss Dunham herself had three outstanding numbers. These were her own impressions of what she called different “hot” styles. These were responsible for some of the heat that brought on the sizzling of the scenery to which the critics referred. The first of her numbers was Bahiana, a limpid and languid impression of Brazil; then Shore Excursion, a contrasting piece, fast, hot, tough, and Cuban. The third was Barrelhouse, an old stand-by of hers, straight out of Chicago’s Jungletown.

Tropical Revue, during its two years under my management, was in an almost perpetual state of flux. It was revised and revised, and revised again. As the tours proceeded, Dunham did less and less dancing and more and more impersonation. But while her “bumps” grew more discreet, there was no lessening of the heat. Dunham’s choreography was best in theatricalized West Indian and Latin American folk dances, some of which approached full-scale ballets. The best of these, in my opinion, was L’Ag’ya, a three-scened work, Martinique at core, the high light of which was the “ag’ya,” a kicking dance. Here she was able to put to excellent use authentic Afro-Caribbean steps, and in the overall choreographic style, I would not feel it unfair to say that Dunham’s style had been considerably influenced by the Chicago choreographer and dancer, Ruth Page, with whom Dunham had collaborated early in her career.

It did not take me long to discover the public was more interested in sizzling scenery than it was in anthropology, at least in the theatre. Since the Tropical Revue was fairly highly budgeted, it was necessary for us, in order to attract the public, to emphasize sex over anthropology. Dunham, with a shrewd eye to publicity, oscillated between emphasis first on one and then on the other; her fingers were in everything. In addition to running the company, dancing, singing, revising, she lectured, carried on an unending correspondence by letter and by wire, entertained lavishly, and added considerably, I am sure, to the profits of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Columns were written about her, and fulsome essays, a good deal of which was balderdash.

The handling of this tour presented its own special set of problems. Not the least of these was the constantly recurring one of housing. We have come a long way in the United States in disposing of Jim Crow; but there is still a great deal to be done. Hotel accommodations for the artists of the Tropical Revue were a continual source of worry. One Pacific Coast city was impossible. When, after days of fruitless searching, our representative thought he had been able to install them in a neighboring town, the Chinese owner of the hotel, on learning his guests were not white, canceled the reservations.

A certain midwestern city was another trouble spot, where, in one of the city’s leading hostelries, the employees threatened to strike because of the presence there of some of the principal artists. This was averted by some quick work on the part of our staff. It should be noted, too, that these unfortunate difficulties were all in cities north of what we hoped was the non-existent Mason and Dixon Line.

Miss Dunham, quite naturally, was disturbed and exercised by this discrimination. In order to avoid this kind of unpleasantness, I had tried to restrict the bookings to northern cities. However, it became necessary to play an engagement in a southern border city. The results were not happy. At the time of making the booking, I did not realize that in this border state segregation was practiced in its Municipal Auditorium.

The house was sold out on the opening night. Owing to wartime transportation difficulties, the company was late in arriving. Just before the delayed curtain’s rise, Miss Dunham requested four seats for some of her local friends. She was asked by the manager of the Auditorium if they were colored. Miss Dunham replied that they were; whereupon the manager offered to place chairs for them in the balcony, since colored persons were not permitted in the orchestra stalls. Miss Dunham protested, and objected to her friends being seated other than in the orchestra. The fact was there were no seats available in the stalls, since the house was sold out. However, had it not been for the segregation rule, four extra chairs could have been placed in the boxes.

The performance was enthusiastically received, with repeated curtain calls at its close. Miss Dunham responded with a speech. She thanked the audience for its appreciation and its warm response. Then, smarting under the accumulated pressures of discrimination throughout the tour, climaxed by the incident involving her friends, she paused, and added: “This is good-bye. I shall not appear here again until people like me can sit with people like you. Good-bye, and God bless you—and you may need it.”

While there was no overt hostile demonstration in the theatre, there were those who felt Miss Dunham’s closing words implied a threat. The press, ever alert to scent a scandal, demanded a statement about my attitude on segregation in theatres, and to know if I approved of artists under my management threatening audiences. It was one of those rare times when, for some reason, I could not be reached by telephone. Faced with the necessity of making some sort of statement, my representative issued one to the effect that Mr. Hurok deplored and was unalterably opposed to discrimination of any kind anywhere; but that, as a law-abiding citizen, however much he deplored such regulations, he was bound to conform to the laws and regulations obtaining in those communities and theatres where he was contractually obliged to have his attractions appear. But I have taken care never again to submit artists to any possible indignities, if there is any way of avoiding it.

I shall relate a last example of the sort of difficulties that arose on this tour and, to my mind, it is the most stupid of them all, if there can be said to be degrees of stupidity in such matters.

In addition to the large orchestra of conventional instruments we carried, Miss Dunham had four Guatemalan percussionists who dramatically beat out the Caribbean rhythms on a wide assortment of gourds, tam-tams, and other native drums, both with the orchestra and in several scenes on the stage.

It happened in a northern city. The head of the musicians’ union local demanded to know if there were any “niggers” in our orchestra. My representative, who feels very strongly about such matters and who resents the term used by the local union president, replied that he did not understand the question. All members of the orchestra, he said, were members of the American Federation of Musicians, and had played as a unit across the entire country, and such a question had never arisen. The local union official thereupon tersely informed him the colored players would not be permitted to play with the other musicians in the orchestra pit in that city; if they attempted to do so, he would forbid the white players to play. My representative, refusing to bow to such an ukase, appealed to the head office of the Musicians’ Union, in Chicago—only to be informed by them that, however much headquarters disapproved of and deplored the situation, each union local was autonomous in its local rulings and there was nothing they could do.

Now comes the irony of the situation. My representative, on visiting the theatre, saw that the stage boxes abutted the orchestra pit on the same level with it “Why not place the percussionists there?” he thought. He proposed this to the union official, and was informed that this would be permitted, “so long as there is a railing between the white players and the black.”

It was only later, on thumbing through the local telephone directory, my representative discovered there were two musicians’ locals there. One of them was listed with the word “colored” after it, in parenthesis.

Yes, we still have a long road ahead in the matter of fair employment practices and equal opportunities for all.

Having had a satisfying taste of the theatre, Miss Dunham eventually turned to it as her exclusive medium of expression, and branched out into a full-fledged theatre piece, with plot and all, called Carib Song, which, transmuted into Caribbean Rhapsody, proved more successful on the other side of the Atlantic than it did in the States.

My association with Katherine Dunham seemed to satisfy, at least for the moment, my taste for the exotic. I cannot say it added much to my knowledge of anthropology, but it broadened my experience of human nature.

I presented Katherine Dunham and her company in Buenos Aires and throughout South America during the season 1949-1950 when our association came to an end. In her artistic career Katherine Dunham has been greatly aided by the advice and by the practical help, in scenic and costume design, of her husband, the talented American painter and designer, John Pratt.

While the scope of Katherine Dunham’s dancing and choreography may be limited by her anthropological bias, she has a first-rate quality of showmanship. She has studied, revived, rearranged for the theatre primitive dances and creole dances, which are in that borderland that is somewhere at the meeting point of African and Western culture. Anthropology aside and for the moment forgotten, she is a striking entertainer.

F. AN AMERICAN GENIUS

It may well be that, considered as an individual, the American Martha Graham is one of the greatest dance celebrities in the United States. There are those who contend she is the greatest. She is certainly the most controversial. There seems to be no middle school of thought concerning her. One of them bursts forth with an enthusiasm amounting almost to idolatry. The other shouts its negatives quite as forcibly.

My first love and my greatest interest is ballet. However, that love and that interest do not obscure for me all other forms of dance, as my managerial career shows. Having presented prophets and disciples of what, for want of a more accurate term, is called the “free” dance, in the persons of Isadora Duncan and her “children” and Mary Wigman, I welcomed the opportunity to present the American High Priestess of the contemporary dance.

This product of a long line of New England forbears was a woman past fifty when she came under my management. Yet she was at the height of her powers, in the full bloom of the immense artistic accomplishment that is hers, a dancer of amazing skill, a choreographer of striking originality, an actress of tremendous power.

The first and by far the most important prophet of the contemporary dance, Martha Graham was originally trained in the Ruth St. Denis-Ted Shawn tradition. A quarter of a century ago, however, she broke away from that tradition and introduced into her works a quality of social significance and protest. As I think over her choreographic product, it seems to me that, in general—and this is a case where I must generalize—her work has exhibited what may be described as two major trends. One has been in the direction of fundamental social conflicts; the other, towards psychological abstraction and a vague mysticism.

About all her work is an austerity, stark and lean; yet this cold austerity in her creations is always presented by means of a brilliant technique and with an intense dramatic power. I made it a point for years to see as many of her recital programmes as I could, and I was never sure what I was going to see. Each time there seemed to me to be a new style and a new technique. She was constantly experimenting and while, often, the experiments did not quite come off, she always excited me, if I did not always understand what she was trying to say.

I have the greatest admiration for Martha Graham and for what she has done. She has championed the cause of the American composer by having works commissioned, while she has, at the same time, championed the cause of free movement and originality in the dance. Yet, so violent, so distorted, so obscure, and sometimes so oppressive do I find some of her works that I am baffled. It is these qualities, coupled with the complete introspection in which her works are steeped, that make it so extremely difficult to attract the public in sufficient numbers to make touring worthwhile or New York seasons financially possible without some sort of subsidy. I shall have something to say, later on in this book, on this whole question of subsidy of the arts. Meanwhile, Martha Graham has chosen a lonely road, and the introspectiveness of her work does not make it any less so. The more’s the pity, for here is a great artist of the first rank.

Martha Graham completed my triptych of modern dancers, commencing with Isadora Duncan and continuing with Mary Wigman as its center piece. In many respects, Martha Graham is by far the greatest of the three; yet, to me, she is lacking in a quality that made the dances of Isadora Duncan so compelling. It is difficult to define that quality. Negatively, it may be that it is this very introspection. Perhaps it is that Martha Graham is no modernist at all.

Modernism in dance, I feel, has become very provincial, for it would seem that every one and her sister is a modernist. Isadora was a modernist. Fokine was a modernist. Mary Wigman was a modernist. Today, we have Balanchine and Robbins, modernists. Scratch a choreographer, scrape a dancer ever so lightly, and you will find a modernist. It is all very, very provincial.

Much of what is to me the real beauty of the dance—the lyric line, the unbroken phrase, the sequential pattern of the dance itself—has, in the name of modernism, been chopped up and broken.

Martha Graham, of all the practitioners of the “free” dance, troubles me least in this respect. Many of her works look like ballets. Yet, at the same time, she disturbs me; never soothes me; and, since I have dedicated myself in this book to candor, I shall admit I can take my dance without too much over-intellectualization. Yet, in retrospect, I find there are few ballets that have so much concentrated excitement as Martha Graham’s Deaths and Entrances.

The choreography, the dancing, the art of Martha Graham are greatly appreciated by a devoted but limited public. The lamentable thing about it to me is that it so limited. She has chosen the road of the solitary and lonely experimenter. Martha Graham, of all the dancers I have known, is, I believe, the most single-purposed, the most fanatical in her devotion to an idea and an ideal. About her and everything she does is an extraordinary integrity, a consummate honesty. Generous to a fault, Martha Graham always has something good to say about the work of others, and she possesses a keen appreciation of all forms of the dance. The high position she so indisputably holds has been attained, as I happen to know, only through great privation and hardship, often in the face of cruel and harsh ridicule. Her remarkable technique could only have been acquired at the expense of sheer physical exhaustion. In the history of the dance her name will ever remain at the head of the pioneers.