January 19, 2021 – davidbruceblog #2

Education

• A man — who didn’t dance — visited the dance class of Margaret Craske. At the end of her class, he said goodbye and jokingly executed a port de bras. Quickly, Ms. Craske reached out and corrected the position of the visitor’s hand. As you would expect, in her dance classes, she tells her students over and over, “Get it right!”

• Among the many soon-to-be-famous people who studied with modern dance pioneer Martha Graham — and among the earliest — was then-unknown-but-soon-to-be-a-movie-star Bette Davis. Ms. Graham helped Ms. Davis get her first job in acting by teaching her how to fall down several stairs without killing herself.

• William de Mille, the father of Agnes, did not want her to study dance. However, Agnes’ younger sister, Margaret, developed fallen arches, and her orthopedist recommended that she study dance. William did not want to treat one daughter differently from the other, so he let Agnes also take dance lessons.

• Ballet teacher Nicolas Legat insisted that dancers learn to move correctly. When established dancer Anna Roje came to him for lessons, he would not allow her to dance, but instead insisted that she do only barre work for six months. After her faults had been corrected, she began to dance in his class.

• The great black dancer Bill Robinson, aka Mr. Bojangles, taught dance steps to many people. His usual method was to show them a few dance steps they could do, then show them a few dance steps it was impossible for them to do. He liked for his students to know who was the master.

• Ruth St. Denis once taught Martha Graham an important lesson when Ms. Graham was just starting to dance. Ms. St. Denis told Ms. Graham, “Show me your dance.” Ms. Graham replied, “I don’t have one,” and Ms. St. Denis advised, “Well, dear, go out and get one.”

Fans

• Mary Lou Raines was a celebrity as a teenager because she was a dancer on The Buddy Deane Show, a very popular teenage dance party show in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1957 to 1964. When she first started going with her future husband, he did not know about her celebrity, so he was surprised when everywhere they went, people would say, “There’s Mary Lou! There’s Mary Lou!” He says, “I wondered if she had just been released from the penitentiary.”

• Whenever ballerina Margot Fonteyn danced in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, many of her fans used to skip Act II because “Margot only gets married in it.” Instead, they watched Acts I and III because she had much more of a chance to dance and act.

Food

• While in Japan, ballerina Nora Kaye faced a problem. She didn’t like Japanese food, and she had to attend a party hosted by a Japanese man who was prominent in the dance world. Fortunately, dance impresario Paul Szilard came up with a solution. They pretended that Ms. Kaye was on a strict diet, and whenever she did not want to eat something, she would turn to Mr. Szilard and ask for permission to eat it, but he would reply, “Absolutely not.” This worked well for a while, but then Ms. Kaye put on too much of an act, saying that something looked delicious and she wanted to eat it. Mr. Szilard rebelled when she said, “Oh, isn’t he awful. He won’t let me eat a thing, and I’m starving.” Mr. Szilard whispered to her, “Nora, one more crack like that, and I am going to give you permission to eat the fungi.” Ms. Kaye then put her hand on his knee and told the host, “He really does take good care of me.”

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