Category: Dance

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Tempi, Theater, Travel

Tempi

• Early in his career, pianist Denis Matthews played the music for a performance by German dancer Annie Fligg. Unfortunately, during the performance, a misunderstanding occurred. In one dance, each time she came by Mr. Matthews, she hissed the word “fast!” at him. Mr. Matthews thought that she was telling him to go fast, so he speeded up the music. Actually, she was trying to tell him that the music was too fast. (Fortunately, she survived the dance, although the tempo almost caused her to have a heart attack.)

• Sir Thomas Beecham once conducted a performance of Mili Balakireff’s Tamara, but he did not make concessions to the dancers; instead, if anything, he speeded up the tempo, making the dancers work very hard to keep up with the music. After the piece was finished, Sir Thomas said, “That made the buggers hop!”

Theater

• August Wilson has written many plays about the Black Experience, including The Piano Lesson, in which Charles S. Dutton danced with his back to the audience. Caricaturist Sam Norkin felt that this was a brilliant idea, as it kept a serious play from appearing to be a musical. However, later Mr. Norkin learned that Mr. Dutton danced in this way because he was “bashful” about his dancing, although the play’s director, Lloyd Richards, wanted him to face the audience.

• A Broadway show called Strike Me Pink had a chorus line that consisted mostly of the girlfriends of the financial backers of the show. One backer of the show, Waxey Gordon, saw a pretty chorus girl in the show and asked whose girlfriend she was. Informed that she wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend, he asked, “Then how the hell did she get into the show?”

• Sir Ralph Richardson once toured in William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in Quito, Ecuador, where the dancing fairies had a rough time because of the high altitude and the lack of oxygen. Quickly, the company learned to put oxygen tanks behind the trees, so the fairies could breathe in extra oxygen before dancing.

Travel

• George Balanchine wanted his dancers to learn from the places they traveled. Once, Patricia Neary was in Rome, teaching a ballet by Mr. Balanchine. She telephoned him to talk about the dancers, but Mr. Balanchine asked, “Pat, but what about Rome? What have you seen?” She honestly answered, “Nothing.” Mr. Balanchine then said, “Forget about my ballet! You’re only in Rome once. Go out and look at the beauty of Rome. The sculptures, the fountains, the Sistine Chapel — Rome. Learn!” She did.

• Anna Pavlova took her dance troupe to Japan, where H. Algeranoff purchased a cup with a design of blue reeds against a cream background for only twopence. To the Japanese, the cup was nothing special, but to foreigners, it bore the mark of perfection. Ms. Pavlova admired the cup, then she told Mr. Algeranoff, “You know, Algy, there is nothing in this country that one wants to throw away.”

• Being young and ignorant has its advantages. At the very beginning of her career, in 1928, modern dance pioneer May O’Donnell crossed the Atlantic in a ship. A very bad storm — which she called “one of the worst storms in the century” — occurred, and because she and the other young dancers did not realize in how much danger they were, they thought the rolling of the ship in the storm was fun.

• In London, while dancing Giselle, Alicia Markova performed on a stage that used lifts — remarkable for their speed — to ascend Giselle from the grave to the world of the spirits known as Wilis. One performance, as she stepped onto the lift, one of the stagehands said, “Here goes the last jet to Wili-Land!”

• When Maria Tallchief joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo as a 17-year-old, she was untraveled. On her first train trip with the troupe, she spent all of the first night sitting straight up in her seat — because she didn’t know how to make it recline and she didn’t want to ask anyone for help.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Sex, Swan Lake, Tap Dance

Sex

• Dance impresario Paul Szilard once saw ballerina Nora Kaye wearing lots of jewels, and he asked her, “Nora, are these faux, or are they real?” She replied, “Darling, they’re real.” The fabulous jewelry had come from rich man Harry Winston, who unfortunately did not pay for it, and who later asked for it back. Ms. Kaye did not want to return the jewelry. This led to a lawsuit, and the judge ruled against Ms. Kaye, forcing her to return the jewelry. When Mr. Szilard asked what had happened, Ms. Kaye replied simply, “Well, my dear, I f**ked for nothing.”

• Martha Graham once lectured at a Texas university where Tommy Tune was studying. She told the dance students in a lecture, “All great dance stems from the lonely place.” One of the dance students said, “Miss Graham, you said that all great dancing stems from the lonely place. Where is the lonely place?” Ms. Graham replied, “Between your legs. Next question.” According to Mr. Tune, “We were never the same again.”

• American dance pioneer Ted Shawn once choreographed the bawdy ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, in which the Spartan and Athenian women decide to stop the Peloponnesian War by declining to have sex until the war ends. According to Mr. Shawn, the young dancers of his company claimed to have “learned about life from the birds, the bees, the flowers, and the Lysistrata ballet.”

• While watching David Lichine dance in L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune, photographer/writer Gordon Anthony never wondered why the nymph ran after dropping her scarf!

• Ford Madox Ford once told a story about an old lady who, after watching a couple dance the tango, said, “I suppose it’s all right — if they really love each other.”

Swan Lake

• Cynthia Gregory was able to dance the role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake in only her second year with American Ballet Theatre when David Blair of The Royal Ballet staged a new production. She was chosen to be one of the dancers who would understudy the role. Three of the dancers had to stop understudying the role, then a fourth understudy became pregnant. This left the ballerina and two understudies, including Ms. Gregory. However, tickets for Swan Lake sold briskly, and ABT decided to add two more performances and let all three dancers undertake the role.

• Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn were wonderful partners in ballet, but they differed artistically. Before they first performed Swan Lake together, Mr. Nureyev was worried. While dancing in Swan Lake, Ms. Fonteyn used much mime, telling the story in gestures, and Mr. Nureyev worried that he “would feel silly standing about” in the mime scenes, and so he told her, “I am afraid I will ruin your Swan Lake.” Looking him straight in the eyes, Ms. Fonteyn (amiably — but firmly) replied, “Just you try.”

Tap Dance

• Peg Leg Bates lost his leg when he was a child working in a cottonseed gin during World War I. However, he didn’t let it stop him. His uncle made a peg leg for him — possible because his leg was amputated below the knee — and he learned how to tap dance, using the peg leg to create a heavy, distinctive beat. He was so successful that he appeared on Ed Sullivan’s variety television show a total of 21 times — more than any other tap dancer.

• Back in the glory days of tap dancing, dancers would sometimes try to “steal steps” from other dancers. Tap great John Bubbles enjoyed playing a practical joke on other tappers. He would sit in the front row of a vaudeville theater, and when the tap dancer performed Mr. Bubbles took out a pencil and a notebook and pretended to diagram the dancer’s steps. Often, the dancer would speed up to stop the “thievery.”

• Comedian Lily Tomlin used to do some weird stunts when she was starting out in show business. For example, she used to tap dance while barefoot — after gluing taps to the soles of her feet.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Rehearsals, Religion, Respect, Retirement, Sabotage

Rehearsals

• Anna Pavlova took dance rehearsals seriously. Early in her career, she arrived at the Mariinsky Theatre, but discovered that she had forgotten her practice clothes. No problem. She wrapped two towels around her body and practiced — despite the sniggering of the stagehands in the theater.

Religion

• After Rumi, the founder of the Whirling Dervishes, died, zealots went to the ruler and asked him to suppress Rumi’s innovations of sacred dance and sacred music. The ruler, being a wise man, asked a learned man, the Mufti of Qonya, Sheik Sadru-’d-Din, if he should listen to the zealots. The Mufti told him, “Do nothing of the kind. Listen not to such biased suggestions. There is an apostolical saying to this effect: ‘A laudable innovation, introduced by a perfect follower of the prophets, is of the same nature with the customary practices of the prophets themselves.’” The ruler took the Mufti’s advice and did not suppress the Whirling Dervishes’ sacred dance and sacred music.

• Dance is sometimes liturgical. At a Catholic Church, a young female dancer rhythmically moved down the aisle, then laid a lily at the bishop’s feet. The bishop joked to the pastor, “If she asks for your head on a platter, she can have it.”

Respect

• Even at very young ages, ballet dancers can command attention. While Antoinette Sibley was still at the British junior ballet school — the White Lodge — the ballet students were excited over a program listing all the dancers, even the minor ones, of a performance of The Sleeping Beauty. The excitement was not over the dancers performing Aurora or the Prince but over a dancer with a minor role — “Antoinette Sibley is a Lilac Fairy attendant!”

• Soviets respect ballet. To correctly film a scene in Romeo and Juliet, ballerina Galina Ulanova had to run 70 or 80 yards several times. At first, a group of watching sailors applauded each time she made the run, then they began to worry that she might exhaust herself. One sailor told choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky, “If you kill her, we’ll kill you.”

• When Eleanora Hughes was dancing in Paris, a Spanish marquis fell in love with her and threatened to jump out of a window unless she returned his love. She told him, “All right, dear, go ahead and jump. But since the room is only two stories above the ground, I’m not the least impressed by your bravery.”

Retirement

• Modern dance pioneer Martha Graham danced until she was 75, and she took her retirement from dance hard, although she continued to teach and to choreograph. One day, Tim Wengerd, a dancer in her company, saw that she had been crying, and she explained that she had been dreaming that she was dancing — something she was now incapable of doing in real life.

• As the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev edged closer to his 50^th birthday, critics began to say that it was time for him to retire. However, Mr. Nureyev declined to stop dancing. Instead, he said, “Inside, I am only twenty-three, an eternal youth. Dancing, for me, is forever.”

Sabotage

• During her performance in the ballet Firebird in New York, Irina Baronova leaped onto the stage, only to have her shoulder straps break and the top of her costume fall down. Her dance partner, Paul Petroff, reached under her arm and held up her costume while she finished the dance. Later, they examined her costume and discovered that it had been sabotaged — a razor blade had been used to almost sever the shoulder straps.

• After ballerina Marie Taglioni made her triumphant debut at the Paris Opéra, several ballet dancers became so jealous that before her next performance, they sprinkled bits of soap on the stage in the hope that she would slip on them.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Programs, Rehearsals

Programs

• Léonide Massine choreographed La Boutique Fantasque for — of course — humans. Believe it or not, while Mr. Massine was in residence in San Francisco in 1977, a version of the dance was performed at the Rossmoor Miniature Theatre — the dancers were puppets!

Rehearsals

• George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet once needed a leading dancer to perform as Apollo at short notice, and Peter Martins, a young dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet, was called in to dance. Everything seemed to Mr. Martins to go well at the first performance, and the critics agreed, but the next day at rehearsal Mr. Balanchine said to him, “Before we begin, you know, you do it all wrong.” Then Mr. Balanchine showed him what he wanted. (Mr. Martins says he got the impression during the rehearsal that perhaps the one thing he had done right was to show up for the performance.) Later, Mr. Balanchine told Mr. Martins’ teacher, Stanley Williams, that he had been impressed with the young dancer at the rehearsal: “I changed everything, and he remembered everything.” This led to Mr. Martins being asked to join the New York City Ballet.

• Anna Pavlova’s dance company once arrived in Washington, D.C., for a three-day engagement, but the ballet master neglected to call for a morning rehearsal — an oversight the dancers gleefully took advantage of. Arriving at the theater that evening with only minutes left to put on makeup and costumes, the dancers were confronted by Ms. Pavlova, who told them to form a straight line on the stage, then asked, “Have you practiced today?” All of the dancers were forced to admit that they had not. Ms. Pavlova then said, “I am Anna Pavlova — you are my corps de ballet. I practice every day while you do nothing — we will have a lesson here and now.” She then made her dancers practice for half an hour, despite the audience members who were impatiently stamping their feet on the other side of the curtain while waiting for the performance to begin.

• Opera singer Mary Garden sometimes watched rehearsals of the Ballets Russes with Sergei Diaghilev, and she noticed just how much attention to detail he paid. On one occasion, he noticed a tiny flower in a dancer’s hair and ordered her to remove it because the color wasn’t right. Ms. Garden asked him, “Don’t you ever rest?” Mr. Diaghilev replied, “My dear Mary, there is all eternity to rest.” Ms. Garden writes, “I don’t wonder it was the greatest ballet company in the world.”

• Buddy Ebsen is perhaps most famous for his role as Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies; however, he and Vilma Ebsen were a famous brother-and-sister dance team during the 1930s. Frequently, they rehearsed in hot, unventilated rehearsal halls, leaving pools of sweat on the floor. Other people used to come into the rehearsal hall, look at the pools of sweat on the floor, and ask, “Were the Ebsens here?”

• At a ballet rehearsal in London, Sergei Diaghilev suddenly asked Leon Bakst, “What are the three most beautiful things in this theatre today?” Then he answered his own question, “[Ballerina] Olga Spessiva, the little boy with the big brown eyes, and me.” The “little boy with the big brown eyes” was Anton Dolin, who became famous throughout the world as a ballet dancer.

• When it came to his dancing, Fred Astaire was a perfectionist. He sometimes rehearsed 18 hours a day, losing up to 15 pounds in the process. In addition, when his dancing partners rehearsed with him, at the end of the practice, they would sometimes find blood in their shoes. Mr. Astaire once explained why he rehearsed so much: “I wanted to make it good, then make it better.”

• Ballerina Natalia Makarova was rehearsing Manon when the orchestra suddenly began playing an unexpected piece of music. She felt bad because this meant she wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the music of the ballet, but then she saw everyone smiling at her and realized that the orchestra was playing “Happy Birthday.”

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David Bruce: Problem-Solving, Programs

Problem-Solving

• Alexandra Danilova once requested her partner, Edouard Borovansky, to not clown around in the background while she danced her variation in Le Beau Danube. He replied that he didn’t even notice when he was clowning around because he was so carried away by the role. Therefore, the next time Mr. Borovansky clowned around, Ms. Danilova slapped him. Of course, he asked her why she had slapped him, and she replied, “Oh, did I? I was so carried away by my role, I didn’t even notice it.”

• As a ballerina who danced the part of Odette, the Swan Princess, in Swan Lake, Cynthia Gregory was always careful to never get a tan. In the glare of the blue stage lights, a ballerina with a tan under her white makeup would look purple. In addition, after years of performing, Ms. Gregory learned to place her personal items — hair spray, makeup, comb and brush, etc. — in the same place each time on her makeup table so she could quickly find what she wanted, even when she is in a new theater.

• In George Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, a single stage prop served many uses. It was used to represent a fence with a gate, a banquet table, a rostrum, and a boat, with the Siren’s red cloak serving as a sail. The prop served these uses partly out of necessity. The boat that was to be used in the production was not finished in time, so Mr. Balanchine decided to use the stage prop he already had. This worked out so well that the boat was never used, even when it was finished.

• Anna Pavlova’s dance troupe spent years touring the United States and appeared in many small towns as well as big cities. Of course, many mishaps arose and many problems had to be solved during those tours. Once, the power went off just as their performance was about to start. Stagehands borrowed several cars and parked them where the headlights would cast light on the stage through the theater’s doors and windows. The show went on.

• While touring in South America, the ballet team of Alicia Alonso and Igor Youskevitch was confronted by an abusive audience member in a very crowded stadium. The other audience members solved the problem by grabbing the offensive man, hoisting him high, then passing him above their heads until finally they threw him over a wall and outside the stadium.

• One of the artworks owned by choreographer Léonide Massine was a drawing by Pablo Picasso that showed a satyr raping a nymph. Mr. Massine’s cleaning woman in London looked at the drawing, then told him, “Either that goes, or I do.” Because he needed a cleaning woman, Mr. Massine packed up the drawing and sent it to his home in Italy.

• Ballerina Yvette Chauviré once averted a disaster on stage. While dancing the lead in Giselle, her pearl necklace broke and fell to the floor. Improvising a dance step, Ms. Chauviré swept the necklace to the side of the stage, out of the way of the other dancers, then continued her performance.

Programs

• Alicia Markova felt strongly about Giselle and did much to make it a staple of ballet. During a season of the Markova-Dolin Ballet, the other directors out-voted her and said that Giselle would not be performed that season. However, Ms. Markova forced the other directors to change their minds by threatening to jump off her dressing room balcony if Giselle were not put in the season’s schedule.

• Anna Pavlova was famous for her dance interpretation of Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Dying Swan.” After Ms. Pavlova’s death, choreographer Michel Fokine asked ballerina Alicia Markova to revive “The Dying Swan,” but she declined to do so until a note was put in the program saying that the dance was dedicated to the memory of Ms. Pavlova.

• World-renowned choreographer Antony Tudor once attended an all-Tudor program put on by American Ballet Theatre. Afterward, he overheard a member of the audience say, “Three Tudor ballets in one evening! That’s a bit much, isn’t it?” Mr. Tudor said that after hearing this, he “agreed wholeheartedly.”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Prejudice, Problem-Solving

Prejudice

• The great black dancer Bill Robinson, aka Mr. Bojangles, fought prejudice. One day, some members of Duke Ellington’s band ordered coffee and doughnuts but were refused service. They ran into Mr. Bojangles and told him what had happened. He told them to follow him, and they all went back to the restaurant. Mr. Bojangles sat down, pulled out his gold-plated gun with the pearl handles, laid the gun on the table, and ordered coffee and doughnuts for himself and his friends. This time, they were served.

• After turning age 13 in 1930, Wah Ming Chang took dancing lessons in a school in California. Unfortunately, soon he was told to leave and never come back. Later, he found out that some parents had complained after discovering that their daughters were dancing with a boy of Asian heritage. As an adult, Mr. Chang became a famous artist and award-winning creator of special effects for such television series as Star Trek and such movies as The Time Machine.

• In the Jim Crow days, black dance pioneer Katherine Dunham toured the South, where she often confronted race prejudice. In a segregated theater in Louisville, Kentucky, she was outraged because blacks were forced to sit in the balcony. After the performance, she stood on stage, looked at the white members of the audience, and stated, “This is the last time we shall play Louisville because the management refuses to let people like us sit by people like you.”

• During the Jim Crow days, Sir Rudolf Bing took the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Aida on tour to Washington, where he was informed that Janet Collins, the Met’s African-American ballerina, would not be welcome at a party at the Mayflower Club. Therefore, Sir Rudolf stayed away from that party and hosted his own, at which Ms. Collins was very welcome.

• In 1937, while traveling in the pre-civil rights south, Norma Miller and some other touring Lindy Hop dancers stopped at a White Castle hamburger joint to order food, only to be told, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” One of the dancers replied, “We don’t eat Negroes — just serve us a burger!”

Problem-Solving

• Comedian Fanny Brice always had a talent for singing, but she soon realized that her weakness was dancing — a weakness for which George M. Cohan once fired her from the chorus line of one of his shows. Being ambitious, Fanny began to work on her weakness. Before leaving on tour with a show, the young Fanny went through her family’s home and gathered up all the female undergarments she could find, using the excuse that as the star of the show she had to make many costume changes and couldn’t possibly wear the same bloomers during an entire show. (Actually, she had only one song in the show.) On the road, she began to ask girls in the chorus to teach her dance steps in return for the undergarments. As soon as one girl got tired of teaching her, Fanny would offer some bloomers to another girl. In time, she learned to dance.

• Fern Helsher, an attractive woman, worked as a press agent for Ted Shawn at his dance retreat, a former farm called Jacob’s Pillow. One day, a road crew was putting tar topping on the road by Jacob’s Pillow, but they were stopping about 100 feet from the driveway leading to Jacob’s Pillow. Mr. Shawn mentioned to Ms. Helsher that he had asked the town officials to extend the tar topping another 100 feet but they were unwilling to do so. Ms. Helsher said, “Let me handle this.” She then dressed very provocatively, mixed a pitcher of martinis, and went down to the road crew. She stood at the point to which Mr. Shawn wanted the tar topping poured and told the members of the road crew, “If you build the road to this line, you can have everything you see just beyond it.” The road crew raced to build the road, and when they had finished, Ms. Helsher put down the pitcher of martinis and ran to safety.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Nudity, Old Age, Photographs, Prejudice

Nudity

• When Russian heiress Ida Rubinstein wished to dance nude in the role of Salome in 1908, her brother-in-law, a physician, was so upset that he committed her to a mental institution. It didn’t work. After she got out of the mental institution, she appeared nude in many roles, including that of Cleopatra.

• As Rudolf Nureyev was dancing in Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty at the Metropolitan Opera, a naked man streaked across the stage. Mr. Nureyev — a homosexual — was delighted.

Old Age

• In his old age, dancer Léonide Massine went to San Francisco to recreate his choreography of Le Beau Danube. During his stay at the Valley View Lodge, videotapes of him giving lessons to several dancers were shown, causing some elderly residents to ask, “Did you ever dance, Mr. Massine?” He smiled at the question, replied, “A little,” then taught the elderly residents a few exercises to lessen their pain from arthritis. Shortly thereafter, the elderly residents came to Mr. Massine and thanked him for his help, saying such things as, “I can move now. Thank you so much for your help — it is better than medicine.”

• Modern dance pioneer José Limón once lived temporarily at the Ruxton Hotel on West 77th Street in New York City — a hotel where many retirees lived. As a dancer/choreographer, Mr. Limón was surrounded each day at work by bodies that were nearly perfect, and he was shocked by the bodies of the retirees. Sometimes, he wondered what they had done with their lives to have ended up with such grotesque bodies.

Photographs

• Many dance photographs of Anna Pavlova exist, but people often don’t realize how much work went into taking them. The art of photography was in its infancy, and to get an adequate exposure, Ms. Pavlova sometimes had to hold a pose for 20 seconds. To get a photograph of Ms. Pavlova jumping, the photographer was forced to string her up on clotheslines.

• Gordon Anthony’s book A Camera at the Ballet: Pioneer Dancers of the Royal Ballet did much to give credit to these dance pioneers. Such credit was sorely needed, as a young Royal Ballet School dancer saw a photograph of one of her teachers (a dance pioneer) and exclaimed, “Goodness, were you once a dancer!”

Practical Jokes

• Karen Kain once played a practical joke during a dress rehearsal for Sleeping Beauty. Of course, she was dancing the role of the princess Aurelia, but she dressed herself in horn-rimmed glasses, the witch Carabosse’s fright wig, and bright blue leg warmers for the scene when her dance partner, Frank Augustyn, awakens her with a kiss. The joke amused everyone — except for management, who reprimanded her the following day for not setting a good example for the younger dancers.

• In 1966, while acting in George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, Sir Ralph Richardson fooled the younger members of the cast by telling them anecdotes about dancing with Fred Astaire. They believed him until he went too far and told them he had also danced with Nijinsky.

Prejudice

• Sir Rudolf Bing was the major force behind the integration of the Metropolitan Opera. For example, after being hired as general manager in 1950, he immediately hired the first African-American ballet dancer to dance at the Met — Janet Collins, who danced in the triumphal scene in Aida. How did he get around the board of the Metropolitan Opera, which might have opposed the hiring of Ms. Collins? Simple. Sir Rudolf says, “I told the board about it after the contract was signed.” Sir Rudolf also was responsible for signing the first African American who sang opera at the Met: Marian Anderson, who sang the part of Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Movies, Names, Native Americans, Nudity

Movies

• As a ballerina in the former Soviet Union, Natalia Makarova was asked to star in a movie of Swan Lake. However, she discovered the movie director lacked taste, although he thought he was capable of teaching her how to dance the role of Odile. When he told her, “Dance as if you wanted to seduce me,” she replied, “I haven’t the slightest desire to do that to you,” and then she walked off the set and refused to return. The director was forced to find another ballerina to dance the role of Odile.

• Whenever Fred Astaire was ready to shoot a big dance number for one of his films, word would go out across the studio, and lots of people would come around to watch the dancing. Anthony Perkins was doing a Western while Mr. Astaire was filming Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn, and he remembers lots of gunslingers watching the filming of “Clap Yo’ Hands.”

• The year 1940 was a very bad year for Fred Astaire, who starred in the turkey Second Chorus, but it was a very good year for his former dance partner Ginger Rogers. When she won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Kitty Foyle, Mr. Astaire sent her this one-word telegram: “OUCH.”

Names

• The mother of the great tap dancer Savion Glover, one of the creators of Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk, knew he was special when she was pregnant with him. In fact, his name comes from a religious vision his mother had — she saw God writing a name on a blackboard: SAVIOR. She read the name, then said, “Now, You know I can’t name him Savior.” Therefore, she substituted an “n” for the “r.” To a great extent, Mr. Glover has been the savior of modern-day tap dancing, bringing it into the era of hip-hop.

• Edward Villella and other dancers called ballerina Melissa Hayden “Old Ironsides” as an affectionate mark of respect for her hard work and determination. One of the things she did to get energy for dancing was to inject herself with vitamin B12. One day, thinking Mr. Villella needed some extra energy, she told him, “Honey, take down your pants.” He obeyed her — and was rewarded with a needle in his butt.

• Russian ballet dancer Elena Lukom ran into a problem when she performed in Sweden because audience members laughed when she was introduced. Fortunately, she was able to solve that problem easily. She discovered that in Swedish her last name meant “rest room,” so whenever she toured in Sweden she changed her last name to Lukova.

• Loïe Fuller started a dancing school whose pupils danced for her. The pupils’ real names were kept secret from the general public on the grounds that they were from prominent families that might be embarrassed by the publicity, and on the dance programs they were given pseudonyms such as Buttercup, Chocolate, Peach, Pinky, and Smiles.

Native Americans

• When the Native American tribe known as the Wampanoag dance, they dance both clockwise and counterclockwise. When they dance clockwise, they are thanking the good spirits. When they dance counterclockwise, they are paying respect to the other spirits — the evil ones.

• According to many Native Americans of Canada, the Northern Lights are actually a dance. When the Northern Lights appear in the sky, one sees the spirits of the ancestors dancing.

Nudity

• The costumes for Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches underwent several changes before the ballet’s premiere. The costume worn by dancer Vera Nemchinova originally was a full-length evening dress; however, costume designer Marie Laurencin very quickly cut off the train. Ballet producer Sergei Diaghilev then cut off the rest of the skirt. When Ms. Nemchinova complained that the costume made her feel naked, Mr. Diaghilev told her to buy a pair of gloves.

• Sometimes what you think you see is not what you actually see. To create an illusion of nudity, female dancers sometimes wear flesh-colored costumes on which nipples and navels have been painted. Sometimes what you think you see is what you actually see. In 1978, Vivi Flindt stripped off all of her clothing to perform the dance of Salome for the Royal Danish Ballet. Her husband, Flemming Flindt, danced the role of Herod.

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