Category: Dance

The Funniest People in Dance — Smashwords: Many formats, Including PDF

David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Mishaps, Money

Mishaps

• Early in her career, dancer Ann Miller performed live on vaudeville bills featuring the Three Stooges. One day, the stage manager forgot to put down a rubber mat that protected the stage when the Three Stooges engaged in a pie-throwing sketch. When Ms. Miller came on the stage to dance, she slipped and fell into the orchestra pit. The Three Stooges thought this was funny, but Ms. Miller was upset and left the stage briefly before returning to dance. Afterward, the Three Stooges sent her flowers and congratulated her for acting so professionally by performing after the mishap.

• While filming Follow the Fleet in 1936, Fred Astaire suffered a mishap while dancing with Ginger Rogers. She was wearing a beaded gown, and the right sleeve hit Mr. Astaire’s head, dazing him. However, he continued dancing. Although they made 30 takes of the dance, the best take was the one in which Mr. Astaire carried on despite being dazed.

• Ivan Nagy once danced with Margot Fonteyn in Puerto Rico. They were scheduled to dance at a university, but because of a strike they were forced to dance on an emergency stage at a Holiday Inn with low ceilings. At one point, Mr. Nagy was supposed to pick up Ms. Fonteyn and run with her. He began running, but suddenly she was no longer in his hands. Looking back, he saw her hanging from a chandelier.

• Ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev could be cocky. In 1963, after a late performance, he was walking in Toronto, Canada, when he began to dance up the centerline of a street. A police officer arrested him, and Mr. Nureyev said, “You can’t arrest me. I’m Rudolf Nureyev.” The police officer replied, “Yeah, and I’m Fred Astaire — but you are under arrest.” Mr. Nureyev was taken away in handcuffs.

• For a while, Oscar-winning actress Goldie Hawn was a chorus girl. While dancing in the chorus of the musical Kiss Me, Kate, she witnessed an actor who played a strongman run into a problem. He couldn’t find his costume — a loincloth — so he ended up appearing on stage while wearing a woman’s leotard. Ms. Hawn says, “I laughed so hard I peed down my leg.”

• Nora Kaye was a very energetic ballerina. Once, while dancing in Valerie Bettis’ Streetcar Named Desire, she accidentally knocked out her partner, Igor Youskevitch, forcing her to finish the rape scene by herself.

• Edward Renton once conducted a dance with such a slow tempo that dancer Robert Helpmann, who tried mightily to jump to the music, complained, “Have you never heard of gravity?”

Money

• A society woman once made the mistake of announcing that Anna Pavlova would dance at one of her affairs. Afterward, she asked Ms. Pavlova how much she would charge for a dance, and she was shocked when Ms. Pavlova said the price would be £500. The society woman asked, “Surely £500 is a very great deal of money for a performance which will last only five or six minutes?” Ms. Pavlova stood firm, and since the society woman had already announced that Ms. Pavlova would dance, she was forced to agree to Ms. Pavlova’s price. However, Ms. Pavlova thought for a moment about the kind of guests who would likely be present at the society woman’s party, then she said, “If you do not insist upon my sitting with your friends at supper, I will reduce my fee to £300.”

• Léonide Massine choreographed “The Dying Swan” for Anna Pavlova, and the only two people he taught it to were Ms. Pavlova and his wife. However, when his student Patricia Bowman expressed an interest in learning to dance “The Dying Swan,” he asked his wife for permission to teach it to her. She agreed — provided that Ms. Bowman paid $300 for the privilege. After Ms. Bowman had paid the fee and had learned the dance, Mr. Massine said she might forget some of the steps, so he handed her a book that had photographs of “The Dying Swan” and descriptions of all its steps — Ms. Bowman could have learned the dance merely from reading the book! In addition, Mr. Massine charged her $5 for the book!

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Mishaps

Mishaps

• Many performing artists desire quiet and privacy before facing an audience. Impresario Sol Hurok once was backstage before a performance by Sadler’s Wells Ballet. He knocked on ballerina Margot Fonteyn’s door. No answer. He went away, returned a short while later, and knocked again. No answer. He then opened the door and asked if she had heard his knock. Ms. Fonteyn told him, “GET OUT!” After the performance, the two met, and Mr. Hurok asked if she were angry at him. Ms. Fonteyn smiled, then asked, “Why on earth should I be angry at you?” After Mr. Hurok reminded her that she had told him to get out of her dressing room, she replied, “Don’t you know that, before a performance, I won’t talk to anyone?” After giving him a kiss, she added, “Remember, I don’t want to see anyone before I go on.”

• Soprano Joan Hammond once appeared on the BBC series Gala Performance on the same program as ballet dancers Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Unfortunately, as she was singing, she caught sight of the dancers warming up their muscles at the barre. Normally, this would be OK, but they were warming up using a rhythm that was different from that of the aria that Ms. Hammond was singing, so she had to stop, explain what had happened, apologize, then begin singing again. The aria went well this time, but after the program, the conductor, Malcolm Arnold, told her, “You were lucky, Joan. After Margot and Nureyev moved away from you, they came into my vision, and I had to force myself to keep to Puccini and not follow their timing for the entire aria. I didn’t want to stop and cause you to start yet again.”

• As a young dance student, Peter Martins thought he was both a strong and a good dance partner, but he learned the truth in a performance of August Bournonville’s Far From Denmark. At one point, the 20 males onstage were required to lift their partners and hold them in the air during the applause that followed. Of all the 20 males, young Peter was the first to lower his partner. She was furious at his weakness and hissed at him, “You need to do push-ups.” He cried after the performance, and the next day he bought a piece of exercise equipment known as a chest expander and started to use it and to do push-ups.

• Peter Martins took over as a co-director of the New York City Ballet after George Balanchine’s death. For a while, Mr. Martins continued his dancing career, but he soon discovered that it was too difficult to do both jobs. During a performance with Suzanne Farrell, with whom he had had little rehearsal, he had numerous entrances and exits. While he was standing in the wings, he watched an improvising Ms. Farrell and told the ballet mistress, “Doesn’t Suzanne look great out there!” The ballet mistress replied, “Yes, but you’re supposed to be there with her.” Mr. Martins quickly made a belated appearance on stage.

• Disasters and near-disasters are always a possibility at a public dance performance. Ballerina Darci Kistler once was dancing when her costume started to unravel at a side seam. She remembers thinking that even if her costume came off, she had to continue to dance. (Fortunately, this turned out to be a near-disaster rather than a disaster.) On another occasion, the glue on her false eyelashes glued her eyes shut so that she was unable to see on stage. And once when she was a young ballerina, her perspiration caused her mascara to run down her face; after that experience, she used waterproof mascara.

• Before a matinee performance, a young Margot Fonteyn noticed that some other people were taking a drink, so she had a few drinks, too. Big mistake. The other people weren’t dancing at the matinee, but she was. Feeling tipsy and inclined to giggle, she went on stage and discovered that her body could not do what she wanted it to do. The performance was a nightmare, and the applause following it was scanty. For the next 30 years of her career, she refused to take even an aspirin before a performance, and she never again drank before a performance.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Language, Media

Language

• When Pierre Monteux was conducting for Sergei Diaghilev, a champion of new choreography and new music, he sometimes ran into problems with orchestras that resented playing some of the new music. For example, at the Vienna Opera House, the Philharmonic Orchestra rebelled at playing Igor Stravinsky’s music for Petrushka, and so at rehearsals — despite Mr. Monteux’s best efforts — the violins, celli, basses, and violas played pianissimo, while the woodwinds and brasses played fortissimo. Mr. Diaghilev heard the cacophony, and he yelled at Mr. Monteux, “It’s not Petrushka — it’s a funeral march!” The musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, eager for a fight, jumped to their feet and demanded an apology. Mr. Diaghilev agreed to give them an apology, but he knew that they could not understand French when it was spoken quickly, so he proceeded to insult them in the worst and most derogatory terms possible, but he was such a good actor that the musicians thought he was making an apology. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra accepted the “apology,” the rehearsal went on, but unfortunately, Mr. Monteux says, “The results were dull, uninspired performances because … the great Vienna Philharmonic simply could not play Petrushka.”

• Nicolas Legat was a Russian dancer who lived the last years of his life teaching ballet in England. Unfortunately, he didn’t learn English very well. One day, he spoke to a police officer, using the words that he had learned so he could greet visitors to his dance studio, “Thank you very much, too much, sit down, please.” His lack of English led to some funny sentences. Whenever he wanted to tell a pupil in class to hold her head up, he said, “Keep your football up.”

• Gerald Arpino met Princess Margaret on Oct. 27, 1977, at the Contemporary Dance Foundation Gala at the Hotel Pierre. He had always been told that British royalty are impeccable in their pronunciation, and so he practiced perfectly saying, “I — am — pleased — to — meet — you — Your — Royal — Highness.” The meeting went very well. Mr. Arpino was impeccable in his pronunciation, and Princess Margaret responded, “How d’ja’ do?”

• Alexandra Danilova, from Russia, and Alicia Markova, from England, used to travel throughout the United States and give ballet performances. In the south, waiters often had a hard time understanding Ms. Markova’s British accent, so Ms. Danilova would tell the waiter both of their orders, then say about Ms. Markova, “These French girls — they just can’t learn to speak good English.”

• Andrei Kramarevsky taught classes at the School of American Ballet despite knowing very little English. According to ballerina Darci Kistler, one of his students, he knew only two English words. Dance students who made mistakes, he called “cheap.” Dance students who didn’t make mistakes, he called “expensive.”

• When ballerina Marie Taglioni became pregnant after her marriage, she tried to keep her pregnancy secret by telling other dancers that she had a sore knee. The lie didn’t work. The dancers even began to use the term “mal au genou” (“hurt knee”) as a synonym for being pregnant.

• Alexandre Volinine, the dance partner of Anna Pavlova, did not learn much English. At a restaurant, he would ask for a menu, look intently at it, then point at a random spot on the menu and order, “Ham and eggs.”

Media

• The author of this book once wrote a preview story for an Ohio University School of Dance performance. The only place for interviews during a rehearsal was in a closet, so Ohio University dance teacher Michele Geller told the dance students, “This is David Bruce. He is going to interview you for a story he is writing for The Athens News, so don’t be shocked if he asks you to go into a closet with him.”

• A Sports Illustrated writer once met ballet dancer Edward Villella for an interview. Immediately after shaking hands, Mr. Villella said, “I know the question you’re dying to ask even before you ask it: Am I straight?” (The answer is yes; Mr. Villella is married with children.)

• Loïe Fuller, a 19^th– and 20^th-century American dancer who took Paris by storm, understood the value of publicity. Whenever public interest in her seemed to be decreasing, she would start a lawsuit or announce that she was suffering from a severe illness.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance —Illnesses and Injuries

Illnesses and Injuries

• Apparent setbacks may not be true setbacks. In the United States, Mary Anthony once danced some difficult steps well at a rehearsal for the musical Touch and Go, which was choreographed by Helen Tamiris. Ms. Anthony kept dancing the difficult steps and suddenly she heard a crack like a board being broken, but it was her foot that was broken — in two places. She was not able to dance in Touch and Go, but the musical’s director, George Abbott, witnessed her injury and was so impressed by her dedication that he asked her to stage the musical in London.

• Accidents occur while dancing on stage. At a charity performance, Nicolas Legat was dancing with Olga Preobrazhenskaya when she raised an arm while doing a series of pirouettes and accidentally hit him in the mouth, knocking out several of his teeth. Mr. Legat remained calm, kept his mouth tightly closed, and finished the dance. Because of the applause, Ms. Preobrazhenskaya wanted to dance an encore, but she fainted when Mr. Legat spat four teeth out on the floor backstage.

• Nora Kaye was a New York ballerina who mixed classicism on stage with earthiness off stage. Sometimes the two characteristics would meet. A dancer in Pillar of Fire once suffered from muscle cramps and had to stumble off stage. Three dancers gathered around to help her — although they were supposed to be dancing with Ms. Kaye on stage. This forced Ms. Kaye to improvise a dance. As she leapt past the just-off-stage group, she asked in an aside, “Where the hell is everybody?”

• Young dancer Alicia Alonso had two operations on her eyes to repair detached retinas, forcing her to lie still for months until the physicians allowed her to get up from bed. As she lay in bed, she practiced dancing using only her fingers, moving them as she visualized the movements of the dancers in such ballets as Giselle. When she finally got out of bed, she was unable to stand by herself, but she got herself in shape again and became a world-famous ballerina.

• Agnes de Mille attended the ceremony in which President Gerald Ford presented her fellow choreographer Martha Graham with the Medal of Freedom. (Trivia: President Ford’s wife, Betty, had been a dancer for Ms. Graham.) Shortly after the ceremony, Ms. de Mille suffered a major heart attack and went to the hospital, where she complained, “That’s what comes from having dinner with a Republican!”

• Anna Pavlova frequently danced when she was injured. After she had injured her left ankle while rehearsing in St. Louis, Missouri, newspaper reporters asked her which ankle she had injured. Ms. Pavlova told them, “The right one.” After the reporters had left, she explained to her dancers why she had lied: “Now they will watch the right ankle during the performance, and nothing will seem amiss.”

• Watching is an important part of a dancer’s education. Ballerina Marion Tait once had a nerve removed from her foot. As soon after the operation as she was able, she hobbled into ballet rehearsal, leaning on a cane and wearing a blue plastic bag on her foot. She then began to watch the rehearsal and so learn the choreography.

• After Margot Fonteyn had retired and was ill, Rudolf Nureyev was speaking with her on the telephone. Worried that her illness might tire her too much, he said, “I should go, or I tire you out.” Ms. Fonteyn replied firmly, “Listen. You never tire me out. Never.”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Gifts, Good Deeds, Husbands and Wives

Gifts

• Learning to dance ballet with a partner can be difficult. When Chan Hon Goh, later a prima ballerina with the National Ballet of Canada, was learning to dance with Che Chun, she was terrified at first when he lifted her because she was afraid that he would drop her. Eventually, she learned to trust him, and she treasured a swan-shaped mirror he gave her before their first show together. The card that came with the gift said, “May this be a grand jeté to a brilliant career.” (It was a grand jeté to a brilliant career — and more. Later, they married.)

• Early in his career, ballet master George Balanchine made enough money in Copenhagen to buy an American car, which he took to London, then drove onto a ferry and crossed the English channel to France. Unfortunately, once in France, he discovered that he didn’t have enough money to pay the import fee, so he handed the car keys to a stranger, then continued on his way, using public transportation.

• Alicia Alonso was born in Cuba, but her grandfather was from Spain. When she was seven years old, Alicia and her family visited Spain. Her grandfather asked them for a present — to bring him back a piece of Spain. Therefore, Alicia and her sister learned some Spanish folk dances that they performed for him when they returned to Cuba.

• When she was a young girl, Moira Shearer once darned a pair of ballet shoes while riding in a bus to her ballet lesson. An old man sat next to her and told her of his interest in ballet. He then stood up, handed her a silver thimble, said, “Keep this for luck, my dear,” and disappeared.

Good Deeds

• Modern dance pioneer May O’Donnell and her husband, composer Ray Green, acquired five old, dilapidated townhouses in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Mr. Green devoted time and effort to restoring the townhouses, which Ms. O’Donnell described as looking “as if they were in a Charles Addams cartoon. They were dirty, cobwebbed, dingy, and dank.” After restoring the houses, they lived in one, sold two, and gave two away. Ms. O’Donnell explains why they gave two houses away: “… it involved … helping others find a home. We both had an idea of sharing beyond our own lives. The neighborhood was dreadful, full of drug dealers and dangerous people, but somehow we who lived on this street got together and made it a decent place to live.”

• Many dancers show consideration in helping other dancers. When Maria Tallchief gave her first performance in 1951 as Queen of the Swans in George Balanchine’s production of Swan Lake, things did not go well and she was dissatisfied with her performance. At 1 a.m., she received a comforting telephone call from retired ballerina Felia Doubrovska, who told her, “I just want you to know, Maria, maybe you’re not too happy tonight. But it was nerves.”

Husbands and Wives

• When the young ballerina Maria Tallchief was married to choreographer George Balanchine, they hosted a dinner for composer Igor Stravinsky. Mr. Balanchine liked to cook, but he couldn’t physically be at home to prepare the food, so he left instructions for Ms. Tallchief, telling her when to start cooking the potatoes, etc. Unfortunately, Ms. Tallchief was so nervous that she dropped the potatoes on the floor, where they rolled everywhere, and when Mr. Stravinsky arrived, she was picking up the potatoes, washing them off, and putting them in a pot. A very embarrassed Ms. Tallchief explained what had happened, and a very polite Mr. Stravinsky said, “The potatoes will taste better.”

• People tend to think that celebrities live glamorous lives, but that’s not always true — at least not every moment of their lives. When George Balanchine, one of America’s greatest choreographers, was married to Maria Tallchief, one of America’s greatest ballerinas, the apartment they lived in was on the fifth floor, and they had to walk up five flights of stairs to get to it. In addition, they had to do their own housework. Mr. Balanchine disliked having to walk on newspapers after Ms. Tallchief had scrubbed the floor.

• Dance director Busby Berkeley once liked a woman so much that he walked 10 miles every night to woo her. After doing this for 67 consecutive nights, he gave it up — she had married someone else.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Food, Fouettés, Gays and Lesbians

Food

• Professional musicians are often asked to dinner, and after they have eaten, asked to play for their food. At one such dinner, pianist Anton Rubinstein was asked to play a valse for such guests as wished to dance. Annoyed, he did play a valse, but he introduced so many rubatos into it that he made dancing almost impossible. In addition, he started the valse at a conventional tempo, but then speeded it up so much that no one was able to dance to it.

• Like other young energetic dancers, 15-year-old Jacques d’Amboise had to learn to fight dehydration. Quickly, he discovered a system that worked for him, and whenever the servers at a West 56th Street coffee shop near City Center in New York saw him coming, they would set out a glass of grapefruit juice, a glass of milk, and a glass of water — all of which he quickly drank.

• When Josephine Baker was growing up as an impoverished black child in East St. Louis, she and her brothers and sisters used to look through garbage cans, hoping to find something that could be used to make soup — for example, they were very happy when they found some chicken heads. In the 1920s, Ms. Baker conquered Paris as a dancer.

Fouettés

• It’s possible for an audience to get distracted by the quantity of dance moves and ignore the dancing itself. For example, in Swan Lake the audience tends to count the 32 fouettés made by Odile. That’s why choreographer George Balanchine allowed very few multiple pirouettes in his ballets: “Two, maybe three … after that the audience starts to count.” Someone once said to ballerina Alexandra Danilova, “You do such virtuoso dancing, you do impressive fouetté turns, but you don’t do extreme, multiple pirouettes — why?” Ms. Danilova replied, “Because I am too busy dancing.”

• Early in her career, Natalia Makarova had great trouble with the 32 fouettés in Swan Lake. Of course, they are supposed to be performed in one spot, and the ballet dancer ought not to travel around the stage while spinning, but Ms. Makarova remembers that during her first attempt at them on stage she traveled so far that she ended up in a rear wing where she could not be seen by the audience.

• Anna Pavlova didn’t like to perform fouettés, but that doesn’t mean that she couldn’t perform them when she wanted. One day, she saw a dancer practicing fouettés — but not well. Ms. Pavlova said, “You want to learn fouetté? I show you.” She performed 64 fouettés, then left.

Gays and Lesbians

• As a gay teenager, author Joel Perry used to hide copies of Playgirl, which features a nude male centerfold each issue, under his bed. One day, his mother found them, so he told her that he was keeping them for a girl named Susie so that Susie’s mother wouldn’t find them. His mother believed him. Years later, after he had been living with a male lover for 11 years, she asked him if he was gay. After hearing that he was, she said, “Oh, honey, and you’re not even a good dancer.”

• Before Stonewall, Edythe Eyde used to go to a gay bar that was divided into two halves. One side was reserved for lesbians, and in the other side sat straight men. One day, a straight man came over and asked several women to dance with him. Being lesbians, they weren’t interested. When he reached Ms. Eyde, he said, “What’s the matter, lady? Don’t you dance with men?” She replied, “Of course not! What kind of a girl do you think I am!”

• The first lesbian couple to dance at the White House was Barbara Love and Kay Whitlock. Having gone to the White House in 1978 to present President Jimmy Carter with the International Women’s Year National Plan of Action, they waltzed together to chamber music in an outer chamber.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Food

Food

• Monica Lera, a former member of the Opera House Ballet, remembers a time when she and other dancers played children in Act II in La Bohème and were required to carry food onto the stage. Because the food was real, tasty, and free, and because the dancers were living on low wages, they nibbled on the food before bringing it in, reasoning that no one in the audience could see that a bite or two had been taken out of a slice of ham or a cream cake. Of course, the singers on stage did notice, and in a low voice would joke to the dancers: “The rats have been at this. I shall complain to the management.”

• Mrs. Haskell, the mother of ballet critic Arnold Haskell, enjoyed watching ballet practice at the London dance studio of Princess Seraphine Astafieva. Often she rewarded dancers with boxes of chocolates. Because young dance student Patrick Healey-Kay, who later became world famous as Anton Dolin, knew that Mrs. Haskell enjoyed watching the circle of pirouettes with which Ms. Astafieva’s students ended the class, he sometimes asked Mrs. Haskell what she would give him if he danced two circles of pirouettes instead of just one. In that way, he was able to earn many boxes of chocolates.

• While on tour, Merce Cunningham and his dance troupe stopped at the Brownsville Eat-All-You-Want Restaurant, where they wolfed down food in huge quantities. (Dancer Steve Paxton ate five pieces of pie for dessert!) Mr. Cunningham asked the cashier how the restaurant managed to stay open, and she replied, “Most people don’t eat as much as you people.” On another tour, they stopped at a restaurant that advertised homemade pies. Before the dance troupe left the restaurant, they heard the servers tell the regular pie-eating customers, “I’m sorry — we don’t have any more.”

• Mikhail Mordkin was jealous of the great success enjoyed by his dance partner, Anna Pavlova, who even had food named after her. While the two were preparing to order supper at a restaurant, Mr. Mordkin glanced at the menu, then he grew angry. He showed the menu to Ms. Pavlova and said, “There you are! Now you see! Frog’s legs à la Pavlova! Always it is yourself! Never of Mordkin you think, but always Pavlova, Pavlova, Pavlova! Frog’s legs à la Pavlova! But where is there frog’s legs à la Mordkin? Where is there anything eatable à la Mordkin? Tell me that!”

• As a young child growing up in Ufa, the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev was frequently hungry. When he started kindergarten, he was always late to class each morning, and his teacher asked him why. Young Rudi explained that he had to eat at home. His teacher then reminded him that he could eat at school. What young Rudi didn’t explain was that now he had a chance to eat twice in the morning, he was not going to miss it — especially since he could not be sure that food would be available at home in the evening. (One day in class, he actually fainted from hunger.)

• Alexandra Danilova lived in Russia after the revolution, so she suffered from food shortages for many years. After leaving Russia and going to Germany, where she danced for the Ballet Russe, she feasted on the food there. One day, she was supposed to rehearse with Anton Dolin, but he looked at her and then told her that he was a dancer and not a piano mover. After that — and after being told by the company that she was not allowed to dance until she lost weight — Ms. Danilova slimmed down.

• As you would expect, surrealist Salvador Dali had some very original ideas for ballets choreographed by Léonide Massine. For a scene in which Theseus kills the Minotaur, Mr. Dali wanted to use a real calf’s head from which the dancers would cut pieces of meat and eat them. Mr. Dali and Mr. Massine went to several restaurants to see if they could get a calf’s head, but the best the waiters could do for them was to offer them a veal sandwich.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Dance — Education, Fans, Food

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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