This is the extended version of a conference paper, presented at the Modernism Studies Association Conference in Amsterdam, August 2017, as part of a round table "Modernism and Recent Developments in Dance Research: Cross Cultural Collaborations" with Allana Lindgren (University of Victoria, Canada), Susan Cook (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA), Andrea Harris (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA), Rebekah Kowal (The University of Iowa, USA), Tara Rodman (Northwestern University, USA) & Emily Wilcox (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA). This paper comes from a larger project which looks at the influence of 'Black' dance on Australian modern dance from 1940s to 1960s.
DRAFT
“On the edge of my seat”: ‘Black’ dance and the transnational education of Anita Ardell
“It is sumptuous, it is dazzling, a feast for the eye and a tonic for emotion lulled to sleep by the routine of Western living” (Tory, 1947).
“I will hold within me till I die the memory of those waves of rhythm and of unashamed and uninhibited physicality that rolled out over the auditorium from the stage” (Bane, 1995).
“The thrust and jab of its movement, the pace and rattling excitement of its delivery were of a quality to leave any spectator limp with exhausted tension” (R.C., 1961).
“[they] shattered the gilt and plush atmosphere [with] raw rhythms and pungent harmonies” (Anon, 1962).
“There was the shimmering of quivering muscles as the men in prodigious leaps flung themselves through the air [and] the women, fleet and supple, have a body lilt the weaves rhythmic sound into sight patterns” (Dean, 1965).
These breathless quotes were inspired by visiting dancers from the sub-continent of India and the islands of the Caribbean, the cities of Brazil, Cuba, and the United States, and the new republics of Africa. In the middle decades of the 20th Century, Australians were astounded, assaulted, disturbed and inspired by a rhythmic mixture of the dazzling skill and the confronting politics of what I am calling, very loosely here, ‘Black’ dance. In the three decades that followed WWII—when Ananda Shivaram arrived from India on his first visit to Australia in 1947, when Katherine Dunham came from the United States in 1956, when the musical West Side Story landed in 1960, when Carmen de Lavallade & Alvin Ailey brought their company here in the same year, when Les Ballets Africains performed in 1963, the African Dance Ballet Company in 1965, and Eleo Pomare in 1972—‘Black’ dance transformed Australian dance. As the quotes above suggest, audiences, critics and dancers found themselves repeatedly, and excitedly, on edge of their seats, and the performances and practices of these artists inspired experimentation and translation that would have a long lasting impact on dance and dancers in Australia.
This paper could follow this wave of influence through the experience of any number of working dancers across the 1950s, ‘60s and the early 1970s in Australia—Ruth Bergner, Jack Manuel, Keith Bane, Jannette Liddell, Ronne Arnold or Carole Johnson, to name but a few—and the project from which this paper emerges (partially formed) will do just that. This larger project is ‘transnational’ in focus. It will, to use Susan Manning’s (2017) distinctions, “trace networks of exchange” and “illustrate how local conditions shape the assimilation and transformation of influences from abroad”. It is also interested in the “swarming bodies in real or virtual transit” that moved “back and forth between different geographical areas” (Clayton, 2014, 28). But the project’s ultimate concern is how a swarm of techniques embedded within moving bodies—the infiltration of practices at the level of muscle and bone, creating a profusion of embodied (con)fusions within, as well as between, bodies. It will ask, as Justine Shih Pearson (2011) has asked: “how confusion, despite all its negative meanings in everyday usage, might be productive as a continuing description of […] culturally hybrid dance practice, and in broader terms, of moving bodies embodying hybridity” (139). Shih Pearson examined hybridity through the work of Bangladeshi-British dancer Akram Khan and Indonesian-Australian dancer Ade Suharto, but such hybrid complications also played out across the transnational engagements of mid 20th century modern(ist) dancers whose early, dominant ways of being, or more accurately of dancing, encountered profound competition from the migrating gestures of other cultures.
As Amelia Jones has explained, the trans- prefix is useful in any attempt to understand the transnational migration of ideas and actions, as it “designat[es] a movement or connection across, through or beyond”; it “signals change” and, to follow Shih Pearson, accommodates instability and confusion, rather than stability and fusion. For Jones (2016):
[i]t epitomizes the tension between the local and global in understanding how performance and performative identities work [...]. In this context, trans- signals geographical, conceptual, linguistic and migratory crossings through terms such as transnational, transidentification, translation, transmigration, transembodiment (2) [1].
For Kelina Gottman (2016), the movement of concepts, ideas and ways of moving “following lines of geopolitical, economic and social power” and transform “the spaces they inhabit” (17). Following Paul Gilroy’s idea of transfiguration, through which the “ideas from one plane of enunciation, one site, one body, one movement (or move)” transform the locations they encounter, Gottman sees these as “concrete acts”. They occur “in the swing of a hip, the accentuation of a syllable, the utterance marking a figure in space. These forms and intonations, lilts and dips pass between bodies, conjuring relations of alliance” (Gottman, 2016, 18).
In this paper, I will sketch some of those ‘relations of alliance’, and hint at the subsequent trans-embodiments they affected, in and through the trans-national dance education of a young Jewish dancer from Brisbane: Anita Miriam (Altshuler) de Regt.
Anita Altshuler was born in 1934. Later in life she became better known by her professional surname: Ardell. As a young woman Anita Ardell attended dance class with Nell Johnson, a teacher of “modern interpretive” dance in Brisbane Australia, who was “not a particularly technical teacher”, according to Ardell, but a creative theosophist, inspired by her annual pilgrimages to Sydney—holidays that were filled with dance classes with the Austrian émigré Gertrud Bodenwieser [2]. Madame Bodenwieser was a practitioner of, what has variously been identified as European expressionism, Central European dance or Ausdruckstanz. The rise of Hitler, the threat of war in Europe, sent this celebrated Jewish Austrian, and some of her dancers, on an extended world tour through South America and New Zealand, landing in Sydney in 1939. Bodenwieser stayed to re-stage old and create new choreography and teach until her death in 1959 [3]. Eventually Anita Ardell also became a devotee of Bodenwieser’s. But before she moved to Sydney, Ardell saw, trained and performed with the Indian Kathakali dancer, Ananda Shivaram.
Ananda Shivaram came to Australia in 1947, through an association with another Australian born, transnational figure: Louise Lightfoot. Lightfoot’s history in dance has a striking similarity to Ardell’s. Lightfoot took dance classes in the early 1920s with Gertrude Sievers [4]. She was the first woman to graduate in architecture from Melbourne University, 1923, and moved to Sydney as apprentice to Walter Burley Griffin, but kept up her dance interests under the influence of Griffin’s theosophist wife Marion. After seeing Anna Pavlova’s performances in 1926, Lightfoot developed a passion for all things Russian. Two years later she teamed up with Misha Burlakov, a Ukrainian who migrated to Australia prior to WWI, and together they created the First Australian Ballet company. In late 1920s Lightfoot met Shrimati Rukmini (Devi) Arundale, who had married the leading theosophist George Sydney Arundale (1878-1945) and come to Australia in 1929. In Sydney, Devi and Lightfoot cemented their friendship over their devotion to Pavlova, but later Devi took up the study of Bharata Natyam, creating the Kalâkshetra Classical Dance Company and school in Madras in 1936[5].
In 1937 Lightfoot and Burlakov took a trip to Paris and London, where they hoped to secure the rights to perform a range of ballets from the Diaghilev repertoire. While in Europe, Lightfoot took ballet and Spanish dance classes. She also saw Uday Shankar, and declared his art to be “more highly evolved and profound than Russian Ballet” (Lightfoot, 2015, 234). On the way back to Australia, Lightfoot stopped over in India. Her intended two-week holiday turned into almost a year, and when she finally returned from Colombo in February 1938, Lightfoot consolidated her affairs, disappointed Burlakov—leaving him to deal with the Fist Australian Ballet and its school—and returned to India, where she remained for almost ten years.
In India, Lightfoot reunited with Rukmini Devi, taking class at her Kalâkshetra School. She then studied Kathakali, unusual for a woman at this time, at the Kalamandalm School where she met Ananda Shivaram, a young lead dancer in the Vallathol troupe [6].
Lightfoot’s interest in Kathakali, Bharata Natyam, and the dances of Manipur, blossomed at a time when Indians themselves were engaging in a re-assessment of the value of their cultural traditions. As the nationalist movement grew, dance became a means of legitimating pre-Raj culture and challenging contemporary British rule [7]. In her tutelage with Shivaram, Lightfoot had also teamed up with one of a growing number of Indian dancers who were attracted to the idea of modernising dance. Shivaram had spent a year working with Uday Shankar, who O’Shea (2007) has called the “Indian modernist”, and the younger performer followed suit (33). In 1947 Lightfoot brought Shivaram to Australia. Over the next 10 years this Indian artist and his Australian entrepreneur visited most Australian cities, toured Europe and America, and influenced a collection of local dancers [8].
Of Shivaram’s art one critic stated: “[i]t is sumptuous, it is dazzling, a feast for the eye and a tonic for emotion lulled to sleep by the routine of Western living” (Tory, 1947) [9].
In each Australian city he visited, Shivaram taught in local dance schools and picked up a few extra dancers for performances. He linked up with a Jewish Polish dancer, Ruth Bergner, in Melbourne and she accompanied him throughout his tours. In Brisbane Anita Ardell took class with Shivaram and Bergner: “after the first two or three days I could hardly walk” said Ardell, “everything was in a low second position.”
At 17 Anita moved to Sydney, and she gravitated to the studio of her own “modern interpretive” teacher’s mentor—Madame Gertrud Bodenwieser. By 20 Ardell had joined Madame’s company for a tour of Victorian country towns, but during her time with Bodenwieser, Ardell also kept up her Indian dance classes, firstly with a Bodenwieser dancer Basil Patterson, who taught Hindu ‘temple dances’ at the studio from material he had picked up while traveling to India, and then from Jyotikana Roy [10].
Anita Ardell’s accumulation of a hybrid set of performance skills did not end there. While training and performing with Bodenwieser, and keeping up her Indian dance classes, she was also learning ballroom dance, partnering Les Rutherford who was training at the Phyllis Bates Ballroom school in the same building where Bodenwieser had her Pitt St studio. Together Les and Anita danced in ballroom competitions, always showing their dances to not only Phyllis Bates but also Bodenwieser, seeking her seal of approval. Anita also did what she later called “commercial work”—dancing at the Ambassador club in Manly, a beach suburb on the northern shore of Sydney Harbour, as well as, what Ardell called “hoti toiti” clubs or theatre restaurants across the CBD.
With all this influence, the modification and transformation of Anita’s way of dancing was underway. The influences of Ausdruckstanz, Kathakali, ballroom dance partnering and a bit of shimmy-shake-and-step-ball-change were in dialogue, creating a trans-embodiment through trans-national exchange.
Then…Katherine Dunham came to town.
Katherine Dunham and her company arrived in Australia in 1956. They spent several months in Melbourne and Sydney and then returned in 1957, after a tour of New Zealand, Singapore, Korea and Japan. With an anthropological degree from Chicago University, research in the dance practices of the Caribbean, and training in ballet, Dunham was a hybrid iconoclast par excellence. She combined the multiple strands of her education in a career that included concert dance, the formulation of her own technique, writing (both anthropological, dance and autobiographical), as well as a long career on Broadway, in film and touring the globe with her dance company [11]. She “exposed international audiences to an aesthetic of modernity rooted in Africanist cultures” (Das, 2017, 11). By “performing modernity as a hybrid and creative fusion of European, African and indigenous forms,” states Von Eschen (2010),
Dunham’s work challenged the very core of racialized Western societies who denied the value of ‘race-mixing’ and the cultural contributions of black peoples. As she created new worlds of modernity through performances that challenged dominant epistemologies, bringing these performances to fervently responsive audiences across the world, Dunham’s embodied transnational expression influenced metropolitan and provincial cultures alike (157).
But, as Joyce Aschenbrenner (1980) observed, this eclectic, pragmatic mix, meant that Dunham confused her critics at home and abroad, and her work inspired an “untapped store of adjectives” (41).
Performing at the Tivoli Theatre in Sydney, in September 1956, Dunham and her company were described as voluptuous, virile, ecstatically agonised, barbarous, hypnotic, frenzied, infectious, primal, opulent, and sinuous. Their performances displayed “jungle vitality” and “suspended intensity”. This was a “bewildering, enriching and disturbing spectacle”. Dunham’s dance Fertility Ritual from the larger work Rites of Passage was a “mating dance dramatic with phallic significance”; Rara Tonga and L’ag’ya were “orgiastic”. Dunham herself was an “uninhibited voluptuous dark goddess”. The men in the company had “magnificent physiques” and a “barbaric virility”, and Dunham’s “bewildering, enriching disturbing spectacle”, highlighted the “over-civilised and worked-out” impetus of Western performance practices (R.R., 1956 & Foley, 1957). As the Bodenwieser trained Keith Bane (1995) recalled: “I will hold within me till I die the memory of those waves of rhythm and of unashamed and uninhibited physicality that rolled out over the auditorium from the stage on opening night”.
Anita Ardell was also smitten. Nearly 40 years later she recalled:
I was so excited. I was […] sitting on the edge of my seat, I don’t think I breathed. I had never in my life seen anything like that. First of all, the music. There was a full orchestra and there were drums and a full pit; a wonderful conductor —I think that it was Miss Dunham’s husband John Pratt. The costumes were so incredibly colourful and gorgeous. The lighting, I’d never seen anything like it. […] And the smell, it really assailed all of your senses. [Dunham] must have burnt some sort of oil or incense backstage which wafted over into the audience. […] It was just amazing. And of course, she had thirty [sic] black dancers [and] two white girls [12].
Ardell saw the show 3 times.
While in Australia, the dancers and drummers in Dunham’s company were generous with their time – teaching and accompanying classes in various studios during their tour. Ardell’s ballroom dance teacher, Phyllis Bates, “had a real eye for great dance artists”, and arranged for Francisco Angubella, one of the Cuban dancer/drummers, to take class. “I learnt dances that I’d never done before, the cha-cha and merengue, mambo, I’d never heard of these dances”, recalls Ardell.
But it was a chance meeting at the department store that really propelled Ardell into the path of Dunham’s hybrid technique. Ardell bumped into Elijah Hodges and Marvel Martin in David Jones and they told her that Joanne Felce, the white English girl in the company, was leaving and Miss Dunham was holding an audition. “Well”, said Anita,
it was like God spoke to me. […] I went to the audition. It was summer and I was […] very brown [from sun bathing]. I went with bare legs and a black leotard and a green chiffon scarf tied around my waist; I had long hair. Now…every single other dancer, and there were dozens and dozens and dozens [of them]—all the Sydney dancers, […] came in their pink tights, their ballet shoes, their black leotards and their hair pulled back in a bun, and they started to warm up with [long] legs going [on] for days. I thought, oh my goodness, because until that time I had never done a classical ballet class.
When the audition began, Dunham had Lenwood Morris teach class: “she would convey to him what she wanted and he would put us through our paces, and of course, she had some amazing dancers with her, she had John Jones, who later danced with Jerome Robbins, Lenwood Morris was a wonderful classical dancer”. Anita got through the first round, but “the second audition was very frightening. Miss Dunham gave a classical ballet enchaînement. I had never done anything like that, when everybody’s legs were in second position on the right side, my leg was up on the left.” But, Ardell made it through that round as well. Her diverse training and experience—her own developing hybrid embodiment—had become an asset, and Anita was the last auditionee standing. She spent 4 months performing with Dunham in New Zealand and Sydney. As Anita recalls: “every night there’d be tremendous applause, and on the last night, you couldn’t see the stage for streamers”.
But Dunham had high expectations—her dancers were skilled practitioners. Dunham came in to watch rehearsals one day and, seeing Ardell, exclaimed: “For God’s sake, Lenwood, would you teach that girl some ballet!” The other Australian who had been picked up by the company, Jannette Liddell, helped her out, giving her classical classes back stage. But Ardell never missed a company class in the Dunham technique either.
The company classes were very exciting because you would have Julio Mendenz, Albert Laguere, Fransciso Aguabella, sometimes Richardo Avalos playing drums, and to do a class with drumming is just so hypnotic, it is so exciting. [Dunham] would do the set it, and the class didn’t stop. You’d go down the diagonal line of the theatre, quickly, come back, go again in a diagonal line, separate, come back again, and you had this drumbeat going the whole time, […] and we are talking hot drums here, you know, Haitian and Cuban drummers, Brazilian drummers” [13].
As the company prepared to leave Australia for South East Asia, Anita decided not to join them. She had mixed feelings about this choice 40 years later. “It was a very exotic company […] it was quite an eye-opener and I was still […] very inexperienced.” When she decided not to go, Anita said to her friend, Elsie Dayne, “I think my life is over”, to which Dayne replied: “darling, one door closes and another opens”.
One of these ‘doors’ was the emergence of television in Australia, where Ardell performed as a dancer, weekly, making enough money to buy a ticket to visit the United Kingdom. In London, she encountered ballet through the celebrated teacher Audrey de Vos. De Vos trained Beryl Grey, Margo Fonteyn and the dancers from West Side Story. “I saw her, within three months, change people’s bodies” said Ardell, “she was just an amazing teacher.” It was de Vos who suggested Ardell audition for West Side Story.
Now, I had seen West Side Story and for the third time in my life […] I was gobsmaked […]. The first time was the Bodenwieser Ballet […], then there was the Dunham Company, and then I saw West Side Story. I can’t begin to tell you about the music and the energy and the vitality of this show, I went to see it three times, it was so exciting.
Ardell didn’t join the cast of West Side Story, but the “thrust and jab of its movement, the pace and rattling excitement of its delivery”, which left one Sydney critic “limp with exhausted tension”, became another ingredient in the accumulation of embodied experiences that defined the transnational movement education of Anita Ardell: her exposure to jazz. This exposure continued in Italy, Israel, North Africa, and Germany, as Ardell performed in ballet companies, jazz dance companies, night clubs, in circus and on film. Later, she would study with American based jazz dance teachers such as Eugene Facciato Luigi and Matt Mattox.
When Ardell returned to Australia in the early 1960s with her Dutch dancing (soon to be) husband Cor de Regt, whom she had met in Italy, she (officially) began her choreographic career. Anita and Cor opened a dance studio in Sydney and they gave their first recitals in 1965. Keith Glennon (2007) wrote that Ardell’s choreography “had the discipline and conviction of serious experimentation” (200), and when Ballet Australia produced their 1967 season at the Cell Block Theatre in Sydney, Ardell restaged a work she had created for a Bodenwieser workshop in 1959, Transition, and also presented a new piece, Indo-jazz Suite. This work combined all of Ardell’s influences: jazz, classical Indian, Dunham, and Ausdrucktanz. For two local critics, this piece was a disciplined work of “serious innovation”, it “created an effect of stylishly controlled verve” (Glennon, 1967).
The transnational dance education of Anita Ardell was the result of Manning’s networks of exchange transformed by local conditions. Socio-political events over which Anita had no control brought these exchanges into close proximity: the rise of National Socialism in Europe, which forced the migration of artists across the world; the developing nationalism of an impending post-colonial India, which saw the creation of new art forms for local and global consumption; a developing consciousness of a Black diaspora, which produced hybrid forms that confused what could be understood as ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’. Artists caught up in these global events put the possibility of difference in the path of this young Jewish Australian dancer. Her choice to partake of what was on offer were reliant on her ability to be “gobsmacked”, to be pushed to the “edge of her seat” by what she did not recognise, but found fascinating. But it was at the level of her body where her transnational transfiguration took place. It was in the modern play of hybridised forms that Anita Ardell became part of the story of the impact of ‘Black’ dance on the transnational history of Australia’s modern dance.
I have yet to establish the impact of the visits of de Lavallade & Ailey, Les Ballets Africains, the African Dance Ballet Company on Ardell – this will be possible once more research has been done in relation to her history and archive. In the larger project the impact of these artists will be explored as well as those canvased here, and bookended by Eleo Pomare’s visit in 1972 (see Fensham 2013) which marked the beginning of one of Pomare’s dancer’s relationship with Australia, Carole Johnson, and her part in the development of ‘Black’ dance in Australia. Carole Johnson started the dance company Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre (AIDT) in the mid 1970s, introduced dance to the Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Scheme (AISDS), 1976, spearheaded the creation of the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA), 1988, and created the dance company Bangarra (1989). Carole Johnson is soon to begin an PhD exploring the role of dance in the Black Theatre movement of the 1970s in Australia. Also important in this story are the other dancers who migrated across this period: Antonio Rodriguez from Katherine Dunham and Ronne Arnold, a Shark in West Side Story, to name but two influential dancer/choreographer/teachers. Theirs and other transnational trans-embodiments will be part of my larger research project.
NB: 'Black' is continually framed in scare quotes in this draft paper as I have included the work on Indian choreographer dancer Shivaram. This term needs examination and consideration regarding its utility and accuracy in relation to the more formal outcomes of the project.
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NOTES
[1] Jones also acknowledges that trans- “is of course also frequently connected to transgender politics - trans - here is a signal of misalignment or fluidity, depending on how one understands these identifications. The trans- itself is fluid and multipurpose, a mode of performing complex relationships between one site, identification or mode of speaking/doing/being and another”. (Jones, 2016, p. 2)
[2] All direct quotes from Anita Ardell in this paper are from Ardell 2001.
[3] The influence of Ausdruckstanz had been embedding in the culture and bodies of generations of Australia dancers since the late 1920s through the influence of Lola Laban, Sonja Revid, Irene Vera Young, Gertrud Bodenwieser, Elisabet Wiener and others. For more on the history of these women and the dancers they influenced see Brissenden & Glennon 2009; Card 2015, 2011, 2009, 1999a, 1999b; Vincent, 2007.
[4] Lightfoot claims that Sievers was a disciple of Mary Wigman, however, it is possible that Gertrude Seivers is also Gwen Sievers and the latter had her “head crammed with knowledge about operatic, ballroom, folk, classical and Greek dancing, as well as fencing and general physical culture” on a tour of London and Paris in the early 1920s (Anon, 1922). More research needs to be done here to establish if there was a Wigman link for Sievers, and therefore by association, Lightfoot.
[5] Shrimati Rukmini Devi (Arundale)’s school was dedicated to the re-vitalisation of the Indian temple dances – particularly that of Bharata Natyam. She, along with other Indian dance revivalists such as Krishna Iyer, Anada Coomaraswamy and Kapila Vatsyayan, “delved deep into India’s past to invent an unbroken dance tradition” for the future. (Meduri, 1996, 377, quoted in Chakravorty, 2000/01, 112) The connection between theosophists and dance is another avenue that needs to be explored in future research.
[6] Other women also trod this unusual path in the 1930s and the 1940s: South Indian born Shanta Rao, Kanak Rele and the American Ragini Devi (ne: Esther Sherman) are a case in point. By the 1950s, with an excess of trained male actors from Kathakali academies moving into teaching to supplement their performance incomes, some Kerala families took the opportunity to engage Kathakali teachers for their daughters. In the mid 1960s an all female Kathakali troupe, run by Natana Niketanan, was formed. A few years after this troupe disband, the Tripunithura Kathakali Kendrum Ladies Troupe was formed (1975). Although the idea of women training and performing Kathakali was still controversial, this troupe did have its supporters and they are still performing today. For more on women performing Kathakali, see Daugherty 1991
[7] For more on this see Vankataraman 1994, Hanna, 1993, Chakravorty 2000/01, O’Shea 2007. Joan Erdman goes so far as to suggest that some of the re-discovery of Indian cultural traditions in India was fostered by the Western dancer’s dabbling in the region’s practices in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly through the performances of Pavlova and Ruth St Denis. This internationalism “propelled the popularity of the oriental dance back to India and engendered the invention of a modern tradition in Indian dance” (1996, p.262)
[8] Although Sarwal and Walker (2015) attribute the ‘westernisation’ of Shivaram’s Kathakali to Lightfoot, claiming she “realized at a very early stage that, apart from its rigorous training and intricate rhythms, Kathakali would never be ‘adopted entirely by Western dancers’ and audiences because it ‘wouldn’t suit them,’ with all its deeply rooted religiocultural background” (Lightfoot (1946), quoted in Sarwal & Walker (2015), p.317), Shivaram’s acquaintance with Shankar must have had an influence, inspiring this Kathakali dancer to accommodate the expectations (and limitations) of western sensibilities.
[9] Tory 1947. For a history of Lightfoot and Shivaram in Australia see Russell 1982, Card 1998, Lightfoot 2015, Sarwal 2014a & 2014b, Sarwal and Walker 2016, Lightfoot 2017. For West Side Story in Australia see Card 1998
[10] Jyotikana Roy is listed as Jyotikana Ray in “Introduction”, Sarwal in Lightfoot 2017, p.18. I have been unable to find out much about this dancer to date, and it must be said that the ‘Indian’ dance Ardell received with her tutelage from Basil Patterson may have been of questionable derivation. As such, more research needs to be done on the kinds of non-European dance practices that were offered at the Bodenwieser studio.
[11] For more on Dunham’s career see Das 2017, Von Eschen 2010, Clark & Johnson 2005, Manning 2004, Burt 2004 & 2001, Kraut 2003, Aschenbrenner 2002, Fischer-Hornung 2001, Hill 1994.
[12] One of these girls was the British dancer Joanne Felce. The other was a Melbourne dancer Jannette Liddell – classically trained with experience in musical comedy. Other dancers in the Dunham company for the Australian tour included: Americans Lenwood Morris, Lucille Ellis, Vanoye Aikens, Ural Wilson (also listed as a singer), Yolanda Gaffne, Argentinian Ricardo Avalos, Haitian Albert Laguerre, Brazilian Antonio Rodrigues. There were also Joseph Jenkins, John Jones, Marvel Martin, Judith Patterson, Eleanor St Ann, Jorge Saenz, Deborah Velazquez, Camille Yarbrough. Singers were Elijah Hodges, Madeline Preston, Dorothy Speights, Gloria Wynder, Robert Wiase. The drummers included Haitian Albert Laguerre (also a dancer) with Cubans Francisco Aguabella & Julio Mendez. Source: Tivoli programme Katherine Dunham and her company & Katherine Dunham Souvenir Programme (authors personal collection). Glory Van Scott, Pearl Reynolds, Julie (Robertson) Belafonte are also listed by Aschenbrenner (2002) as members of this touring company (p. 154).
[13] For more in Dunham technique see Fischer-Hornung 2001, Clark & Johnson 2005