OTD in early British television: 5 December 1933
John Wyver writes: There are some surprising names among those who appeared on the 30-line Television service operated by the BBC between 1932 and 1935. Tuesday 5 December 1933 saw the first of two appearances by the then 28-year-old Agnes de Mille, the great American dancer and Broadway choreographer. On this occasion the PasB described her simply as ‘the character dancer’, and she shared a high end variety bill with soprano Vivian Lambelet (not the focus here, but the link will take you to a fascinating article by Christopher Reynolds) and Russian tenor Maxim Turganoff. Seventy years later, and a decade after her death, de Mille appeared on the 2004 37c US postage stamp that is pictured.
Agnes de Mille was the daughter of celebrated film director William C. de Mille and niece of the even more renowned Cecil B. She had become fascinated by watching actors and dancers at work on the sets of her father’s films, and after studying at UCLA in 1933 she moved to London to study to become a dancer with Marie Rambert. Under various names, the Rambert company was to make a significant contribution to the ‘high definition’ service from Alexandra Palace later in the decade, but on this evening in December 1933 de Mille was on her own.
Her solos are listed as ‘Gigue from the Fifth French Suite’ to Bach, ‘Ballet class – after Degas’ to music by Strauss, and to Percy Grainger’s ‘Molly on the shore’, a ‘Harvest Reel’. Presumably the choreography, constrained by both the small studio and the more or less fixed frame scanner, was her own.
The website dedicated to de Mille’s life records her five years in England, along with brief trips back to New York, in this way:
she carried on her work and her studies in London, strengthening her technique and improving her repertory. Rambert’s Ballet Club, where de Mille studied, had other future dance luminaries as pupils including Frederick Ashton, Anthony Tudor, Hugh Laing, Diana Gould and later Margot Fonteyn. Although de Mille did not earn great fame during her sojourn at the Ballet Club, her time there, had a significant artistic influence on her work.
All of the dancers noted here also appeared on television before the war, as future posts will detail. Anthony Tudor in particular choreographed a host of short pieces for the medium.
Nearly a year after her first appearance, on 28 November 1934, Agnes de Mille returned to the BBC studio to be part of a broadcast that also included pieces from regular pianist Cyril Smith (to whom we must accord his own post soon), solos by Australian-born violinist Daisy Kennedy, and songs from Maria Sandra.
On this occasion de Mille was described as ‘the famous American expressionist dancer’, and two of her contributions (she also reprised ‘Ballet class – after Degas’) appear to have been more elaborate. There was ‘Primitive spell’ to an extract from Stravinsky’s Sacré du Printemps. And partnered by Rambert dancer Oliver Reynolds, she performed ‘Incident of Queen Elizabeth with the Spanish Ambassador’ to an anonymous Tudor tune and a fragment of Byrd.
None of these pieces are included in the ‘Full Danceography’ on the official Agnes de Mille website.
Four years later Agnes de Mille returned to New York to begin her association with American Ballet Theatre, to create Black Ritual (Obeah), a work performed by 16 Black female dancers, and then in 1942, Rodeo to Aaron Copland’s score. The rest is the stuff of Broadway legend, with Oklahoma! in 1943 followed by a dozen other classics.
[Where I later learn more about a topic, I add extra elements in the Comments, as here]
I have been reading ‘Literature, Modernism and Dance’ by Susan Jones (Oxford, 2013), which has a very good chapter on ‘Rambert and Dramatic Dance’, which includes on Agnes de Mille’s work with Marie Rambert’s company in the mid-1930s.
Agnes de Mille ‘owed her opening successes in London to the Mercury establishment [the theatre run by Marie Rambert and her husband Ashley Dukes] and she was hailed by the critics as a representative of American modern dance…. All in all, the Mercury Theatre experience helped her increase her dance vocabulary, expand from her solo performances into an experience of group work, and learn the exacting discipline of creating expressive, dramatic movement for intimate spaces.’