December 15, 1936
The Dance Center of the Brooklyn Museum announces the following program of activities for the season 1936-1937, a program which has been drawn up in consultation with loading dancers and schools of the dance:
(1) Demonstrations of contemporary dance techniques in the Sculpture Court every Saturday morning from 10:30 to 12:30. These demonstrations range from formal recitals to demonstration lessons of the elements of modern dance technique. An organ recital follows each demonstration.
(2) Gallery tours illustrating the relation between the art of the dance and the arts represented in the museum collections, every Saturday at 12:45.
(3) Exhibitions of the dance in art: photographs, painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, etc.
(4) A bulletin of current dance events in New York and vicinity. Professional dancers, managers, producers and booking agencies are urged to send advance notices of recitals and dance productions so that they can be announced by means of this bulletin. Brooklyn, the largest borough of the city of New York, has a large and enthusiastic dance audience. This audience can be reached through announcements at the Brooklyn Museum.
(5) A directory of dance schools. Many members of the Brooklyn Museum audience are interested in dancing themselves. The Museum receives many inquiries about courses of instruction in the dance. Dance teachers and schools of the dance are urged to send complete information about courses of instruction, hours, rates, teachers available for direction of groups formed outside the dance studios, etc. This information will be available to the Brooklyn public in the Museum directory of dance schools.
(6) Resident demonstration groups under the direction of professional dancers. At present about two hundred persons are enrolled in these groups or on the waiting list. Groups are classified as follows: little children 4-6, children 7-9, girls 10-14, boys 10-14, young men 15-20, young women 15-20, business and professional women including housewives 21 and over, business and professional men 21 and over. Registration is kept open and is unlimited, but the number of groups that can work in the museum at any one time is limited by space available and open hours on the crowded calendar of activities.
At present six groups are working, and the applicants fill every group listed above, some of them many times over. The heaviest registration is in the class of business and professional women including housewives. Each group meets only a few times, in order to give members an opportunity to so whether they have a taste or a talent for modern dancing. After the few demonstrations available to each group, membership in which is free, an effort is made to refer interested group members to schools of the dance outside the museum and to organize affiliated dance classes under the direction of cooperating schools of the dance. Teachers from leading schools of the modern dance in New York are cooperating by contributing their services to direct those free demonstration groups. This gives the cooperating teachers an opportunity to appear before the Brooklyn Museum audience and demonstrate their methods of instruction. It is not the intention of the Brooklyn Museum to set up a school of the dance, but merely to provide space where Museum visitors may participate in the dance and leading teachers of the modern dance may demonstrate their work. The resident dance groups are a free cooperative activity of museum visitors and dance teachers. The Museum has provided facilities for such cooperation in response to the manifest interest of the public and the evident mood for such a free public dance center which would give professional dancers an enlarged field of activities and demonstrate the possibilities of the modern dance as an amateur recreation. It is the belief of the Brooklyn Museum Dance Center and of professional dancers who have been consulted that the modern dance can become a true contemporary folk dance, a lay art, as well as a medium for professional performances.
(7) The Brooklyn Museum Dance Center offers facilities for rehearsals and recitals by professional dancers, especially young dancers and choreographers who desire to make debuts in Brooklyn. Hitherto the facilities for debuts and other productions of young dancers have been limited and expensive. The audience drawn to such recitals has been restricted. The Brooklyn Museum offers to such dancers a place, an audience of several thousand persons, and such publicity as it pleases the press to give to the activities of the Brooklyn Museum. The Museum will make every effort to provide publicity by posters, circular mailings and the release of stories to the press. The Federal Dance Theater has already availed itself of this opportunity by establishing at the Brooklyn Museum a separate unit known as the Young Choregraphers Laboratory. The following dancers have been assigned to this unit and are in daily rehearsal at the Brooklyn Museum, Productions will be announced later. Miss Saida Gerrard, Miss Mattie Haim, Miss Ailes Gilmour, Miss Lillian Mehlmann, Miss Nadia Chilkovsky, Miss Mura Dehn and Mr. William Matons, Mr. Glenn E. Pangborn in charge. Other dancers desiring to stage recitals or productions in the Sculpture Court of the Brooklyn Museum are requested to communicate with Grant Code, Editor, and acting director of the Brooklyn Museum Dance Center.
The Brooklyn Museum Dance Center began last year with an exhibition of the Dance in Art (painting, drawing and sculpture) arranged by Mr. Herbert B. Tschudy, and a. series of dance recitals in which the following dancers and groups participated: Hanya Hoim and Group, Tamiris and Group, Sophla Delza, Esther Junger, Sara Mildred Straus and Group, Anita Zahn and Group, Maria Theresa and Group, Georges Balanchine and members of the American Ballet of the Metropolitan Opera. Activities began this year with an exhibition of the Art of the Dance in Photograph assembled as a travelling exhibition for the American Federation of Arts and sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum, a recital by the English Folk Dance Society of America, New York Branch, under the direction of May Gadd, the organization of resident dance groups, and an exhibition of Photography of Contemporary Dancers by Thomas Bouchard, now current.
A professional dancers discussion forum for consideration of technical dance problems is in process of organization. Mrs. Irma Otto Betz will lecture before this forum on the Rudolph von Laban dance script, and the Young Choreographers Laboratory will lead panel discussions.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1931 - 1936. 10-12_1936, 155-57. View Original
January 24, 1936
On Friday, January 24, in the Gallery for Living Artists of the Brooklyn Museum, there will be a reception and preview of an exhibition of the Dance in Arts featuring dancers as a subject of painting, drawing, and sculpture. The exhibition includes 135 items, several of them by American Indians portraying Indian ceremonial dances.
The exhibitors are Rifka Angel, Awa Tsireh, Therese F. Bernstein, Grant H. Code, Miguel Covarrubias, Dorothea Denslow, Victor De Pauw, Harriet Donnelly, Edouard Edy-Legrand, Frank Eliscu, Angna Enters, Philip Evergood, Helen Ferr, Donsld Forbes, Norman Foster, Frances Fox, Aline Fruhauf, Margaret Gibbons, Genevieve Karr Hamlin, Gerard Hordyk, Betty Joiner, Louis Kronberg, Barnard Lintott, Charles Logasa, Ma-Pe-We, J. A. Mohlte, Mimi Murphey, Isamu Noguchi, Oqwa Pi, Otis Polelonema, Aline Rhonie, San Juanito Garcia, Charlotte Saphiro, James Savage, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Margaret Sherwin, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, Moses Soyer, Alfred H. Stein, Suzanne Suba, Sahl Swarz, Ruth P. Taylor, Tonita Pena, A. Tromka, Eduard Buk Ulreich and Isabel L. Whitney.
A catalogue has been published including an essay on the Dance in Art. The exhibition will be open to the public on Saturday, January 25, and will run through March 15.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1931 - 1936. 01-03_1936, 008. View Original
