The Sydney-Marion School of Dance

Sydney King and Marion Cuyjet are tributaries in the lineage of Philadelphia’s dancers, some of whom changed or are changing the course of race in dance in America and are pioneers within the world of ballet.

Equipped with the knowledge given to them by Essie Marie Dorsey and the desire to continue her legacy, Sydney King and Marion Cuyjet established the Sydney-Marion School of Dance in 1946. Their aim was to “offer dance as a means of social and cultural development” and to give young Black people the opportunity to train that was usually reserved for whites (White-Dixon 25). The school offered ballet, tap, acrobats, Dunham technique, folk dance, and ballroom dance.

In the early ‘40s, Cuyjet married and started a family. In 1944, she began to expand her training by taking up folk dance and began a small school in her home a year later. During World War II, Dorsey closed her school. When she was on the verge of reopening, Cuyjet and King told her of their plans to join forces and start their own studio. Dorsey fully endorsed them and even offered her space and contacts to her young protégées. In 1946, the Sydney-Marion School of Dance opened in the former Dorsey school on 711 South Broad Street.

The two followed closely in their mentor’s footsteps, with a curriculum offering various techniques to their students, including the Dunham technique. Their old classmate John Hines had been studying with Katherine Dunham in New York and encouraged the two to travel to the city to study at the Dunham School. Hines introduced them to new teachers and studios. He also taught at their studio.

The Sydney-Marion School lasted just two years due to Cuyjet and King’s “differences in management styles.” Regarding the split, Joan Myers Brown says this:

I don’t know if it was about color or if it was about the two ladies disagreeing. I know that all of us little brown girls stayed with Sydney, and all the little light skin [daughters of] doctors and lawyers and all the so-called society girls went with Miss Cuyjet. That’s why I was surprised that she ended up with Delores [Browne]. She found them already trained in South Philadelphia at that Barrett Junior High School. Billy Wilson, Betsy Ann Dickerson, Barbara Harper, all of us stayed with Sydney.

King and Cuyjet went on to form their own schools: the latter established the Judimar School of Dance, which subsequently closed its doors in 1971, and the former started the Sydney School of Dance.

Sources:

Sydney King and Marion Cuyjet, MoBBallet
White-Dixon, Melanye. “The Legacy of Black Philadelphia’s Dance Institutions and the Educators Who Built the Tradition.” Dance Research Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 1991, pp. 25–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1478695. Accessed 27 May 2021.

Compiled by Mad Crawford