From Ballet to Broadway to Black and Beryl Clarke
Beryle Clark, also known as Beryl Thornton and Beryl Murray, was a dancer with the Capitol Ballet. She performed as a dancer in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939 as a member of Von Grona’s Swing Ballet in February of 1939. This was her only Broadway performance.
Sources:
Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939, Playbill
Beryl Clarke Performer’s Page, Playbill
More about Beryl Clarke
While a member of the Capitol Ballet, Beryl Clarke performed in Doris W. Jones’ The Mendelssohn Suite alongside Theressa Cassese, Robin Blair, and Laura Fitz. The Tennessean declared that it was “very well danced,” and the performance, part of the Southeastern Regional Ballet Festival, took place on April 22, 1970 at the Henderson A. Johnson Gymnasium of Fisk University. It is not known if Thornton performed elsewhere or with the company on other occasions.
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More about Von Grona’s Swing Ballet
Eugene Von Grona trained in dance in Germany and arrived in New York City in 1928. He formed the American Negro Ballet in 1934 after seeing the zeal of the artists working in Harlem, noting the new type of dance energy he saw in them that was lacking in European dancers. He thought that the dancers he found for his company “didn’t have the opportunity” for technique classes and so he gave it to them at the American Negro Ballet. ANB was the first professional company to feature concert dance with Black members on a scale that garnered acceptance from the media as well as criticism.
They used the term “ballet” to describe all the dance they were doing, though not a classical ballet company. In 1939, members of the company performed alongside the New York Negro Symphony Orchestra; these members were Valerie Cavell, Marion Brown, Beryl Clarke, Viola Gibson, Dorothy Jones, Harriet Oliver, Evelyn Pilcher, Edith Ross, Pearl Spears, Hazel Spence, Ettie Stephens, Willard Taylor, Elizabeth Thompson, Lavinia Williams, Wahneta Talley, Teddy Allen, Alfred Bledger, Jon Edward, Anthony Fleming, Frank Green, Coleman Hill, James Smith, and Harry Young.
Sources:
“Which was the first?” A historical essay on the first Black Dance Company in the USA
Nicole Toney
