From Broadway to Ballet and Black and Elizabeth (Betty Ann) Thompson
Elizabeth Thompson performed in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939 as a member of Von Grona’s Swing Ballet like a lot of the other dancers in the show. This was her only Broadway performance.
Sources:
Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939, Playbill
Elizabeth Thompson Performer’s Page, Playbill
More about Elizabeth (Betty Ann) Thompson
Elizabeth Ann (Betty Ann) Thompson (1936-2012) was born in Harlem in 1936 and began dancing at 12 years old in her church musical theater group. A childhood friend, Thelma Hill, guided Thompson downtown to take classes with Maria Nevelska. Ms. Thompson attended the Juilliard School but would leave to pursue a professional career performing with Les Ballets Negres, the predecessor to the New York Negro Ballet.
After the company disbanded, Thompson was employed as a secretary and performed part-time with Geoffrey Holder and Louis Johnson. In 1966, the Radio City Ballet Company hired Thompson—a pioneer woman of color in a predominantly white corps; she performed with the company full-time until the company’s demise in 1975 and part-time until 1979. She also performed with Walter Nix.
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
