From Ballet to Broadway and Black and Marion Brown
Marion Brown was a member of the American Negro Ballet since its debut in 1937. Brown performed in numerous Broadway shows with one of them being Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939 where she performed as a dancer with Von Grona’s Swing Ballet.
Sources:
Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939, Playbill
Marion Brown, MoBBallet
More about Marion Brown
Marion Brown was a member of the American Negro Ballet, which also featured Al Bledger, Harry Young, and Hazel Spence. Brown appeared in several Broadway shows: Gypsy Love (1911), High Jinks (1913), Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939 (1939), and This is the Army (1942).
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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
Morinsola Tinubu
