From Ballet to Broadway and Black and Edith Ross
Edith Ross was a member of Eugene Van Grona’s American Negro Ballet which was founded in 1937. One of her first Broadway performances was as a dancer of Von Grona’s Swing Ballet in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939. In addition to Blackbirds of 1939, Ross performed in several other Broadway productions.
Sources:
Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939, Playbill
Edith Ross Performer’s Page, Playbill
Edith Ross, MoBBallet
More about Edith Ross
Edith Ross was a member of Eugene Von Grona’s American Negro Ballet, the Negro Unit of Ballet Theatre, and the Katherine Dunham Company from 1940 to 1943. She was a part of the original casts of Agnes de Mille’s Black Ritual and the Broadway shows Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939, Carmen Jones (1943-1945), and Cabin in the Sky (1940), which was staged and choreographed by George Balanchine.
Sources:
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
