From Ballet to Broadway and Black and Hazel Spence
Hazel Spence was born and raised in Manhattan, New York. In 1937, she became a member of the American Negro Ballet (ANB) until it was disbanded in 1938. In 1939, Eugene Von Grona revamped the ANB and renamed it “Von Grona’s Swing Ballet”. Hazel Spence was invited to join the company and performed as a dancer and member of Von Grona’s Swing Ballet in Lew Leslie’s Broadway Hit: Blackbirds of 1939 which opened on February 11, 1939.
Sources:
Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939, Playbill
American Negro Ballet Company, MoBBallet
Hazel Spence, MoBBallet
More about Hazel Spence
Hazel Spence was born February 5, 1919 and grew up in Manhattan, NY. Spence was a member of Eugene Von Grona’s American Negro Ballet, starting in 1937. In 1939, she, along with the rest of the company, performed alongside the New York Negro Symphony Orchestra.
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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
