Dancing Philadelphians

At Home-Philadelphians who stay home for the summer swelter. Those who like music go to the Philadelphia Orchestra concerts at Robin Hood Dell to console themselves. There last week 3,000 Philadelphians could almost imagine themselves out of the sticky, uncomfortable city when Mary Binney Montgomery and her troupe danced their own version of George Gershwin's An American in Paris. Miss Montgomery's choreography followed closely Gershwin's sparkling musical account of a tourist "adrift in the City of Light." The American (Harry Teplitz) elbowed his way bewilderedly through raucous vendors and squabbling shopkeepers, was momentarily absorbed by a gawking family from Kansas. A guttersnipe from the Left Bank (Miss Montgomery) stole his heart. Her Apache boyfriend stole his wallet. Ingenious winds and strings described the American's moods, half jaunty, half homesick. The orchestra revived him with a Charleston, got riotous when he decided to make a night of it.

The Montgomery troupe danced neatly, made the little ballet often pathetic, often good for a laugh. Critic Edwin H. Schloss of the Record wisely rated the performance "a minor triumph." In the four years she has been dancing at the Dell, handsome Miss Montgomery has triumphed many times before. Her repertoire runs from Renaissance pavans and sarabands to formal, dignified Mozart, and striped, angular performances like the Study in Counter Rhythm for Dancers and Percussion Instruments which she put on at the Dell in 1934. In that year's Maguey she donned a skintight dress that fitted down under her heels, striped to look like a Mexican century-plant. Ben Stad called on her to dance the slow-moving steps of the Middle Ages at his Philadelphia Festival of the Society of the Ancient Instruments last spring.

Born & bred in Philadelphia, Miss Montgomery was dancing years before she came out in 1928. Since she is the daughter of rich Banker Robert Learning ("Colonel Bob") Montgomery, she has had plenty of money to study, compose, paint, model, indulge her taste for exotic instruments including Japanese "fish-heads," tiny, castinet-like instruments which priests are supposed to tap continuously near their ears to drive out all but religious thoughts. Drums have long been Miss Montgomery's passion, and for years she would not let her pupils practice with anything else.

Abroad. The same night that Mary Binney Montgomery pretended to be in Paris, Philadelphia Dancer Catherine Littlefield, her former teacher, actually was in Paris, winning even greater praise for her ballet impressions of the U. S. The Littlefield troupe had gone abroad early in the summer, expecting to be the first U. S. troupe to do so (TIME, Feb. 22). Everywhere they went they were a sensation. In Paris they danced eleven times in a week. President Lebrun attended opening night. U. S. Ambassador William Christian Bullitt, himself a Philadelphian, kissed Catherine Littlefield on both cheeks when the performance was over. When the Littlefield troupe danced in Brussels, King Leopold broke mourning for the first time to see them. Richard Henry Gillespie of the London Hippodrome hired the troupe for two weeks, had to extend their run to three. The U. S. Commission to the Paris Fair asked them to give two invitation performances there last week.

Nothing the Littlefield troupe did won greater praise than the two dances on U. S. themes which Catherine plotted herself. Terminal portrays the commotion of businessmen, porters and bootblacks in a railroad station, the arrival of a fresh crop of Reno divorcees, an old maid bothering the information clerk, a departing crooner, an arriving movie queen. In Barn Dance, farm wives of 1850 prepare a picnic sup- per, children play and bicker, bashful hayseeds choose partners. When the deacon gets there, mothers make their children drop curtseys, are distressed when the children fish his hat off. Nellie Ely, a farm girl gone wrong, comes with a city slicker and almost spoils the party.

London and Paris balletomanes were smitten with Nellie Ely, as danced by Catherine Littlefield's younger sister Dorothie. A Paris critic, commending David Guion's arrangement of old U. S. folksongs, felt it necessary to explain that Turkey in the Straw and Old Zip Coon are really French court airs banished during the French Revolution. But nobody was in any doubt about the ballet's originality. They called it a "cyclone of excitement," a regular romp, a "model of choreography." Even so experienced a ballet judge as Arnold Haskell threw his hat over the fence and called Barn Dance the "first chapter in the history of American ballet."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.