Clare Lauché Porter
Traveling with Pointed Shoes:
Growing a Dance Community
by Sandra Kurtz
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Photos of Clare Lauché Porter teaching in Fresno, 1960. The San Francisco Opera Ballet in Lament, choreographed by Adolph Bolm, 1936, photo by Maurice Goldberg, courtesy of the collection of Clare Lauché Porter. |
Before the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco reopened after renovations in the summer of 1997, they hosted a reunion for all the artists, technicians and administrators that had worked in the facility since its opening in October 1932. One of those ‘alumni’ was Clare Lauché Porter, whose life in dance is almost as long as the theater she revisited.
Porter began dancing in the wide open spaces of her native Colorado as an “enthusiastic but untrained” girl. Her first formal studies were with a student of Luigi Albertieri. Albertieri had been a “favorite” student of Enrico Cecchetti and had come to the United States in 1915. It was through Albertieri’s teaching that a major early link to Cecchetti ballet technique in this country was formed. Porter’s exposure to Cecchetti teaching held an important early lesson for her—providing testimony on how a particular dance tradition, style or pedagogy is passed through time from the original source to the student.
Though the Cecchetti method remained the backbone of her dancing skills, Porter and her family didn’t stay long in Colorado. After a series of moves the young dancer eventually ended up with her mother and sisters to San Francisco, arguably the most cosmopolitan city outside the east coast in the United States at that time.
In San Francisco Porter first studied with a “Miss Arnold” at the Hirsch-Arnold Studio, a devotee of Mary Wigman and who had recently returned from Germany. Classes emphasized expression over technique. Porter remembers that Miss Arnold carried a black notebook full of class plans. “She said to pretend you’re a large pile of scrap iron, and you suddenly had to burst your bonds,” Porter recalled, “so I went over and burst my bonds. I was very good at that sort of thing.” At the end of the year, however, Miss Arnold “got to the end of the notebook and she was finished with what she could teach.” It was time for Porter to find something else.
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