Clare Lauché Porter, continued
That something else was the beginning of the San Francisco Opera Ballet, (itself the forerunner of the San Francisco Ballet) which at that time was directed by Estelle Reed. Porter auditioned with a German-derived improvisation, which seemed to overwhelm Reed. “Did you ever do any ballet?” she asked Porter, who then managed to demonstrate enough of her Cecchetti training to satisfy the director. “She [Reed] was there mainly for the supernumeraries but at end of the season we did a [dance] to the Ravel waltz. I had the longest arms in the group and they really showed. But by that time Mr. Bolm had arrived and we had a real company.”
Adolph Bolm had been hired by the SFO directors as much for his reputation as for his skills as a dance maker and performer. A dancer with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, he had performed and taught across the U.S. since the company had dissolved after Diaghilev’s death in 1929.
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Photo of Clare Lauché Porter with friends in Montreal.
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Bolm brought legitimacy to the company and challenged it artistically. Porter recalls the excitement she and her fellow dancers felt in 1933 with the hiring of Bolm: “He had lived in the big outside world where art was really art and they [the dancers] weren’t worried any more about being scrap iron bursting out of its bonds.”
Porter was in a wonderful position to see the changes effected by Bolm over the next few years. She worked in the front office from time to time to pay the bills while she danced in the company, and eventually became a de facto rehearsal assistant to Bolm. As well as staging the dance interludes in the standard opera repertory, Bolm recreated several of the works from the Ballet Russe repertory while making new ballets. He performed King Dodon in Le Coq d’Or with the singers sitting off to the sides as they had in the version produced by Diaghilev, and restaged his own Ballet Mechanique.
One of the high points of this time for Porter was working on Bolm’s Bach Cycle, created for the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth in 1685. She was a leading dancer in the Lament section, performed to the “Prelude #8” from The Well Tempered Clavier. In a costume/set piece that stretched across the front of the stage, three women performed gestures of sorrow and mourning. In photographs it appears closer in style to the work of Graham and Wigman than to the ballet of the time, but Porter says its roots were in the music itself. Two other works completed the concert: Danse Noble, a court dance to the “G Minor Fugue” and Consecration, a work reminiscent of music visualization to the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” The program was so successful it was repeated in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl in 1936. |
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