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Clare Lauché Porter,
| Everyone in the dance world knew Bolm, and would come to his class at the San Francisco Opera when they were in town. “Bolm taught a lot of people like Ruth Page. [Whenever] they were in the Bay area they’d come to our class. The Monte Carlo [Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo] would come and take our class and slowly we began to look a little better.” Bolm was peripatetic, though, and in 1940 he left for New York and Ballet Theater—as American Ballet Theatre was then called. Porter left at that time too, for Paris. The city was home to several emigre Russian teachers, alumni of the Imperial Ballet School and the Maryinsky Theatre. She spent the summer of 1937 studying with Olga Preobajenska, whose classes were not infrequently attended by dancers such as Margot Fonteyn and former members of Diaghilev’s company. Porter took some classes with Mathilde Ksessinska as well, but had to keep such activity a secret. “If one [teacher] found out you’d been with the other, you were exiled,” Porter reminisced. Preobajenska was especially noted for a great sense of style, with beautiful epaulement. After the summer, Porter had to go back to work, this time teaching in a Montreal school. She had taught before, usually to make money for her own classes, but this was different. The winter weather in that part of Canada was “awful” to someone accustomed to the mild California climate and two years later, in 1939, she returned to San Francisco and her family. |
 Foreground photo of Clare Lauché Porter in her staging of Adolph Bolm choreography, Montreal. Background photo of Mathilde Kshessinska, Paris, c. 1937. Photo by Lipnitzki, courtesy of the Dance Collection New York Public Library |
By accident more than by design, she landed a job with the San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island and spent almost a year in a big Follies Bergere-style production (see cover photo). Dancing in it was much like a vaudeville stint—several performances a day of an eclectic program that included a reduced Swan Lake sandwiched among a sampler of popular dances from the era. Yet, during the depression any job as a dancer was welcome and according to Porter, “I had a good time anywhere I went.” The next several years for Porter were a combination of teaching, performing and family life, including having children of her own. She realized though, when her daughters were still quite young and her own marriage was breaking up, that she needed the support of her family in order to keep teaching. With this in mind she ended up moving to Fresno, California, where her mother and sisters had relocated. Unlike the earlier move to San Francisco, this was not a transition to a cosmopolitan town. Fresno was (and remains) known primarily as a center for agriculture, yielding the largest gross revenue from agribusiness of any county in the nation. Its slow pace is best captured in the prose of writer and native son William Saroyan. There were a few people already teaching dance, but most were in studios that offered a hodgepodge of classes ranging from tap, baton, and ‘interpretive,’ to classical ballet. Just as Bolm had represented a larger art world to the young dancer in San Francisco, Porter was now in a similar position in her adopted, rural California, home. Through her mother’s connections she was able to attract enough students to make her classes a going concern from the beginning, but finding a proper space proved difficult. She rented or borrowed what studio space there was in town, in spite of low ceilings and barres that liberated themselves from the wall and into her students’ hands. The local paper added to the confusion at the beginning, ‘correcting’ Porter’s audition notice to read “bring pointed shoes.” |