Buddy Bradley: Black History Month in Dance, 2021

Black History Month in Dance 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138. The African American choreographer Clarence “Buddy” Bradley (1905-1972), born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, became an important but often unsung factor in the New York musicals and revues of the 1920s, where dance directors were well paid but uncredited. Even so, his name became known in show business circles; he worked with many of the biggest white names. Busby Berkeley was given the program credit for the choreography for “Greenwich Village Follies of 1928”, but the production really had been (re-)choreographed by Bradley; it’s likely (he used taught Ruby Keeler) that we see his influence in the dance styles that pervade Berkeley’s Hollywood choreography

Only when he moved to London in 1930, however, did Bradley - thanks to the impresario Charles Cochran - receive full choreographic credit. This began with “Ever Green” (1930), the latest Rodgers-Hart musical: it was a “white” show and for his subsequent work there. Bradley stayed thirty-eight years in London: this was where he collaborated with Frederick Ashton (with whom he worked on five productions), George Balanchine (“Charles B. Cochran’s 1931 Revue”), Vanessa Bell (the Bloomsbury painter, sister to Virginia Woolf), Jack Buchanan (139), William Chappell (dancer, designer, director), Noël Coward, Spike Hughes (composer and writer), Alicia Markova, Jessie Matthews (134), and many more. When the British began to make film musicals, Bradley was part of them.

We speak now of “the Jessie Matthews backbends” that Ashton incorporated into “Façade” (1931) and Balanchine into “Serenade” (1934), but we may be sure they’re really Bradley backbends. Jessie Matthew’s danced them in the stage show “Ever Green”(1930) and again in the film musical “Evergreen” (1934 - Bradley himself has a brief moment: see 137). In a Jessie Matthews backbend, you use your hands as if pushing rhythmically against the air ahead of you while arching rhythmically back. It happens in two ballet waltzes that are danced to this day: the Waltz in Ashton’s “Façade” (where four women do it) and the Waltz in Balanchine’s “Serenade” (where sixteen do it, at the end).

Thanks to Bradley, Markova earned the nickname “Snake Hips” for what he (assisted by Ashton) taught her in the Camargo Society production of “High Yellow”, back in the good old days before she became afflicted by (Balanchine’s term) “Gisellitis”. Bradley remained in London for thirty-eight years (although he often revisited New York), permanently returning to the United States only for the final four years of his life.

Tuesday 23 February

Buddy Bradley in the film “Evergreen” (1934)

Buddy Bradley and Jack Buchanan