Norma Allewelt Dancers Scrapbook.
HISTORY OF ALLEWELT
[Theater] (Allewelt, Norma). Norma Allewelt Dancers (1924-1938). Scrapbook. Syracuse, New
York.
Folio.; 35 leaves holding photographs, clippings, and other original and printed matter; pressed
bamboo boards. 3
Original scrapbook maintained by Dorothy Miers, who studied and danced with the Allewelt
dancers. Miers preserved photographs, clippings, programs, mounted letters, playbills, and loose
material related to the Norma Allewelt Dancers and other, better-known modern dance companies
who performed with her from 1924-1938, including the Isadora Duncan dancers, the Kurt Jooss
company and the avant-garde Marian Marmein ballet troupe. Allewelt, by contrast to these peers,
has almost escaped documentation but for this album.
Norma Allewelt ran a dance studio called The Allewelt Dance School from 1924-34, when she
married a Russian prince, Michale Kildischeff, a refugee from the Bolshevik revolution. Together
they planned to start a Russian ballet company for touring, but instead resumed work with
Allewelt.
This scrapbook contains 24 printed Allewelt brochures, announcements, tickets, and broadsides
from Syracuse; 30 Allewelt newspaper clippings of paid advertisements and dance performances
in Syracuse, although they also performed in New York at Carnegie Hall; 15 programs and
announcements for other dance companies who performed in Syracuse during the 1920s and ‘30s,
including nationally known and local companies, as follows: the Isadora Duncan Dancers (1929),
The Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, Ted Shawn Dancers, The America Ballet of George
Balanchine, and Joss European Ballet. The local performers include: Sonya Marens, Nini
Theilade Company (1935), the Schroeppel Studio Dancers, Ninita Johns, Miss Monica and Her
Pupils, the Civic Repertory Theatre of Syracuse, John Hayes O’Neil, and Women’s Glee Club of
Syracuse University (1934); and 23 original snapshot-sized photographs of dancers performing –
primarily of Miers herself. Also present are original photographs of the Allewelt Dancers in
costume performing the avant-garde Marian Marmein ballet, Machinery.
In addition to material documenting modern dance in Syracuse during this period, there is
important documentation of Marian Marmein of The Marmein Sisters (Miriam and Irene), and
later the Marmein Dancers, who were early exponents of futuristic modern dance in the style
popularized by Sakharoff and the Italian modern dance companies. The material includes
programs, photographs, and 15 pages of typed and annotated choreographic notes for her dances,
letters, etc.
(#4656816)
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