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Mary Campbell Was Like an Angel with Her Full White Curly Hair

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Mary Campbell Was Like an Angel with Her Full White Curly Hair Mary Williams Campbell, A Dancer in Spirit Biographical Introduction to the Collection Author: Janice LaPointe-Crump With appreciation to Catherine Loveday and Dawn Letson © 2004, J. LaPointe-Crump Mary Campbell was like an angel with her full white curly hair. Occasionally I would stand by the piano in Studio 2 at Jacob's Pillow and just listen to her play. She inspired me to incorporate my emotional feelings in my dancing, which is so important to the dancer. It makes all the difference between exercising and really dancing! And to elicit this blossoming in the dancer requires the accompanist to also be a dancer in spirit! --Susan Kramer, Jacob's Pillow alumna 1963 & 1964 A dancer in spirit is a frequent phrase used to describe a woman whose gentle charisma drew in alert listeners from all walks of life. Mary Williams Campbell was much more than a skilled accompanist or a talented composer. She was a moving scholar who helped dancers and students learn the structure, form and the classic codes for creating works. She dedicated her life to unleashing the imagination and instilling a respect for the history of dance, particularly modern dance. Campbell’s unique artistry shined “as a beacon” [through her openness and generosity] to emerging artists and experienced artist- teachers alike. The partnering role of an accompanist with the teacher and choreographer has only recently begun to be analyzed and appreciated. Accompanists are expected to have the patience of Job and be willing to be at each rehearsal, each class, playing the same work again and again in ways that motivate dancers. Often waiting while the teacher gives feedback to a student or while the choreographer works out the next section of dance material, sometimes they, as in the case of Miss Campbell, left the bench to correct or coach a dancer. Surely, talented accompanists, as was Campbell, demonstrated that “music and dance were interrelated” (Gladys Keeton, taped interview, May 8, 2000). Effortlessly and selflessly Miss Campbell moved through numerous roles in her six-decade long career. In an age before technology afforded dancers options to mix, cobble together and overlay pieces of music to fulfill their choreographic needs, Campbell was accompanist, arranger, and composer to many of the famous names in modern dance. One such is Jerry Bywaters Cochran, former head of modern dance at Texas Christian University, who declared that Mary Campbell is one of the “undiscovered angels of American modern dance in the Southwest” (taped interview, January 23, 2004). Some of the artists and teachers remembered in the collection include Ted Shawn, Miriam Winslow, Barton Mumaw, Foster Fitz-Simons, La Meri, Anne Schley Duggan, Ruth St. Denis, Jess Meeker, Jeanette Schlottman Roosevelt, Margaret Morris’s The Celtic Ballet of Scotland, Walter Terry, Elizabeth Waters, Betty Jones, Jack Cole, Norman Walker, Joseph Pilates, Erick Hawkins, and the many instructors and student dancers associated with Jacob’s Pillow University of the Dance as well as with the Texas Woman’s University dance and physical education program, particularly its performing company the Modern Dance Group. Through her innovation, discipline, and open spirit, Campbell influenced the emergence of the dance accompanist as an artistic partner with the instructor, choreographer, dancer, and viewer. The courses she developed and taught, Accompaniment for Movement and Music Appreciation, at both Jacob’s Pillow and Texas Woman’s University was probably the first of their kind in the United States. Empowered students in turn incorporated music in their teaching and dance curricula at such institutions as Florida State University, Arizona State University – Tempe, the Juilliard School, Texas Woman’s University, Jacob’s Pillow, Houston High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the American Dance Festival, and many others. “’As an accompanist, she was a witch!” recalls La Meri, because “. she seemed to breathe with the dancer’” (In Patrick, 62). During her later years Campbell’s contributions to her church and civic organizations in Denton, Texas fostered music and dance as integral artistic and spiritual arts. Mary Williams Campbell was born on September 9, 1899 in a rural lumbering community of Island Falls, Maine, a town where Campbell’s sister remembers, “everybody knew everybody” (Patrick, 1986, p. 26). Piano lessons began at age four even though that meant a ten-mile trek, sometimes going by sleigh in the harsh snowy winters. While she studied dance for about three years as a youngster, it was the piano that beckoned her fancy and became her first paying job. Like the late imaginative choreographer, Alwin Nikolais, the young pianist accompanied silent movies for 25 cents per day while only a high schooler. At fifteen, Campbell graduated from high school, and by her sixteenth birthday had moved to Boston, Massachusetts where she studied at the Faelton Pianoforte School from 1915 to 1919. Certificate in hand, Campbell joined a musical trio named “Melody Mansion” to tour in vaudeville with an act described as a “novel singing, dancing, and pianologue offering.” The trio did not stay together very long. Following this engagement, Campbell bounced around in jobs that usually revolved around accompanying dance classes or providing background music for diners and dancing at a luxury hotel in Banff Springs for five years. Campbell rediscovered the art of dance when a friend of Francesca Braggiotti recommended her as accompanist and arranger for the Braggiotti-Denishawn School of Dancing in Boston. Along with her two sisters, Braggiotti had studied and performed with Ruth St. Denis (1877 – 1968) and Ted Shawn (1891 – 1972). Theirs was one of the more successful Denishawn franchise studios, visited frequently by St. Denis and Shawn, icons of American dance. Campbell worked for the Braggiotti sisters from 1921 – 1928. Impressing St. Denis and Shawn, her real break came the following year, 1929 – 1930, when Campbell was invited to join what was the last tour of the Denishawn Company. As a member of “The Symphonic Quartet”, she played as well for several dance works on the whirlwind tour consisting of more than 70 performances. Following this, in the spring of 1931, Campbell went abroad with Shawn to perform in Germany and Switzerland. What Campbell may not have realized was that this was the grand finale of a company already splintered by the departure of its leading artists a few years earlier: Martha Graham, Louis Horst, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Pauline Lawrence among others. At the conclusion of the tours, in fall of 1932, an embittered, discouraged, and bankrupt Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis dismantled Denishawn the company, Denishawn House the school, and separated their personal lives. How Campbell figured in this famous break-up is hard to say, but suffice it to say, she continued to work with Shawn. She accompanied Shawn’s dance classes at Springfield College (officially the International Young Men’s Christian Association College) and at Miriam Winslow’s new dance studio in Boston. Winslow was one of Shawn’s advanced students. “. the 1930s established the United States as the home of modern dance at its most creative.” Jack Anderson (1997, p. 140) From December 1931 to March 1932, Campbell toured the U.S. with Shawn’s mixed company to earn badly needed funds to develop his newest venture, an all-male company. The trip was financially and artistically satisfying and netted another composer-accompanist, Jess Meeker. Following this stint, Mary returned to New York, there assembling musical scores before heading back to Springfield College in fall, 1932, with Shawn, Barton Mumaw, and Margerie Lyon, Shawn’s secretary, for the winter of teaching. Sharing a house, the foursome was the talk of the small town. For the men’s physical education classes, Campbell played easily identifiable Indian drum music, folk tunes, and Negro spirituals. Particularly remarkable is her role as an original member of the Jacob’s Pillow enclave near Lee, MA. At the end of the last Denishawn tour, Ted Shawn decided to move permanently to his favorite weekend getaway in the Berkshire Hills, near Boston. He had found a bucolic yet horribly dilapidated farm to inaugurate his new artistic life as a solo artist, a place to house and rehearse his new company, the Men Dancers. He wrote in September, 1931 after producing Job at the Lewisohn stadium in New York City with Campbell as accompanist: “I came to Jacob’s Pillow, with Mary Campbell, my pianist, Margerie Lyon, my secretary and for many years manager of the Denishawn Schools, and four of the young men who had appeared in the stadium Job ballet: Barton Mumaw, Jack Cole, Harry Joyce, and Don Moreno.” Thus it was, at the miserable height of the Great Depression, that Campbell donned men’s pants and shirt to share the backbreaking work of renovating the decrepit old house while living a youthful bohemian life as an art zealot and enduring Jack Cole’s practical jokes. Campbell recalled: “We didn’t have anything. Just a horrible old house, no telephone, no running water, no lights, no anything. ” (Patrick, p. 35). What today is a sophisticated summer dance institution known the world over was at first an eye sore demanding ingenuity, grit, and perseverance by Shawn and his cohorts, among whom was Mary Campbell. Once the barn-studio was remodeled, members of Shawn’s last mixed company assembled and rehearsed in 1933 for a three-month tour that climaxed with an appearance at the annual San Jacinto Celebration in San Antonio, Texas. Campbell was both rehearsal and performance pianist “playing for several ensemble dances and one outstanding new solo for Shawn”, titled O Brother Sun and Sister Moon (Mumaw, 52).
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