June Roper, Ballet Star Maker
by Windreich, Leland
Toronto, Canada, 1999, Dance Collection Danse. Presses, 125 pp., illus.
ISBN 0-929003-34-9, $23.95 US with postage
E-mail: danceco@web.net
145 George Street, Toronto, Canada M5A 2M6.

Its unfortunate that the publisher limits dance undertakings to Canadian subjects. If Leland Windreich's patient compilation of June Roper and her proteges is any example, many dance authors with a worthy tale to tell would welcome such an imprimatur as this publisher. While those, alas, are the facts of life, it in no way diminishes the accomplishment of this modest book.

June Ropers heritage is in the grand tradition of the woollier part of U.S. history. That is, God-fearin, Bible totin White Anglo-Saxon Protestant pioneers who believed dancing was the Devils hand mistress. What upright, earnest, energetic souls they were, and what a total pain in the larger history of one of the most ancient forms of celebrating divinity in life and devotion to the spirit!

With the aid of her English mother, Elizabeth Woodhead, herself a thwarted dancer, June Roper started to dance and study dance after she saw Anna Pavlova dance in Los Angeles in 1916. From self-expression and with the aid of money earned by baby-sitting, Roper took three street cars to downtown Los Angeles to study with Cecchetti-trained Ernest Belcher (father of dancer Marge Champion by the bye). When opportunity permitted, she parlayed her training into neighbourhood dance lessons for additional monies and engagements at entertainment temples like The Pantages Theater.

Those lean years of extraordinary examples of self-help, ingenuity and the need for varied repertoire to suit available engagements bred an imaginative dancer whose passion brimmed over the footlights and engaged the audience in mutual enthusiasm. The mixture of fulfillment from an environment defied in order to dance is less often duplicated in the past few decades, except perhaps in the charismatic nature of Rudolph Nureyev and his career. But with figures like June Roper, this was the norm for dancers in the Northern Hemisphere and parts of Europe during the Twenties and early Thirties. Her success was achieved largely in revue and music- hall settings, but one wonders what she might have accomplished if she had been able to perform in a regular ballet ensemble.

Windreich's well-documented account has taken at least two decades to accomplish, starting with his interest in June Roper graduates like Ian Gibson, progressing to girls whose names became Russianized when they joined Colonel W. De Basils Ballets Russes and to Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo dancers Duncan Noble and Robert Lindgren. For Americans whose taste and knowledge was formed in the Forties and Fifties by the tours of the Monte Carlo company, the magnetism of those dancers speaks to the impact of Ropers training on her students. Lindgren and Noble were for years the cornerstones of the dance department at North Carolina School for the Arts, now one of the best advanced training ground for dancers, classical or modern, in the United States.

I strongly recommend this book for its patent tribute to creative disobedience in the name of dance, to the spunky woman who personified such courage and shared her insights with her students. I have been fortunate to meet and know several of them and each of them possess an awareness and command which speaks to the influence of their teacher in the class room molding them towards a sparkling presence.