Music: Dark Wiggling

One day last month Mrs. Charles S. Guggenheimer, energetic chairman of Manhattan’s Philharmonic-Symphony, seeking an added attraction for the Lewisohn Stadium concerts, telephoned for advice to Hall Johnson, Negro composer and choir master. Cautiously he mentioned the Bahama Negro dancers who appeared in his folk play Rim, Little Chillum! (TIME, March 13). Enthusiastic, Mrs. Guggenheimer suggested that they present a joint program with Tamiris, a wiry New York white girl with a growing reputation for dances based on Negroid themes. As a result, for two nights last week Conductor Hans Lange led the Philharmonic-Symphony through the dusky music of John Powell’s overture “In Old Virginia” and the thumping “Bamboula Rhapsodic Dance” of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, while Tamiris and her Bahamans shattered the Stadium’s classic atmosphere with such pulsing jungle rhythms as Manhattanites seldom see outside of Harlem.

Chief members of the Bahama group are “Motorboat,”‘ a hulking mahogany-colored buck who in one dance wore rainbow-hued feather knickers, and “Pearl of Nassau,” a gaudy little darkie who lustily copies the seductive hip-wiggling of Josephine Baker. Attired in scanty draperies and usually accompanied by gourds or tom-tom alone, the Bahama troupe shifted abruptly from sober interpretations of spirituals to the frankly orgiastic frenzy of native Bahaman dances. Against the high yellow paling which divided them from the orchestra their shadows were enormous and fantastic. But in spite of claims that their dances were independent of Harlem influence, the Bahaman dancers displayed merely conventional abandon, little rhythm and no reason.

Sharply in contrast was the sophisticated style in which Tamiris interpreted primitive themes, ranging from Negroid to Spanish. Least successful was her own composition, the “Gris-Gris Ceremonial,” based on African rites of propagation. Happily it was the only one in which she joined with the Bahamans. Alone, Dancer Tamiris displayed a studied, metallic style which emphasized posture rather than motion, successfully overcame the handicap huge Lewisohn Stadium places on a solo dancer. A friendly audience loudly clamored for encores. Critics who joined in the applause for Tamiris found the lusty cavorting of the Bahama dancers merely the obvious counterpart of “hot” music, considered its presence with the Philharmonic-Symphony incongruous.

Tamiris (née Helen Becker) was born in Manhattan 30 years ago of a Jewish family. She learned to dance first in the din of Brooklyn’s streets, under the elevated tracks. Later she studied with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and briefly in the Isadora Duncan and Fokine schools. In 1929 she was the only dancer at Austria’s Salzburg Festival, startled sedate Europeans by her renditions of jazz and Negro spirituals. In spite of her formal training, Tamiris considers herself largely self-schooled, likes to think of her dancing as part of an indigenous U. S. culture.