ALVIN AILEY Born in 1931 to his 17 year old mother Lulu Elizabeth Ailey and his father Alvin who left when he was 6 months old, Alvin Ailey was a key figure in dance in New York, and founded Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. He created several famous dance works including Revelations in 1960 and Blues Suite in 1958. His works drew on influences from several sources and included several key dance figures of the period. Ailey grew up in a time of racial segregation with his mother in Texas and this feature of his life figures significantly in the majority of his works. In Revelations all the dancers are of African American decent to show this period of segregation and oppression.
You could say that was the start of his career as a composer. Menken attended Rochelle High School in his home town and after graduation went to Pre-med school to become a dentist. Lucky for us he later changed his major to music. After college Alen attended the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop in New York where he worked at local clubs writing jingles and songs as an accompanist. Alen Menken got his first big break in January of 1979 with Howard Ashman in the Off-Broadway production “God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater.” Three years later he received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Music in his Off-Broadway Production “Little Shop of Horrors” and from that in January of 1987 Menken was given his first Oscar nomination for a song with in it called “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space.” In 1990 Menken was nominated for three Oscar nominations and three Golden Globe Nominations and went on to win two of each for his work in the Walt Disney production “The Little Mermaid”.
By the time that Bill Robinson (1878 – 1949) became famous as "Bojangles," tap dance shoes were part of the total package. Robinson wore tap shoes with wooden soles and heels. His dance partner in a memorable 1935 film called "The Little Colonel" was Shirley Temple, who popularized eyelet-style tap dance shoes, with large, laced-through bows. In the film, Robinson and Temple demonstrate the "stair step routine" invented by Robinson, which showcases them tapping up and down a staircase. Robinson and Temple would go on to show off their fancy tap footwork and shoes in three other films, "The Littlest Rebel" in 1935, and "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" and "Just Around The Corner" in 1938.
Before he died in 1954, without even acknowledging his son, Scott defaulted on the judgment. In 1939, Kathleen and her brother were sentenced to five years of imprisonment for the robbery of a West Virginia gas station; Charles went to live with a maternal aunt and a sadistic uncle. This uncle often spoke of him as a “sissy” and gave him girls’ school clothes to assist him in “acting like a man”. Charlie’s strictly religious aunt believed all pleasures were sinful. On the other hand, his alcoholic tramp for a mother let him go about as he wished, so this put him in between some very different disciplinary approaches.
He was one of six children in the family of Rabbi Mayer Weisz and his second wife, Cecilia Steiner. His real name was Ehrich Weiss. He was poorly educated, but he was extremely athletic. In 1878, he moved to America with his family. Houdini first became fascinated with magic when he was a young boy, after watching Dr. Lynn, a traveling magician, perform the Linking Ring trick.
Cunningham moved away from modern dance so completely that a new term had to be discovered, and so began postmodern dance. (Perron, 2009) Born 1919 in Centralia, Washington, his father a lawyer and mother a housewife who was a fiercely independent spirit and traveled around the world. Cunningham went to the Cornish school to become an actor and joined a dance group on campus; this is where he met his future work partner John Cage. After attending a dance workshop he met Martha Graham, who invited him to New York to join her company, from which he performed in many of her works. In 1953 he traveled with John Cage to Black Mountain Collage where they founded the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, as a platform to explore ideas.
How they changed over the years. This is a great sport, that's why this essay is about it. Around the year 1801, a scientist was trying to help his studen6ts have fun learning about formulas so he created ice skating. A scot man named Mr. Dunbar Poole, arrived in Adelaide around 1903 to find a group of well minded people interested in ice skating. They opened a rink in Hindley street in a building formely used as a cycloroma.
Louis Armstrong often stated that he was born on July of 1900, but (after his death), it was determined via his baptismal records that he was born on August 4, 1901. He was born in New Orleans, and lived in “one of the poorest sections of town”. Armstrong grew up with a very challenging childhood – his father abandoned the family soon after his birth, and his mother (Who was then unable to pay the bills) often turned to prostitution, frequently leaving him in the hands of his grandmother. At the age of 11, after firing a gun in the air during a New Year's Eve celebration, Armstrong was deemed a juvenile delinquent and sent to the ‘New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs’. (PBS.org) There, he took a music class which made him fall in love with music.
Dvořák composed the Quartet in 1893 during a summer vacation from his position as Director (1892-1895) of the National Conservatory in New York. Dvorak's secretary, Josef Kovarik, convinced him that if he traveled across the ocean, west to the rolling green hills of northeast Iowa, he would find the people he was looking for. He spent his vacation in the town of Spillville, Iowa, which was home to a Czech immigrant community. Dvořák had come to Spillville through Josef Jan Kovařík who had finished violin studies at the Prague Conservatory and was about to return to Spillville, his home in the United States, when Dvořák offered him a position as secretary, which Josef Jan accepted, so he came to live with the Dvořák family in New York. He told Dvořák about Spillville, where his father Jan Josef was a schoolmaster, which led to Dvořák deciding to spend the summer of 1893 there.
The forays into television began with a team up with the Coca Cola company, this was in the form of a short cartoon, “An Hour in Wonderland.” In October 1954 ABC commissioned Disney into producing a regular television series, “Disneyland.” This became the longest running series in history on primetime television. Emboldened by these early successes Walt envisaged areas children and parents could go together to enjoy animation inspired rides and parks. This idea came into fruition as the Disneyland Theme Park which opened to the public in July of 1955. The Disneyworld Theme Park followed