Last Updated: 02 May, 2024 | Views: 426
Age: 47
Profession: Dancer
Other Profession(s): Choreographer, Teacher
Famous For: Modern Dance Pioneer
Higher Education: Herron School of Art and Design
About (Profile/Biography):
Lester Horton, a well known American dancer and choreographer, was born in Indianapolis. Horton created anti-fascist and anti-Nazi protest dances in the middle of the 1930s, including Dictator (1935) and Prelude to Militancy (1937; with Lewitzky). Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), presented in the Hollywood Bowl amphitheatre in 1937 with Lewitzky in the lead role as the Chosen One, was one of Horton's most notable works of dance. Many in the audience were astonished by the barefooted dancers because this was the first time the Stravinsky piece had been choreographed by an American.
Career:
In the years 1926–1927, Horton took part in his debut theatrical performance, a pageant he staged in Indianapolis with the help of amateur dramatist Clara Nixon Bates, whose work was based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha.
Horton's fascination with Native American culture as a child and the performances he watched of modern dancers Ted Shawn and the Denishawn Dancers motivated him to pursue a career in movement.
Horton started directing the choreography for Hollywood films in 1942. He frequently worked on movies with plots set in foreign locations because of his interest in fusing cultural elements, such as Moonlight in Havana (1942), White Savage (1943), Phantom of the Opera (1944), and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1946). (1945).
In an Indianapolis studio, Horton started learning ballet as a teenager. He first came to Chicago to study for a short time with Russian American ballet dancer and choreographer Adolph Bolm as well as at the school of Andreas Pavley and Serge Oukrainsky after studying with Forrest Thornburg, a teacher who had received training at the Denishawn School of Dance, in 1925.
Achievements and Awards:
Over the ensuing 11 years, Horton would go on to choreograph 19 movies.
Horton went about the production in the way he would throughout his career, getting engaged in the choreography as well as the staging and the costumes.
Unknown facts:
Lewitzky, Reynolds, and Horton's group all disbanded in 1950, just two years after the Dance Theater was founded; Bowne had gone much earlier.
Wait!
Here're some popular profiles for you.