Eleanor Powell
by Chuck Staley
Title
Eleanor Powell
Artist
Chuck Staley
Medium
Digital Art - Photograph - Colorized
Description
Tap dancer and actress Eleanor Powell in a publicity photo taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull during the 1930s. "At a time when female dancers on screen were there to make their male partners look good, Eleanor Powell was the most talented tap-dancer in Hollywood, perhaps the world."
After auditioning for Broadway shows and meeting with rejection because of her lack of tap-dance expertise, Powell enrolled in Jack Donahue's dance school where she studied with the master soft-shoe dancer, and Johnny Boyle, a vaudeville hoofer known for his "terre a terre" style of buck-and-wing. She signed up for ten classes, and somewhere between the first and fifth lesson became frustrated with learning the steps -- her training in ballet and acrobatics made her tap dancing too aerial. In private lessons, Donahue sat on the floor in front of her and held her ankles, explaining that tapping was done with the feet and not the whole body. Donahue and Boyle then devised a belt, purchased from a war surplus store, with a large sandbag attached on either side. They made her wear it in practice, thereby training her to tap close the ground. By the eighth lesson, she caught on and was often called on in class to demonstrate. Those tap lessons were all Powell needed to help launch her career on Broadway. She debuted in Follow Thru (1929), in which she auditioned with Donahue's class routine for "Button Up Your Overcoat." During the run of the show, Powell practiced twelve hours a day, devising her own routines, dancing to phonograph records of such jazz pianists as Fats Waller. Between shows, she appeared with jazz and big bands, such as the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, where she had the distinction of being the first tap dancer to perform at Carnegie Hall.
Uploaded
June 13th, 2022
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