Bonnie Bird & Company AN EXPERIMENTAL DANCE-THEATER COLLABORATION AT CORNISH CHANGES THE DIRECTION OF ART MID CENTURY
There is hidden drama behind a series of familiar photographs from Cornish’s “golden years.” Unpopular, unappreciated, seemingly dead-end: no one caught up in the events of 1937-40 could have predicted how huge the work of an ad hoc dance-theater company set up by Director of Dance Bonnie Bird ’27-30 would be. More than a half century ago, Seattle photographer Phyllis Dearborn froze on black-and-white film a moment from a whimsical bit of choreography. There are four dancers in the shot, but our attention falls first on the familiar face of the young man with the curly hair. Almost anyone connected with the College can tell you who it is: Merce Cunningham. Cunningham, as everyone knows, went on from Cornish to become one of the major figures of 20thcentury dance, and any picture of him that show him at work are treasured keepsakes at Cornish, icons of the school’s glory days. The images are iconic, too, for one who is not pictured but happily haunts the photos—the musical director of the piece, John Cage. Almost as many know that he, too, went on to become a major figure in 20th century art, as a composer. Cornish introduced Cunningham and Cage, and they entered into a life-long professional and personal partnership. Called 3 Inventories of Casey Jones the piece was a fun romp—but the fun so brilliantly captured in the photo masked a very serious drama that was unfolding at Cornish. There is, in fact, something almost Shakespearean in the size of it. The story behind the photo puts in stark contrast the brilliant impulses that made Cornish an internationally important center of arts education in the 25 years it had existed and those darker ones that pulled it back towards obscurity. One might say it is the story of greatness laid low by what the Greeks called hamartia—a heroic flaw.
THE YEAR WAS 1937 This is significant in setting the drama because it is a mere two years before Nellie Cornish would leave the school that bore her name, a departure that ended an era, a philosophy, and a revolution in arts education and began a PAGE 12
By Maximilian Bocek
period of tumult and bad feeling. At the center of the drama was the young head of the Dance Department, a product of the Cornish School and a favorite of Nelly Cornish. This dancer, choreographer, and educator would go on to great success, alumna Bonnie Bird ‘27-30.
BONNIE BIRD Bonnie Bird was, like Nellie Cornish, a daughter of the Northwest: straightforward, tough-minded, resilient, and hard-working. Born in Portland the year Nellie founded Cornish, 1914, Bird grew up both in Seattle and in the countryside beyond its city limits, what is now Bothell, Washington. A great lover of horses, her highest aspiration as a girl was to become a rodeo trick rider and roper, according to her biographer, Karen Bell-Kanner. This plan for her development was undermined the day in Seattle when she saw her next-door neighbor, the son of her mother’s friend, doing his ballet exercises. The young dancer’s name was Caird Leslie. He had been dancing with Adolph Bolm, a partner to Anna Pavlova in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Some time later, Leslie took her backstage to meet Pavlova when the great dancer came to Seattle on tour. Young Bonnie migrated in her dreams from “Bonnie Bird, rodeo queen” and “Bonnie Bird, veterinarian” to “Bonnie Bird, prima ballerina.” At about the age of nine, in about 1923, Bonnie became one of Leslie’s first ballet students in his new school. Worth noting is that it is likely that Karen Irvin, longtime head of Dance at Cornish from 1954 to 1979, took classes with her: Irvin listed Leslie as her teacher and she and Bonnie Bird were roughly the same age. Irvin would go on to form the influential Cornish Ballet that was the center of the art in the Northwest for a generation.