OTD in early British television: 19 April 1937
John Wyver writes: On Monday 19 April 1937 Alexandra Palace hosted a troupe billed as the Margaret Morris Dancers, who performed in both the afternoon and evening. Their first 13-minute slot featured seven short works, performed to Beethoven and Chopin among other composers, while the later, slightly longer programme showcased a somewhat different selection of seven dances. Eight dancers are named in the Programme-as-Broadcast records, including Morris herself performing ‘Luncheon hour’ to a score credited only to ‘Bradford’.
Margaret Morris led the Margaret Morris Movement (MMM), a successful school teaching a form of classical Greek dance that, in contrast with the rigid forms of ballet, celebrated freedom and movement. After performing at the start of the century as a teenager in productions of Shakespeare by Ben Greet Frank Benson and Sir Herbert Tree, she studied with Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond and in 1910, encouraged by her lover John Galsworthy, opened a school in London.
She continued to perform, including in Paris, and opened a tiny theatre in Chelsea, before as Wikipedia tells us,
In 1922 she started the first ‘Educational School’ in England to combine normal educational subjects with educational training in dancing and acting… Painting and design became an integral part of the students curriculum which already included acting, dance composition and improvisation, normal educational subjects and her system of Dance Notation.
From the 1920s onwards her work was increasingly celebrated for its remedial qualities for those taking part, and it became an important strand in the keep-fit activities that were immensely popular in interwar Britain. Indeed Morris’ only other appearance on pre-war television was as the leader of and commentator on a demonstration of keep-fit exercises by her students in the series Body-Line in November 1937. And with similar aims Margaret Morris Movement continues to thrive to this day.
BFIplayer online offers (for free) the wonderfully exuberant 1922 Topical Budget newsreel item, Miss Margaret Morris’ Merry Mermaids, which features students from a summer school performing on the beach at Harlech (and is the source of the header framegrab). And from a decade and a half later, made at more or less the moment of the television broadcasts, there is this glorious newsreel item made available by British Pathé:
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