The Paris Archives Internationales de la Danse, formed in 1931 by Rolf de Maré, the Swedish dance patron who was responsible for the Swedish Ballet in the early ’twenties, in 1932 sponsored the first International Choreographic Competition in Paris. The prize-winning work in this initial competition was won by Kurt Joos for his now famous The Green Table. The second prize went to this hitherto almost unknown Trudi Schoop, for her comic creation, Fridolin.
In 1936, I brought her with her company for their first tour. Here again was a fresh and new form of dance entertainment. Tiny, with a shock of boyishly cut blonde hair, Trudi Schoop had the body of a young lad, and a schoolboy’s face alternating impishness with the benign innocence of the lad caught with sticky fingers and mouth streaked with jam.
Her repertoire consisted of theatre pieces rather than ballets in the accepted sense of the term. Trudi herself was a clown in the sense Charles Chaplin is a clown. Her range was tremendous. With a company trained by her in her own medium of gentle satire, she was an immediate success. Her productions had no décor, and there was a minimum of costume. But there was a maximum of effective mime, of wit, of satire. Her brother, Paul Schoop, was her composer, conductor, accompanist.
Trudi Schoop’s outstanding success was the prize-winning work, Fridolin. Schoop was Fridolin; Fridolin was Schoop. Fridolin was an innocent boy in a black Sunday suit and hat who stumbled and bumbled through a world not necessarily the best of all possible, wringing peals of laughter out of one catastrophe after another.
Other almost equally happy and successful works in her repertoire included Hurray for Love; The Blonde Marie, the tale of a servant girl who eventually becomes an operatic diva; and Want Ads, giving the background behind those particularly humorous items that still appear regularly in the “Agony Column” of The Times (London); you know, the sort of announcement that reads: “Honourable Lady (middle fifties) seeks acquaintance: object matrimony.”
The critical fraternity dubbed her the “funniest girl in the world”; the public adored her, and theatre folk made her their darling. Prior to the outbreak of the war, I sent Trudi and her Swiss Comedians across America. When, at last, war broke in all its fury, Schoop retired to her native Switzerland and disbanded her company. She did not reassemble it until 1946; and in 1947 I brought them over again for a long tour of the United States and Canada. On this most recent of her tours, in addition to her familiar repertoire, we made a departure by presenting an evening-long work, in three acts, called Barbara. This was, so far as I know, the first full-length work to be presented in dance form in many cities and towns of the North American continent. Full length, of course, in the sense that one work occupied a full evening for the telling of its story. This is another form of dance pioneering in which I am happy to have played a part.
Today Trudi Schoop, who has retired from the stage, lives with her sister in Hollywood.
C. A HINDU DEITY
Back in 1924, in London, I had watched a young Hindu dancer with Pavlova in her ballet, Hindu Wedding. I was struck by the quality of his movement and by the simple beauty of the dance of India.
His name was Uday Shan-Kar. From Pavlova I learned that he was the son of a Hindu producer of plays, that he had been trained by his father, and had worked so successfully in collaboration with him in the production of native Hindu mimed dramas that Pavlova had persuaded Shan-Kar to return to London to assist her in the production of an Indian ballet she had in mind, based on the Radna-Krishna legend. Pavlova succeeded in persuading him to dance in the work as well.