Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks’ Fabulous Dance Sketches

 

Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks (1905-1963) inherited his parents love for collecting theatre memorabilia. His family had close ties to the leading ballet companies and he was appointed Artistic Director for Anna Pavlova’s world tours in the early 1930s.

Paget-Fredericks went on to become the first lecturer in dance in the United States, at the University of California, Berkeley, taught colour and design, released several children’s books. A student of Léon Bakst and John Singer Sargent, his dance drawings and paintings were exhibited in Europe and the United States.

 

The online version of the Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks Dance Collection, ca. 1913-1945 consists of 8 thumbnail pages (3 of photographs) of 368 images at UC Berkley’s Bancroft Library. The material is either original drawings by Paget-Fredericks or material he collected. It would be fair to say that Anna Pavlova dominates the web collection, one way or another. Summary and biography.

“The categories by subject include: Isadora Duncan; Loie Fuller; Vaslav Nijinsky; Anna Pavlova; Ruth St. Denis; other dancers; decor and costume designs for ballets; other figure and costume studies; illustrations and graphic design; miscellaneous drawings and paintings; juvenilia; historic dance costumes; printed pictures and clippings; photographic prints; portraits; and works by other artists in various media.”

 

 

Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks For Loie Fuller

 

A swirl of blues and greens….an ocean wave….a woman in motion. By all accounts, when she danced, Loie Fuller dominated the stage as definitively as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa dominated Mount Fuji in Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

Whatever they meant by it, critics likened Fuller to a force of nature. In Joseph Paget-Fredericks’ gouache, Loie Fuller performing Claude Debussy’s La Mer (inspired by Hokusai) is a wave in human form. To achieve that effect Fuller converted a staircase and hundreds of square feet of silk into lapping waves. Pavel Tchelitchew, who later designed several ballets for George Ballanchine, remembered the 1925 performance for its “dreamlike costumes of trailing silk and its phantasmagorical lighting.”

Loie Fuller (1862-1928) was in images more than any other performer of her time: Toulouse-Lautrec, Koloman Moser, Jules Cheret, Joseph Paget-Fredericks (1905-1963), who became a painter, choreographer and designer, also knew Fuller as a friend from his childhood. – Via