Valerie Bettis

Valerie Elizabeth Bettis was born in Houston, Texas, and began ballet training as a child. After a year at the University of Texas, she moved to New York and studied with Hanya Holm, whose blend of modern-dance structure, theatrical design, and improvisational inquiry shaped Bettis's early development. She made her professional debut in Holm's *Trend* in 1937 and danced with Holm's company into 1940.

By the early 1940s Bettis was presenting her own choreography. Her breakthrough was the 1943 solo *The Desperate Heart*, which combined movement with John Malcolm Brinnin's poetry and drew strong critical attention for its speed, emotional volatility, and dramatic command. She formed and directed her own ensemble, working with composer and musical director Bernardo Segall, whom she married in 1943. Bettis brought her company and repertory to Jacob's Pillow in the summers of 1946 and 1947.

Bettis moved freely between concert dance and commercial theatre. She performed in and contributed choreography to Broadway projects, winning a 1948 Theatre World Award for her performance in the revue *Inside U.S.A.* Her interests also expanded toward "dance plays" based on literature. In 1948 she adapted, directed, and choreographed William Faulkner's *As I Lay Dying*, treating gesture, text, acting, and dance as parts of a single dramatic form.

Her best-known narrative ballet, *A Streetcar Named Desire*, premiered in 1952 for the Slavenska-Franklin Ballet, drawing Tennessee Williams's characters into an expressionistic movement world. Bettis also worked in early television and Hollywood, both as a performer and choreographer. Her career's breadth was not a departure from modern dance so much as an application of its dramatic tools to other media.

Bettis continued making concert works through the 1960s and 1970s. In 1964 she created *Songs and Processions*, and in 1976 *Echoes of Spoon River*, continuing her long engagement with literary source material. In 1982 she saw Dance Theatre of Harlem revive *A Streetcar Named Desire*, a significant acknowledgment of the ballet's endurance. She died in New York later that year. Her papers and musical materials at the New York Public Library preserve production notes, scripts, scores, photographs, and correspondence that document a career built across normally separated categories of American performance.