High Yellow

What it contains

• Vernacular Jazz · Throughout the ballet, in the choreography credited to Buddy Bradley — Bradley taught Markova a hip-isolation step ('snake hips') drawn from contemporary vernacular jazz dance, and the work as a whole is described as the first ballet built on jazz choreography rather than classical vocabulary. Source: "It was from High Yellow that Alicia Markova gained the nickname "snake hips" for what she was taught by Bradley."

What is danced

The clearest piece of movement evidence the article gives is that Buddy Bradley taught Alicia Markova, a classically trained ballerina of the Camargo Society, a hip-isolation step that earned her the nickname 'snake hips' — a vocabulary drawn from contemporary vernacular jazz dance rather than from the classroom she had trained in. This detail, together with the article's flat statement that the work is 'the first jazz-ballet', is the basis for treating jazz vernacular movement as the defining idiom of the piece, taught to and performed by dancers otherwise working in a ballet company context (Markova, Ashton, Walter Gore, William Chappell and others of the Camargo roster).

Context

The Camargo Society (1930–1933) existed to commission new British ballet outside the commercial theatre, and in the same 1932 season it staged Swan Lake with a Duncan Grant set — High Yellow sat in that same repertory as a deliberate departure into jazz idiom, using a score assembled from an actual jazz recording session (Spike Hughes and Jimmy Dorsey, Chenil Gallery, 1930) played by the London Symphony Orchestra plus nine jazz musicians. According to the writer Andy Simons quoted in the article, the title itself was a compromise acknowledging that white stage performers were dancing to music intended to evoke Black musical idiom, a tension the article frames as central to how the work was received and understood.

Staging history

The article states plainly that the ballet has not been revived; its only afterlife has been musical, with Hughes's score reissued on a 1994 compilation CD. Physical traces of the original production have surfaced separately — Vanessa Bell's curtain design was sold at auction in 2023, and one of William Chappell's costume designs for the production was included in a 1993 exhibition of twentieth-century dance design at Central Saint Martins.

How to watch it

There is no film or living staging to watch; what survives is descriptive. Attend, in any reconstruction of the material, to the friction between a ballet-trained cast (Markova, Ashton, Gore) and Bradley's jazz vocabulary — the 'snake hips' detail suggests hip isolation and torso movement quite outside classical alignment, layered onto dancers whose base training was Cecchetti-descended English ballet of the early 1930s.

Structure

1. Foreword
   Opening number of the original 1932 programme; the article names it but does not describe the action or steps.
2. Sirocco
   Second named number in the original programme; no further description is given.
3. Six Bells Stampede
   Third named number in the original programme; no further description is given.
4. Elegy
   Fourth named number in the original programme; no further description is given.
5. Weary Traveller
   Fifth named number in the original programme; no further description is given.
6. Finale, from A Harlem Symphony
   Closing number, set to music drawn from Hughes's 'A Harlem Symphony'; the article gives no further description of the choreography.

Structure read from an encyclopaedia article, not from a libretto or score we hold. Confirm against a programme before treating the numbering as authoritative.

Credits

• composer: Spike Hughes

Questions