Ailes Gilmour

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Ailes Gilmour was among the young pioneers of the American Modern Dance movement of the 1930's. She was one of the first members of Martha Graham's dance company.

Ailes was born in Yokohama, Japan in 1912. Ailes' older brother is Isamu Noguchi the American sculptor. Isamu and Ailes had different fathers. Their mother, Leonie Gilmour was an American ex-patriate living in Japan, working as an English teacher and writer. Leonie Gilmour, met Isamu's father, Yone Noguchi while Yone was living in New York where he trying to get his poetry published. At first she worked for him as his editor. Isamu was born in New York after Yone had gone back to Japan to teach English at Keio University. At the time Leonie believed they were married. However, when she got to Tokyo, Leonie found out that Yone already a child and another family.

According to Masayo Duus in her biography of Isamu, ^[1], Ailes' son found a page in an old notebook which might have referred to Ailes' father. However, the corner of the paper where a signature would be written had been torn off apparently to conceal his identity. Ailes said in a biographical statement for Marion Horosko's book about Martha Graham, that her father was a Japanese poet. ^[2]

Leonie chose the name Ailes for her daughter from a poem Beauty's a Flower by Moira O'Neill, the pseudonym of Agnes Shakespeare Higginson. It is a striking coincidence that the words in that poem seemed to predict Ailes' career as a dancer. Moira wrote, "Ailes was girl that stepped on two bare feet..." Performing barefoot was an important innovation by modern dance pioneeers like Martha Graham.

Ailes grew up in a little Japanese style house that Leonie had constructed in Chigasaki, a seaside town near Yokohama. Isamu as a boy actually worked with the carpenters who built it. The Japanese woodworking tools they taught him to use were among his most treasured possessions all his life.

Ailes was remembered by neighbors in Chigasaki as a happy child who liked playing in the garden, chasing butterflies and cicadas.

In 1920, Leonie and her daughter managed to return to America. Isamu was still in high school in LaPorte, Indiana. He got his high school diploma there and was accepted into Columbia University's pre-med program in 1922. At that time, Leonie and Ailes also go to live in New York City. Leonie sends Ailes to the Ethical Culture elementary school which was founded in 1876 by Felix Adler, She herself had been a student there. It was known as a progressive school. Leonie had completed her education at Bryn Mawr College and the Sorbonne in Paris. For her daughter, she chooses the Cherry Lawn School [1] in Connecticut. It was a boarding school which was known for its progressive, co-educational program. The director of the school was Dr. Christina DeStael von Holstein, a descendant of the Madame DeStael, a French woman writer in the early 19th century. Dr. Christina DeStael's husband, Dr. Boris Bogoslovsy had been an official in the Kerensky government and later served an observer at the Nurenberg trials. He taught science at Cherry Lawn.

In 1928, Ailes was the literary editor of The Cherry Pit, the Cherry Lawn's student magazine. After she graduated from high school there in 1929, she went on to the Neighborhood Playhouse to study dance and performing arts as a scholarhip student. There she met the young Martha Graham and joined her new professional dance troupe. Ailes told Marion Horosko that she introduced Martha Graham to her brother, Isamu, in 1929. At the time he was trying to make a living in New York City taking commissions for portrait busts, an activity he disparagingly termed "doing heads." Martha had a bust made of herself in bronze.

On December 31, 1933 Ailes mother, Leonie Gilmour dies in the charity ward of New York's Bellevue Hospital. The cause of death was listed as pneunomia perhaps brought on by the toll taken on her by many years of poverty and hardship.

Isamu and Ailes put a small gravestone for Leonie in her family burial plot in Cypress Hills cemetery in Brooklyn. Isamu made a Japanese style unglazed haniwa statue to guard their mother's grave. It was only many decades later that Isamu achieved renown and success as an artist.

During the Depression Era, dancers like Ailes and artists like Isamu struggled to find work. In 1932 when Radio City Music Hall opened Ailes performed at the debut with Grahham's company. Their work, "Choric patterns" lasted on stage for just one week. Ailes ruefully observed to Marion Horosko that Radio City Music Hall could only succeed when it became a movie movie theater with Rockettes.

Ailes name appears in the 1930's on dance programs with a dancer-choreographer named Bill Matons [2]. Matons was the director of the "experimental unit" of the New Dance League. This organization evolved from the Workers Dance League between 1931 and 1935. Among the group's later to- become-famous-members were male dancer-choreographers like Jose Limon and Charles Weidman. Ailes and Matons performed in a WPA dance recital at the Brooklyn Museum in 1937. They were in Adelante, a WPA sponsored Broadway musical in 1939. Matons did the choreography for the 1937 Lenin Peace pageant at Madison Square Garden.

Ailes was married to Herbert J. Spinden. Ailes son is Jody Spinden.

[edit] Additional Reading

Duus, Masayo. The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Horosko, Marian. Martha Graham: The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training. University Press of Florida, 2002.

Noguchi, Isamu. A Scupltor's World. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.