Marie Bryant
Marie Bryant was a force to be reckoned with on the stage. She is well known for her contagious, much-sought-out style of dancing in Hollywood productions, as well as her eventual prominence as a dance coach and choreographer. At various points in her career as a performer, Bryant dabbled in burlesque, singing, and acting, gaining prominence and cultural relevance in each.
Bryant was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on 6 November 1917, and Meridian remained her home until a racist incident threatened her family and required that they relocate to New Orleans. While in New Orleans, Bryant began studying under dance teacher Mary Bruce, who would become her earliest dance mentor and help her perfect her style and technique. Bruce’s mentorship and training subsequently opened the door to Bryant’s first professional gigs in Chicago nightclubs, where, by 1934, she was performing regularly with Earl Hines and his band in their popular Grand Terrace Cafe floorshow.
In the mid-1930s Bryant relocated to Los Angeles, the city that would become something of a lifelong home base. She worked at both predominantly Black and predominantly white clubs in the years following her relocation to Los Angeles, booking shows at venues such as the Paradise Club. She found a niche in the film industry during these years, performing in a score of movies, such as the 1937 film Artists and Models, the 1938 film The Duke Is Tops, and the 1940 film Gang War.
By 1940 Bryant had formed a working relationship with Duke Ellington and was heralded as one of Ellington’s great California “discoveries.” Ellington is reported as having named her “one of the world’s greatest dancers.” This is the type of praise Bryant would earn throughout her life from big-name performers, as Gene Kelley once called her “one of the finest dancers I’ve ever seen in my life.” In the early 1940s Bryant toured with Ellington and his crew, taking the stage in theaters across the nation before returning to Los Angeles. Bryant opened for Ellington’s musical revue Jump for Joy, in which she performed her famous number “Bli-Blip.” Despite much anticipation and positive community reception, the show did not make it to Broadway and closed after nine weeks of production.
Among Bryant’s stage productions included Africana (1942) and Sweet ’n Hot (1944), and she had film roles as a dancer, though often she wasn’t credited. These films included Broadway Rhythm, where she performed the “Brazilian Boogie” number with partner Lena Horne; When Strangers Marry, where she performed with Lennie Bluett; and Carolina Blues, where she performed with Harold Nicholas. She also dabbled in vocal performance in her various film roles, singing, for example, the classic jazz standard “On the Sunny Side of the Street” in the film Jammin’ the Blues.
Marie Bryant was able to break onto Broadway with the 1945 musical Are You With It? The very next year, she performed with the production Beggar’s Holiday. This helped get her foot in the door, and she began teaching tap and boogie and coaching for the Katherine Dunham School.
Bryant began to shift away from on-screen parts and turned to staging dance scenes in film and training professional dancers. Many actors, actresses, and film directors sought out Bryant because of her specific dance techniques, her most famous called “controlled release,” a technique she described as “finding the natural line in each body and the favorite ways it likes to move about—then controlling these movements.” Despite her indispensability to many films, she often did not receive on-screen credit for her coaching.
In Los Angeles, Bryant obtained several regular gigs, including working as a guest instructor at Eugene Loring’s School of Dance, coaching dancers at the Belasco Theater, and staging dances for her own troupe of the Marie Bryant Dancers at the Florentine Theater. During this time, Bryant dabbled in burlesque dancing, eventually performing strip teases on stage. She told Ebony magazine that she hoped to make the strip “more of a dance and less of a come-on, to give the stripper more art and more dignity.”
Bryant and her troupe of dancers toured with the Barnstorming Extravaganza of 1951, a domestic tour bringing together Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan, among others. Soon after, Bryant joined an overseas touring venture that took her and her troupe from New York to England, India, and finally to Colombo, Sri Lanka. This would place them in Colombo for the opening of the Colombo Plan Exhibition, which attracted guests such as Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. Performing for royalty, however, was not the most consequential moment of this tour for Bryant, as in the midst of the tour’s performances, Bryant met and married, John Rajkumar, the company’s business manager. Bryant and Rajkumar toured through his home country of India for their honeymoon before returning to England.
In England, Bryant joined the cast of the revue High Spirits, wherein she received significant attention for her satirical anti-apartheid song “The Plea.” This song became the topic of much conversation and controversy after its performance during the visit of South African Prime Minister D. F. Malan to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Bryant used this time in her life to explore her singing career more fully, gravitating mostly toward calypso songs but exploring swing music as well.
After their stint in England, Bryant and Rajkumar returned to Los Angeles in 1955. There they had a decade together before Rajkumar died, having long suffered from ill health. In the years around his death, Bryant continued her work choreographing and coaching acts around California and Las Vegas, as well as picking up a choreography role for Nat King Cole’s television series. In the 1970s, she continued this work while she also ran the Marie Bryant Dance Studios.
After a long and storied career in the industry, Marie Bryant died on 23 May 1978 from cancer. She was fifty-nine. Bryant was survived by a daughter and three grandchildren and is heralded as one of the great Black performers of the twentieth century.
