Impure Dancer

In the wings a piano played softly Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours. A squatty ballerina in pink & white tarlatan waddled across the broad, bare stage with the grace of an angry duck, poised herself on her toes in the manner of Alicia Markova and executed a series of shaky pirouettes. To no music at. all she leaped through the air and beat her chest in an athletic agony that was unmistakably Martha Graham.

A young and mischievous dancer named Iva Kitchell had rented Manhattan's 2,700-seat Carnegie Hall with considerable misgivings last week. But dance fans almost filled the place. Wrote the New York Times's dance critic John Martin: "If Miss Kitchell has her eye on Madison Square Garden, her friends need feel no qualms. . . . She . . . ought to be compelled to travel about the country on the trail of the various ballet companies to restore sanity."

Tiny (5 ft. 1 in.) Iva Kitchell, 27, has mastered the basic techniques of all ballet styles. She joined the Chicago Opera ballet company at 14, aped the ballerinas backstage so mercilessly that her ballet master suggested she turn comedienne. She has since appeared in almost every small Manhattan dance auditorium except the Young Men's Hebrew Association. ("I was never asked. I suppose because I'm not pure dance. I'm an impure dancer.")

Seek & Search. Iva Kitchell has nothing against any school of dancing ("I just think there's something completely ridiculous about anything that's too serious"). In one dance (called Oriental Dance by an Occidental Girl) she flips her fingers and toes and picks up a handkerchief with her teeth. But she shines in Soul in Search, satirizing the Dark Meadows dance in which Martha Graham rolls herself up in a black cloth which seems to symbolize the labyrinths of a frustrated libido. As Iva Kitchell, hopelessly mired in yards of purple muslin, thrashes about on the floor, she suddenly calls out: "Who am I--that seeks and searches and never finds? . . . Where shall I seek? Where shall I search? . . . Is it here where I am--or am I? Is it there? . . . " Soon she is crawling about the stage on her hands and knees, sobbing: "I seek and search. Seek. Search. Seek. Search." Then, happily, she suddenly trots offstage, shouting, "I will go into the fertile fields!"

Says impious Iva Kitchell: "I think Martha Graham is a fine artist, although I did think it was pretty funny when she got under that piece of cloth."

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