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Ivy
Schilling and Fred Leslie,
1920. Dancers
1 of 7 gelatin silver photographs,
halftone photogravure;
20.5 x 15.5 cm or less
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an10573226-1 |
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Many
of the National Library’s smaller collections of manuscripts
and personal papers contain surprises. They bring to light stories
from the past about artists who, while immensely popular in their
time, have been all but forgotten today: dancer Ivy Schilling,
for example. The papers of Ivy Schilling, preserved in the Library’s
Manuscript Collection at MS 6410, occupy just five folders and
consist of newspaper clippings, a scrapbook, an autograph book
and a collection of photos. They reveal not just the career of
a dancer but the life of a feisty woman with strong opinions and
some unusual achievements in her list of credits. The Schilling
collection provides a glimpse of a woman who was hailed in the
Australian press in the 1910s as ‘a Bernhardt of dancing
and unquestionably the greatest exponent of the ancient art that
Australia has yet produced’, but who was also reported in
the newspapers around the same time as the first Australian actress
to be granted a licence to drive a motorcar.
Schilling
was born in Melbourne in 1892. Her determination to make a career
as a dancer was clear early on in her life. Convincing her mother
to allow her to take dance classes was the first hurdle, as one
undated clipping from her scrapbooks records: ‘She pleaded
in a kitchen eight years ago. Just a plain, everyday kitchen one
finds in any modern day house. She, whose destiny was to be decided
that day, was watching her mother ironing. She patiently watched
the progress of the iron until it came to the handkerchiefs. Then
she took the plunge. “Mother, dear,” she remarked, “may
I learn to dance?”’
Schilling’s
mother was initially unwilling to let her daughter take classes,
and demanded to know why her daughter had an interest in an activity
that in some households was not considered appropriate for young
ladies. But she eventually relented, and Schilling went to learn
dancing from renowned Melbourne teacher Jennie Brenan, whose school
had opened in 1904, probably just shortly before Schilling arrived
to take her first classes. Brenan and her two sisters taught ballet,
ballroom and fancy dancing and the studio supplied dancers to J.C.
Williamson musicals. Brenan herself was also well known as an arranger
of dances for Williamson musicals, pantomimes and operettas, and
continued to teach well into the twentieth century.
When
Schilling began her dancing lessons, she already had, unbeknown
to her mother, set her eyes firmly on a stage career. She joined
the pantomime class at Brenan’s school rather than the ballroom
dancing class. And when the pantomime season in Melbourne opened
in the year that Schilling turned 12, she faced her mother again
and announced that she was about to make her stage debut in Mother
Goose.
After Mother
Goose, Schilling’s career path was clear, and work
as a dancer never seemed to elude her. After more work in pantomime
she went on to dance professionally in a series of J.C. Williamson
musicals including Our Miss Gibbs in 1910 and The
Quaker Girl in 1911. She established an acclaimed partnership
with another Australian dancer and choreographer, Fred Leslie,
and together they danced many specialty numbers across the country.
Often these specialty items were interpolated into musicals.
For
example, ‘Ju-No Kata’, the duet they danced based on
ju-jitsu moves, was introduced into Florodora, and later The
Quaker Girl. Schilling also appeared in 1913 in what is regarded
as the first J.C. Williamson revue, Come Over Here, in
which she and Leslie performed their famous ‘Spider and the
Fly’ routine. This number was an inspiration to a young Robert
Helpmann, who saw the pair perform it in Adelaide. Helpmann recalls
the occasion in an oral history interview recorded for the National
Library in 1974: ‘The first night after we arrived [from
Mount Gambier] I was taken to the theatre: this to me was magic.
It was the first time I’d ever been in a live theatre. It
was a revue called Come Over Here, in which Fred Leslie
and Ivy Schilling did a dance called “The Spider and the
Fly”’.
So while
Anna Pavlova may have been Helpmann’s great inspiration to
make a career as dancer, as man of the theatre his fate was sealed
the night he watched Leslie and Schilling in ‘The Spider
and the Fly’.
But
as the Schilling papers reveal, this ‘Bernhardt of dancing’ was
a real celebrity for many reasons that extended beyond her dancing
skills. Her physique and her athletic prowess were often noted
in the press. As one paper reported: ‘She belongs to the
athletic cult, and practices assiduously with the heavy dumbbells
and the parallel bars, and all the other appurtenances of the gymnasium.’ Schilling
included punch ball, boxing, wrestling and ju-jitsu in her daily
training routine. She had strong and controversial opinions about
the kind of sport that women might play, saying that she couldn’t
see why women shouldn’t play football. She won a beauty competition,
Sirens of the Surf, in Sydney, and another in Christchurch, New
Zealand, while on tour there with a J.C. Williamson pantomime.
She modelled for Rexona products and was described as ‘a
perfect model of a fine girlish beauty’. Her ‘vital
statistics’ were discussed freely in the press. Little escaped
notice.
But
perhaps her most widely reported exploit outside the theatre occurred
in 1911, when she saved well-known surfer, Tommy Walker, from drowning
at Manly Beach. Apparently seized by stomach cramps had been carried
out into dangerous and had begun to sink when Schilling strong
swimmer, swam out to rescue him. One newspaper was moved to publish
piece of doggerel to celebrate the event:
They
saw him bob where breakers lob
His lungs with fluid filling;
But when he gave another bob
Up came a shiny Schilling.
Her
name continued to generate word games, and a postcard from an admirer
contains more verse, this time headed ‘Ode to IV 1/-’.
But by the time she arrived in London in 1914 to pursue her career
there (as was the custom for Australian theatre artists at the
time), the outbreak of World War I was not far off. Schilling,
whose surname began with a Germanic cluster of consonants, removed
have pursued her interest in working the ‘c’ and became
Ivy Shilling.
Under
this name she performed in London and other large cities in England,
in pantomime, musical comedy and revue— in works such as
Chu Chin Chow, Maggie, Aladdin, Watch Your Step, and The Lilac
Domino—and, accompanied again by Leslie, appeared as a specialty
dancer in vaudeville.
On the
strength of her performances at Drury Lane in The Lilac Domino,
Schilling returned to Australia under contract to Tivoli Theatres
Ltd to appear in the Sydney run of that show in 1921. Her contract
is preserved at the Library in the papers of J.C. Williamson, at
MS 9145. It indicates that she was provided with a return, first-class
sea passage from London, and received a salary of £100 per
week, a not insubstantial amount given that the basic wage in the
1920s was in the vicinity of £5.
Schilling’s
visit home seems to have resulted in the development of another
side to her performing career. She appeared in the 1921 black and
white feature film, The Blue Mountains Mystery, directed by Raymond
Longford and Lottie Lyell. Nothing in Schilling’s papers,
however, documents this appearance—and the film itself, whose
libretto was based on the book The Mount Marunga Mystery by Harrison
Owen, is presumed lost. But Schilling does appear to have pursued
her interest in working in film when she returned to London after
the Australian season of The Lilac Domino. From London, according
to an undated clipping in her scrapbook, she sailed on the Mauretania
to ‘participate in film work in Los Angeles’. Little
else has so far come to light about Schilling’s excursion
into film. Further research is clearly warranted.
In 1931,
The Times (London) announced Schilling’s engagement to Harley
Street surgeon John Eugene Ryan. They were married in London on
18 March 1932. Can we assume that marriage was the end of the career
of Ivy Schilling, and that she spent the rest of her life until
her death in 1972 happily married as Mrs John Ryan? Again, only
further research will tell. Her small collection of papers certainly
provides
an insight
into an unusual woman who was a household name for two decades.
The material suggests that there is much more to discover about
her dancing career, as well as about her status in many other areas
of public life in the first decades of the twentieth century.
MICHELLE
POTTER is the National Library’s Curator of Dance. She was
the recipient of the award for services to dance at the 2003 Australian
Dance Awards. |