Ailes Gilmour

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Ailes Gilmour was among the young pioneers of the American modern dance movement in the 1930's. Her half-brother is Isamu Noguchi the American sculptor.

Ailes was born in Yokohama, Japan in 1912. Her mother, Leonie Gilmour was also the mother of Isamu Noguchi. Leonie was an American woman living in Japan working as an English teacher and writer.

Leonie Gilmour met Yone Noguchi in New York. He was a self-styled poet. When he returned to Japan, he made his living as a professor of English at Keio University in Tokyo. Yone invited Leonie to come to Japan with their baby. When Leonie got to Tokyo, she discovered that Yone already had children and another family there.

Ailes' father was not Yone Noguchi. Ailes said in a biographical statement she gave for Marion Horosko's book about Martha Graham that her father was a Japanese poet. ^[1]

Neither Ailes nor Isamu knew the name of Ailes' father. According to Masayo Duus in her biography of Isamu, a page in an old notebook which might have referred to Ailes' father was found by Ailes' son, Jody Spinden. However, the corner of the paper where a signature would be written had been torn off. ^[2]

Leonie chose her daughter's name from the poem Beauty's a Flower" by Moira O'Neill. a pseudonym of Agnes Shakespeare Higginson

It is a striking coincidence that the words in that poem seemed to predict Ailes destiny as a dancer. Moira wrote, "Ailes was girl that stepped on two bare feet..." Indeed that was part of the modern dance technique.

Ailes grew up in a little Japanese style house that Leonie had built in Chigasaki, a seaside town near Yokohama. Isamu as a boy actually worked with the carpenter on its construction. Ailes was remembered by neighbors in Chigasaki as a happy child. She spend summer days playing in the garden, chasing butterflies and cicadas as children in Japan do.

In 1920 Leonie managed to return to San Francisco with Ailes. Isamu is still in high school in LaPorte, Indiana. He is accepted into Columbia University's pre-med program in 1922. Leonie and Ailes then go to live in New York City as well.

Leonie sends Ailes to the Ethical Culture school where she herself had been a student. It was founded in 1876 by Felix Adler, a champion of many educational and social reforms of the Progressive movement and professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She went on to study at the Sorbonne and graduate from Bryn Mawr College. For her daughter, she finds the Cherry Lawn School [1] in Connecticut, one of the first progressive, co-educational boarding schools and enrolls Ailes there for high school. The director of the school was Dr. Christina Stael von Holstein, a descendant of the famous Madame DeStael of the Napoleonic era. Her 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.

Ailes was the literary editor of The Cherry Pit the school's student magazine in 1928. She graduated from the Cherry Lawn School in 1929. She gets a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse to study dance and performing arts. There she met the young Martha Graham and joins her 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. Martha had a bust made of herself in bronze.

In 1932 Radio City Music Hall opened. Ailes performed for its debut with the Graham company in a piece called Choric Patterns. Its run lasted only one week. Ailes commented ruefully to Marion Horosko that Radio City was a success only as a movie theater with Rockettes.

On December 31, 1933 Ailes mother, Leonie Gilmour died in the charity ward of New Yorks Bellevue Hospital. The cause of death was listed as pneunomia but years of poverty and hardship must have taken their toll. Isamu and Ailes put a small gravestone for their mother in her family burial plot in Cypress Hills cemetery in Brooklyn. Isamu made a Japanese style unglazed haniwa statue to guard her gravesite.

During the Depression Era, artists struggled to find work. Ailes name appears in dance programs with a dancer-choreographer named Bill Matons [2] who was also involved in politics. He did the choreography for the Lenin Peace pageant at Madison Square Garden in 1937. Matons was the director of the New Dance League's Experimental Unit. This organization evolved from the Workers Dance League between 1931 and 1935, Among the group's members were male dance-choreographers like Jose Limon and Charles Weidman. Ailies 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.

Ailes was married to Herbert J. Spinden. He was the curator of American Indian art and culture at the Brooklyn Museum. They had one son, Jody Spinden.