Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work!
Albertina Rasch, (born 1896, Vienna, Austria—died Oct. 2, 1967, Hollywood, Calif., U.S.), Austrian-born American dancer, choreographer, and teacher whose troupes became well known during the 1920s and ’30s for their appearances in Broadway musicals and Hollywood films.
Rasch, a student of the Vienna Opera ballet school, became leading ballerina at the Hippodrome Theatre in New York City in 1911. In 1923 she opened a ballet school and in 1924 formed the first of several troupes known as the Albertina Rasch Girls. After staging the dances for several of Florenz Ziegfeld’s revues and for George White’s Scandals, she choreographed numerous Broadway musicals, including Three’s a Crowd (1930) and Moss Hart’s Lady in the Dark (1941), as well as a number of motion pictures.
Before Rasch’s influence, dancing in musical plays and films had provided primarily a background for the leading performers; routines were usually simple, with emphasis on spectacular costumes and uniform ensemble dancing. Rasch’s choreography was more closely allied to the dramatic narrative, and, although she continued to use precision dancing, she was among the first on Broadway to include variations for individual ensemble dancers. She incorporated classical ballet technique into precision dancing and helped raise technical standards of stage and film dancing by requiring a ballet background of her dancers.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
Los Angeles 1960s overviewDuring the 1950s there had been no distinctive “Sound of California,” but in the decade that followed there were several. Capitol Records, after long disdaining the youth market, released a series of records by the Beach Boys celebrating cars, surfing, and girls. The group’s glee-club harmonies and…
EducationEducation, discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships). Education can be thought of…
Los Angeles 1970s overviewLos Angeles had been an important music-business city since the 1930s. The city’s movie industry, the favourable climate, the influx of European émigrés and Southern blacks during World War II, and the founding of Capitol Records in 1942 all contributed to the city’s growth as a music centre. But…