Margaret Barr (29 November 1904 – 29 May 1991) was an Australian choreographer and teacher of dance-drama who worked in the United States, England, New Zealand and Australia. During a career of more than sixty years, she created over eighty works.
Born in India, she spent parts of her adulthood in England and the United States. As an adult, she studied dance with Martha Graham in New York, and then moved to England. There, she formed dance groups in London, taught dance-mime at Dartington Hall School in Devon, and choreographed and produced dance-dramas on contemporary topics. In 1939, after marrying a conscientious objector, she moved with him to New Zealand, where she taught dance, movement and improvisation and developed further works. Around 1950, she left New Zealand for Australia, where she spent the rest of her life. For about forty years, she taught dance-drama classes developed from the ideas of Martha Graham and Konstantin Stanislavski. She led the Margaret Barr Dance Drama Group, mounting major productions every year. She also taught movement and improvisation at the National Institute of Dramatic Art for seventeen years. Her works explored many social issues, including the environment, relationships between peoples, strong women, pacificism, and ideas from works of art and literature.
Barr was born in Bombay, India, in 1904 to Mungo Barr, an American-born dentist, and his English wife Margaret (née Aukett), a nurse. She had one younger sister, Betty. After time spent with other family members in the United States and England, Margaret and her sister settled with their parents in Santa Barbara, California, where Barr graduated from Santa Barbara High School in 1922. They studied drama with Little Theatre Movement founders Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg, and dance in the Denishawn style with Martha Graham's sister Geordie, then briefly ran their own dance school. In 1927, they moved to New York, where Margaret Barr studied dance with Martha Graham. Barr's first works, Earth Mother and Hebridean Suite, were choreographed while she was there; she continued to produce Hebridean Suite until the 1970s, and it was one of the works performed at a festival to celebrate the centenary of Barr's birth in 2004.
In 1929, Barr left New York for London, where she formed a group called The Workshop of Modern Dance. After Dorothy Elmhirst attended the group's debut performance in 1930, Barr was invited to teach at Dartington Hall School in Devon. Also in 1930, Barr choreographed the dance movements in the West End production of Othello in which Paul Robeson and Peggy Ashcroft starred.
At Dartington Hall, Barr taught dance-mime. Dance historian Garry Lester has explained, "The work was called 'dance-mime' for very clear reasons: the choreography clearly had movement as its basis, valuing and using the attributes of modern dance (in terms of the form it took, the structuring of component parts and the movement style), and relied equally on finding and sustaining through improvisation the character of the protagonists within each of her works." Barr formed a core group of professional dancers, and taught both students at the school and, through the Workers' Educational Association, groups of people from the surrounding communities. Her classes involved "Graham exercises: stretching, bending, leaping, rolling
over, muscle by muscle, on the floor" and "exploring the movement impulse, its stylisation and the range of dynamics (from lyrical to staccato) available to a dancer". Theatre producer Maurice Browne, reviewing productions at Dartington Hall, commented on the highly developed technique shown by performers who had never danced nor appeared on stage previously, demonstrating Barr's talent for developing individual skills to the highest level possible.
Barr choreographed works for large groups: Browne described seeing a performance by about forty or fifty people whose occupations included schoolchildren and teachers, clerical workers and farmers, housemaids and stonemasons. Several reviewers were struck by the way some pieces "welded the group of thirty adults into a unity that was so purposeful that no one in the audience was left unmoved"; in particular, dance critic John Martin wrote: "The unity of spirit with which they worked together provided a model of ensemble playing." Lester observes that "Margaret practised the politics of inclusion, with a simple pre-requisite: participants must show commitment to the work itself and the idea of a 'group'."
Among the works Barr created while at Dartington were: from 1931, Funeral and Wedding, to music by Cyril Scott; The Factory, representing the rhythmical movements of machines and workers, including an accident; Plain Song; The Child; Medieval Dance (later Medieval Suite), with music by Edmund Rubbra; and Sea Sketches, which included "vocal sounds"; from 1932: The People, to music by Donald Pond; Sibelius, set to Sibelius' Symphony No. 1 in E Minor; Song of Young Women; from 1934: The Family, with music by Rubbra; The Three Marys; The Three Sisters, in which three women (a prostitute, a spinster and a young girl) show their reactions to war; Epithalamium (inspired by an affair Barr had with Dorothy Elmhirst's 16-year-old son Michael Straight) and Colliery (for which Barr visited a coal mining community in Northumberland).
In 1934, German exile Kurt Jooss and his dance group arrived at Dartington, and Barr resigned rather than work under Jooss' direction. She became director of a permanent corps de ballet attached to the new Experimental Theatre in London. Its first production was Pacific, incorporating Polynesian dances. It was at this time that Barr began using the term "dance-drama". Her works from this period carried pacifist and communist-derived political messages, and were set to music by contemporary composers such as Edmund Rubbra and Michael Tippett. She contributed to the 1938 Festival of Co-operation at Wembley Stadium, directed by André van Gyseghem, by training "a ballet of mourning women and a ballet of exultant men of the future".
Critics had strong, and strongly contrasting, responses to Barr's work in England. W. A. Darlington, reviewing a performance at the Arts Theatre, London, described it as "nothing better than posturing and pattern-weaving ... [despite] "moments of sheer beauty — especially in The Three Sisters and in a little Hebridean scene, The Storm ... immense pains and skill were being wasted".
Dance critic Fernau Hall described many of Barr's works from the Dartington and London periods in his 1950 book Modern English Ballet: An Interpretation. Although Hall thought that some individual pieces were failures (describing Means Test (1937) as a "propaganda work" in which "the movements [were] so vague that the result had little meaning"), overall, he considered that "Margaret Barr has considerable importance in the history of English ballet. She was the only English choreographer to concentrate on contemporary subjects, and the first English artistic director to give consistent encouragement to experimental work and contemporary composers. Her artistic standards were so high that designers like Goffin, and composers like Rubbra, Rawsthorne and Tippett were proud to work with her."
Barr married Douglas Bruce Hart, a carpenter and communist, in London in 1936. As Hart was a pacifist and conscientious objector, the couple moved to New Zealand in 1939 to avoid conscription during WWII.
In New Zealand, Barr taught movement and improvisation at the Workers' Educational Association in Auckland. She developed two works in collaboration with poet R. A. K. Mason, China (1943) and Refugee (1945). Processions (1943) is another work created during Barr's time in New Zealand; its final section, 'May Day', was performed at a May Day celebration in Auckland in 1944. Other works performed in New Zealand included Hebridean, Three Women, Funeral and Wedding, Breadline, and Factory.
In 1949 or 1952, Barr sailed to Sydney, Australia, with her partner in a yacht they had built. She started a dance studio and established the Sydney Dance-Drama Group (called the Margaret Barr Dance-Drama Group from 1968). In the early years, she worked as a cleaner, and trained and rehearsed the dance-drama group on two evenings a week. From 1955 until 1990, productions of her dance-dramas were presented annually, usually introducing a new work each year, as well as reprising and sometimes revising earlier works. She was also a member of the Maritime Industries Theatre amateur dramatic group.