John Butler

John Butler (1918-1993), dancer and choreographer, spent his career avoiding many of the restrictions and limitations that affected his contemporaries. Although he took a different path from most of his colleagues, Butler achieved considerable success and some of his dance pieces are still performed around the world today.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he moved to Greenwood, Mississippi, at a very early age. Upon arriving in New York in the early 1940s, Butler studied with Martha Graham and George Balanchine. The combination of training eventually led to Butler’s unique style of joining elements from both ballet and modern dance in his work.

Television gave Butler some of his first major opportunities to choreograph for a larger audience. On television, he choreographed brief dances for variety shows, full-length ballets, and operas. His staging of Amahl and the Night Visitors from 1951 was recreated for NBC holiday specials for nine consecutive years. Although he continued choreographing the occasional theatrical dance, Butler spent most of his time in the early 1950s working in television, ultimately becoming the permanent choreographer for two seasons of The Kate Smith Show. He used his salary from that work to finance his own dance company, which toured the United States and Europe in 1955 and 1956.

While he returned to television in the late 1950s, most notably as a regular choreographer for The Ed Sullivan Show, Butler began to freelance with dance companies around the United States. After very well-received ballets at the Spoleto Festival in Italy in 1958 and 1959, Butler developed an international reputation and spent the 1960s traveling around Europe and the United States. During this period, he choreographed Carmina Burana, which would become perhaps his most famous piece. Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Butler traveled the world choreographing newly commissioned dances and restaging several of his greatest successes. In addition to Carmina Burana, Catulli Carmina, Othello, and After Eden were among his most requested ballets. He was a frequent guest with dance companies in Israel, Australia, throughout Europe, and in the United States.