Cole Porter’s Pro-Immigration Ballet Gets A Trump-Era Revival
NPR has a fascinating story about American composer Cole Porter.
In the early 1920s, before he became an icon of the American songbook, composer Cole Porter wrote the score for a protest ballet. The production, called Within the Quota, criticized restrictive immigration laws that had been passed by Congress. According to Princeton music professor Simon Morrison, who rediscovered the score two years ago in Yale’s Porter archives, the show opened in New York at a time of fearful backlash against Polish, Greek and Australian immigrants arriving in the U.S. after World War I.
Now, to protest President Trump’s anti-immigrant stance, the Princeton University Ballet is reviving the production. Morrison, who produced the show, says after the election, “[I] looked again at the score and thought about its context and thought, Oh my God, this is actually what it was about. These things were real and actually we’re feeling them again now.”
KJ