Enters, Angna, 1897-1989

Angna Enters (born 1897, Anita Enters) was a dancer, mime, and visual artist, performed solo productions such as “The Theater of Angna Enters,” “Pagan Greece,” and “Episodes” from 1924 through the end of the 1960s, most prolifically from 1924-1939, choreographing, designing, and performing all parts. Enters was a visual artist with a prolific body of work, as well, from sketches and paintings to woodblock prints and lithographs. Her visual works were exhibited in the United States and Europe, sometimes coordinated to appear simultaneous to her performances. The sketches were often costume designs for her performance characters. Enters was an author of multiple autobiographies, and acted as an instructor at the Stella Adler School from 1957-1960. She was an artist-in-residence at the Dallas Theatre Center after Kalomyne’s death in 1961, teaching courses on mime at Bailor University, and from 1962-1963, taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. From 1970-1971, Enters was an artist-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and her last known public performance was given there during that academic year. Enters married Louis Kalonyme (born Louis Kantor) in 1936 in Spain, and were in a secret marriage nearly until Kalonyme’s death in 1961, when he publically acknowledged their relationship. Enters lived in several nursing homes in the New York, New York area from 1976 until her death in 1989 February.

Enters was born in New York City and graduated from North Division High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1925. She saw the first Denishawn concert tour the same year, and the following year, an American tour of Sergei Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes. In June 1926, Enters enrolled in Milwaukee State Normal School, a normal school for teachers, design and drawing (now the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee).[1]

Emergence as a dancer
Enters moved to New York to study at the Art Students League of New York in 1929, and began to study dance with Michio Itō the following year, eventually performing as Michio's partner in 1933.[1] That year she created her first piece, an evocation of a statue of a Gothic Virgin, entitled Ecclesiastique. The piece later became Moyen Age. In 1934, she borrowed $25 with which to present her first solo program at the Greenwich Village Theater.[2] Her solo program, The Theatre of Angna Enters, toured the United States and Europe until 1939 and was performed, though less often, until 1960.[1] In 1934, Enters was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study Hellenistic art forms in Athens, Greece.[3]

Visual artist
Enters created a large body of visual art, including sketches, landscape drawings, archaeological studies, costume plates, water colors and oil portraits. Many of her sketches and paintings were exhibited in the United States and Europe.[3] Her sketches were often costume designs for characters of her mime performances or set designs for plays.[1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds selected works by Enters, as do other museums.

Personal life
Enters met journalist Louis Kantor in 1921. The two began dating secretly in 1924, wed quietly in Spain in 1936 but maintained separate households. In 1924, Enters changed her first name to Angna and began using 1907 as her birth year. Kantor also changed his name to Louis Kalonyme in 1924 and began writing art criticism for Arts and Decoration magazine. Kalonyme was friends with many notable thinkers of the day: Eugene O'Neill, George Bernard Shaw, and Georgia O'Keeffe among them. The couple did not have any children and Kalonyme died in 1961 after a long illness.[1]

In 1924 the realist painter and printmaker John Sloan, along with his fellow artists Robert Henri and George Bellows, attended one of Enters’s shows. They were enchanted. The following year Sloan asked Enters to pose for him in one of her dance routines, “Contre Danse.” Sloan’s etching of this subject was the first of seven etchings that he produced, from 1925 to 1930, showing Enters performing various of her compositions. Although Enters posed for Sloan’s etching of Contre Danse, his six subsequent etchings were done from drawings executed by him while he was attending her shows. These etchings convincingly portray the attitudes of the characters that Enters created, and they convey a vivid sense of what must have made “The Theatre of Angna Enters” so compelling.