John Durang: Man of the American Stage By Lynn Matluck Brooks

Young Durang was, apparently, too awed by the initial beauty of the celebration to note its calamitous outcome.

Each of these theater-related events stayed with John Durang: he became an accomplished wire dancer, he taught dancing academies where he presented his own students publicly and prepared them for balls, he danced in ballets, created fireworks and transparencies, and participated in civic parades and celebrations. Perhaps the paucity of theater in his formative years vividly highlighted each event he witnessed, allowing him to absorb every detail and to model his professional form on those he watched with such hungry delight.

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There is one more significant reference by John Durang to performances in Philadelphia in these dark days of theatrical sterility: “a dramatic performance by Wall and Ryan and Company; they had among them a Mr. Rusell, a dancer. I saw him dance a hornpipe which charmed my mind” (11). Durang, impressed by Roussell’s style and dress, practiced until he could do the same steps and more. Although this is his first mention of his own dancing, Durang’s reflection—“I thought I could dance as well as any body”—makes clear that he had been dancing for some time. Durang reveals that he began formal dance training with Mr. Roussell through a clever and thrifty tactic: “I contrived to get Mr. Rusell to board at my father’s house that I might have the opportunity to dance more correct then I had been used to.” Roussell was the first of several teachers whom Durang sought out for his theatrical education. Durang notes in his Memoir that Roussell “was a Frenchman”; it is possible that Louis Roussell came to the colonies from Paris, where a “M. Roussel” is listed as a supernumerary dancer at the Paris Opera for 1768 and 1769. If so, then Durang’s first teacher was a man of at least some skill. John Watson’s memoir of early Philadelphia describes “Mr. Russell” as a “fine dancer” whose hornpipe was “composed of ground shuffling and elevated operatic volte steps.”⁴⁷ Roussell performed in the 1782–1783 Baltimore season of the Maryland-based Lindsay and Wall Company⁴⁸ and taught a dancing school.