Moment in Time (July 8, 2021)

First Avenue resident Blanche Field Holmes was a New York and Chicago trained dancer and dramatic actress who started and ran a dance studio for adults and children in Grandview Heights.

Prior to a prominence of professional dance studios such as the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, Grandview Heights had its own exceptional dance instructor named Blanche Field (inset upper left c. 1922). Blanche was born in Grandview Heights in 1901 and lived with her parents, Dennis and Emma Field and four siblings on Lincoln Road.

Early issues of the Highlander, the Grandview Heights High School yearbook, reveal a young woman who was extremely active academically as well as socially. She traveled to Chicago in 1916 as a high school sophomore for “dramatic training”.  When she graduated from high school in 1919 she was already well established as a dancer and local dramatic artist. She was conducting dance classes for Grandview youth before graduating from high school, and was actually in charge of choreographing and staging “aesthetic dancing” during the 1919 and 1920 Field Day celebrations.

Blanche was an instructor at a girls’ camp in the Adirondacks before enrolling at the prestigious Louis H. Chalif Normal School of Dancing in New York City, which was one of the earliest schools in the U.S. to instruct teachers in dance. A class photo (inset lower right) shows Blanche and several of her classmates (circa 1920). She then went to Chicago to study classical dance, toe, Oriental and character dancing. Her daughter recalled that her mother also was a “stock actress” in Madison, Wisconsin for a number of years.  

Returning to Grandview in 1921, Blanche established her studio in rented space at Foettinger Furriers on First Avenue and offered kindergarten classes as well as a wide variety of dance instruction. Blanche conducted kindergarten from 9:00 to 11:30 and then offered dance classes for students and adults until 8:00 p.m. By 1936 she had returned to Grandview, built a home with a studio at 1714 First Avenue (see photo), married her third husband Louis Holmes, had a child, and resumed teaching dance to the youth of Grandview. Recitals were held yearly at Edison Elementary School.

Blanche quit teaching dance by 1955, retired to Florida with her husband Dick Holmes, and passed away in Arizona where her daughter lived 1990.