Sono Osato

Sono Osato (1919-2018) was a dancer and actress. She was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Her father was a Japanese photographer and her mother was Irish and French Canadian. When Osato was four, the family relocated to Chicago, and when she was eight, her mother took her and her sister to Europe, where they spent two years. While there, Osato saw a performance  of Cléopâtre put on by the Ballets Russes. This inspired her to start taking ballet classes when she returned to Chicago in 1929.

Her talent and aptitude as a dancer were obvious, and she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo at the age of 14, making history  as both the youngest member of the company and as its first dancer of Japanese descent. She was advised to change her name to a Russian one, but she refused. She worked with the company for six years, touring the United States, Europe, South America, and Australia with them.

Osato performing at the Theatre Royal in Sydney, 1939 or 1940/Image by May Moore, courtesy of the Mitchell Library, The State Library of New South Wales via Wikipedia Commons

In 1941, she left the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo as she felt her career was not advancing. She enrolled at the School of American Ballet in New York City for six months, and following that, she joined the American Ballet Theater as a dancer. She danced in several ballets during her time with ABT, including Kenneth MacMillan’s Sleeping Beauty and Bronislava Nijinska’s The Beloved.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Osato’s father was sent to a Japanese Internment camp. At the company, Osato was advised to change her name to something that would be perceived as more American. She even used her mother’s maiden name, Fitzpatrick, for a time to avoid anti-Japanese bias. However, by 1942 restrictions against all individuals of Japanese descent on US soil reduced her ability to travel with the company when it went on tour, eventually leaving her without work for months. 

Sono Osato in One Touch of Venus, 1947/Image by Florence Vandamm via the New York Public Library Digital Collections

Next, Sono Osato began to work on Broadway, where she won a Donaldson Award in 1953 for best female dancer award for her role in One Touch of Venus, choreographed by Agnes de Mille. She then starred in the musical On the Town with much success. She also appeared in the movie The Kissing Bandit with Frank Sinatra.

After Osato left the stage, she worked extensively in support of Career Transitions for Dancers, an organization aimed at supporting dancers transitioning to other careers, and received an Outstanding Contributions to the World of Dance award from them. Osato was also the author of an autobiography, Distant Dances.

Sources:

Oja, Carol J. 2015. “The Original Miss Turnstiles: Sono Osato Starred on Broadway.” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities. National Endowment for the Humanities. 2015. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/januaryfebruary/feature/the-original-miss-turnstiles

Wingenroth, Lauren. 2019. “Sono Osato, Boundary-Breaking Japanese-American Dancer, Dies at 99.” Dance Magazine. January 1, 2019. https://www.dancemagazine.com/sono-osato-trailblazing-japanese-american-dancer-dies-at-99/