Biography|John Neumeier — The Jesuit Campus Where He Took an English Degree and Started to Choreograph

Most accounts of John Neumeier begin in a European opera house.

The trail actually starts on Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, at Marquette University, where a captain's son finished a Bachelor of Arts in English literature and theater studies in 1961.

He was born in this city on 24 February 1939.

Reference books later printed 1942, the year he gave the Royal Ballet School when he registered in London; in 2017 he put the record back to 1939.

The family was Catholic.

The father was of German origin and worked at sea.

The mother came from a Polish family.

Tap class came first, then a neighborhood ballet school, then a stop at twelve when his back protested.

A doctor cleared him to dance again. A Jesuit mentor, Father John J. Walsh, helped secure a scholarship that kept both the degree and the extra training alive.

Johnston Hall, the Gothic pile at 1121 West Wisconsin Avenue, had opened in 1907 as the building that held almost every Marquette department except medicine.

Theater and English sat in that campus cluster beside Gesu Church. It is the public pin for the years when Neumeier was still a student who made his first pieces.

He also rode the train to Chicago for classes at the Stone-Camryn School of Ballet and danced with Sybil Shearer from 1960 to 1962.

The double life was the point.

Literature gave him plots.

The studio gave him a body that could carry them.

Parents held the line until the diploma and military service were done. Only then did he leave for Copenhagen and London.

The Milwaukee campus did not make him a European ballet director.

It did decide that the boy who wanted to dance would also be a reader of Shakespeare, and that combination is what later filled Hamburg's stage.

Johnston Hall is now the Diederich College of Communication. The brick and the address have not moved.

Photo: Freekee, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons