About Charlotte Blume
Starting in the mid-1950s, a young Charlotte Blume brought true artistic professionalism to the Fayetteville region in the teaching of ballet, bringing her own top-flight training pedigree and her insistence on high standards and authentic technique. Before her arrival, no other local dance studio was using mirrors or bars. One teacher taught ballet on carpet.
“I built a dance scene here as a result of my early work,”
she told the Fayetteville Observer.
“Because of that work, I was able to build a dance audience and dance awareness at studios all over Fayetteville.”
Over 60 years she helped thousands of girls and boys achieve a sense of poise along with a knowledge of movement and body. More importantly perhaps, she helped them learn the virtues of responsibility and hard work, sometimes working with three and four generations of the same families. She helped little girls achieve their ballerina dreams and encouraged boys to defy convention and make ballet the cool thing to do. And many did.
For thousands of students the studio was their second home of childhood, and for some it was their virtually their first home, their place of refuge and positive growth.
For many, participating in her productions and studying under her helped win admission to top colleges. She taught the city’s prominent families and she taught the less fortunate. Within the studio, all were treated equally.
For many talented students, dance became the activity of their youth that they looked back on with pride. Quite a few became professional dancers; a select few opened their own dance studios and ran dance companies.
Her no-nonsense insistence on merit made Ms. Blume, who grew up mostly in Texas and the northeast, a de facto civil rights pioneer. In the rigidly segregated South, she welcomed all students equally, white and black. And there was never any question but that they would learn together in the same classes. And the prime dancing parts would go to the most deserving: Those students who worked hard and showed talent. (There also were roles for any student who worked hard, regardless of talent.)
At her Fayetteville studio, the first students were black; white families quietly boycotted her integrated operation, until their daughters insisted that they, too, wanted to receive the finest instruction.
Ms. Blume also was a trailblazer as a woman business owner and professional. At one point, her studio had branches in more than half a dozen cities. She eventually narrowed her focus, concerned over quality control, she said.
Her most loyal students made sure either to work for her studio or open their own in a different region, just as she had with her mentor, Harriet Hoctor of Boston.
Besides running her innovative studio, Ms. Blume was a notable performer, dancing lead roles as prima ballerina for the Raleigh-based North Carolina State Ballet during the 1960s, when it was under the direction of founder John Lehman. Later, she assumed control of the franchise, reshaping it as a regional operation based in Fayetteville. She staged ballets with classic, original choreography—which she had traveled all over the country to learn, and she also developed works of her own invention.
She worked with some of the world’s best dancers, teachers and choreographers, including Leonide Massine of the Royal Ballet, Alvin Ailey, Donald McKayle, Henry LeTang and Alexandra Danilova. Danilova was the first wife of the famed Russian dancer George Balanchine.
In a punishing profession where the vast majority of ballerinas retire from performing by their early 30s, Ms. Blume danced lead roles into her fifties, a longevity she credited to clean living, good genetics, and careful stewardship of her physical gifts.
Her father lived to be 97 and she expected to do at least as well before symptoms of failing health revealed themselves as advanced pancreatic cancer in 2016. After more than a month of treatment at Wake Medical Center in Raleigh, Charlotte elected to enter a hospice in Smithfield in late March of that year.
She died on May 11, 2016 at the age of 85.
