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Jooss was scarcely out on his own when old-style ballet began to impress him. He admired it for its discipline, its grace. As ballet master at the opera house in Münster he found a sympathetic collaborator in Fritz Cohen, a budding young conductor who was glad to write music for dancing. In Münster the leading dancer was Aino Siimola, a sleek black-haired Esthonian who became Jooss's wife and assistant director.
From Münster Kurt Jooss moved on to Essen where his troupe grew its first teeth.
Elsa Kahl was there, wife of Fritz Cohen who now writes or arranges most of the music, plays one of the pianos in the pit.
So was Sigurd Leeder, who assists Jooss as dance instructor, Ernst Uthoff, who dances and acts as the troupe's paymaster, Rudolf Pescht, last week's prodigal son, who began his career selling books. In Essen Kurt Jooss brooded for weeks over a danse macabre, worked up The Green Table which he took to the International Dance Congress in Paris in 1932 where he won the gold medal and 25,000 francs.
Suddenly Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic campaign drove Composer Fritz Cohen from Germany. This compelled Kurt Jooss to go touring, although his dancers still needed more training. The troupe gained grace and prestige with the addition of Hans Zuellig, 22-year-old Swiss (The Big City) and pretty Noelle de Mosa, 19, a Java-born Dutch baroness. Both conform to the Jooss type, employ the widest and most theatrical use of pantomime.
Jooss partisans point to the fact that the Monte Carlo Ballet suits its steps to well-tried music, that most of the modernists demand music improvised to suit their own highly athletic dancing. By way of a happy medium Jooss and Cohen devise programs in which dance and music are, for better or for worse, interdependent. Financial backing was the chief Jooss need after the U. S. visit in 1933. In England the sponsor was found—Mrs. Leonard Knight Elmhirst, an heiress to the U. S. Whitney fortune who, with her British husband, is striving to build up an idyllic artistic community at Dartington Hall in Devonshire.