Iva Kitchell

Iva Kitchell (March 31, 1908, Junction City, Kansas – November 19, 1983, Daytona Beach, Florida) was a concert dancer, dance satirist, comedian, and Broadway book writer. Born Emma Baugh, she was adopted at age three by Robert W. Kitchells.

Kitchell entered professional dance through the ballet corps of the Chicago Civic Opera Ballet in 1922, following years of amateur work. Rather than performing with the seriousness typical of the form, she gravitated toward comedic mimicry of her fellow dancers, and was encouraged rather than discouraged in that tendency. That early impulse shaped the direction of her entire career.

She went on to become a featured performer at Radio City Music Hall and also worked with American Ballet Theatre. Kitchell gave recitals at Jacob's Pillow and built a reputation for comedic one-woman shows performed across the United States and Europe. Among her most notable engagements were a series of recitals at Carnegie Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall in New York in 1941, 1946, 1948, and 1949. She often billed herself as being assisted by the "Invisible Ballet Company" and frequently performed without a printed program, drawing spontaneously from a repertoire of approximately 50 works. Titles in that repertoire included "Fantasy for Body and Piano," "Valse Triste, as shown on a home movie projector," "Bacchanale at the Opera," "Oriental Dance (by an Occidental Girl)," "Pseudo-Voodoo," and "Non-Objective." Ballet, ballerinas, and modernist choreographer Martha Graham were frequent subjects of her parody. In 1946 she told Time Magazine, "I just think there is something completely ridiculous about anything that is too serious."

Kitchell's Broadway credit came in 1956, when her one-woman revue That Girl at the Bijou ran for ten days at New York's Bijou Theatre, with accompanist Harvey Brown. She served as the show's book writer as well as its performer.

In 1933 Kitchell married painter and aeronautical engineer Stokely Webster, and the couple adopted a daughter. After retiring from public performing in 1958, she operated a ballet studio in Huntington, Long Island, before she and Webster eventually relocated to Florida. Her papers are held at the Newberry Library.