Bryan Butterfield enjoyed a long career as a dancer on the hotel circuit, with his own show, the Bermuda Authentic Limbo Dancers, and signature act, the Broken Bottle Dance.
He and his former wife and dance partner, Erma Washington Butterfield, also achieved prominence in the 1950s for their performances in the annual Floral Pageant, he as drum major of North Village Band, she as leader of North Village majorettes.
Born and raised in Somerset, the younger of two sons, Butterfield attended West End Primary School and Sandys Secondary School. Butterfield played drums from childhood. His older brother Allan played saxophone.
His earliest exposure to dance came from an uncle Lionel Gilbert, a ballroom dancer, and from Barbara Horton, who introduced a host of youngsters to dance at a studio she opened in Somerset in 1942. During his teenage years, he took formal lessons from Gregory Gordon, an American ballet dancer who set up a studio on Brunswick Street, Hamilton.
Gordon ran his studio in a large complex owned by businessman and activist W. E. R. Joell. Butterfield remembered that as many as 60 students took dance lessons.
In 1948, Gordon began producing shows at the Colonial Opera House, with Butterfield as lead dancer. While Butterfield was not especially enamoured of ballet, he danced the lead in Swan Lake, which Gordon also staged.
Starring roles for Butterfield continued when Gordon moved on to the hotel circuit. Based on their titles, the shows catered to tourists’ tastes for the period: Gambia La, African Revue, Revenue in Calypso and Gumby Revue.
Butterfield performed with many female dancers, but dance partner Erma Washington had a lasting effect on his life. She had been schooled at Jamaica’s Excelsior College and encouraged him to set his sights beyond Bermuda.
The couple began performing in the annual Floral Pageant in the 1950s after promoter Olive Trott asked Washington to start a North Village majorette troupe. Trott and Washington were both from the same neighbourhood where the North Village band had sprung into existence—as the Alexandrina Band—in 1866. With the establishment of the majorette troupe, Butterfield joined the North Village senior band as drum major.
North Village majorettes and band put on a series of show-stopping performances during the 1950s, when there was a handful of majorette troupes, and floral floats dominated the parade.
On April 24,1954, the Bermuda Recorder reported that “powerful North Village band”, with Bryan Butterfield and Erma Washington and her majorettes at the front, had the “honour” of heading the parade, which more than 10,000 attended.
But New York’s Harlem was on their minds. The couple moved there, with Butterfield living there for five years, according to one report. They studied at the Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theater, which Dunham, an anthropologist and pioneer in modern dance techniques with African and Caribbean roots, founded in 1945.The couple also danced with Dunham’s company and toured the U.S. with a group of Dunham dancers to promote the school, which remained in existence until 1955.
While in New York, Butterfield also studied at Fred Astaire’s School of Dance. Interviewed by Royal Gazette dance critic Patricia Calnan in 1998, Butterfield said: “That’s where I learned Latin dancing—stuff like the rumba and the tango because by that time, I knew I wanted to dance on the hotel circuit in Bermuda and I wanted to be as versatile as possible.”
Washington and Butterfield married in July 1954. They formed their own act, the Bermuda Fire Dancers, with young dancers June Lindsay and Barbara Adams, who were billed as the Mambo Tots, as cast members. With their tantalizingly titled “Voodoo Skull Dance”, “Dance of the Machete” and “Basket Dance”, they landed work in all the major hotels, including Elbow, Castle Harbour, and the Princess. In 1956, congo drummer Freeman “King” Trott joined the show.
Over the years, the act would undergo several name and cast changes and eventually became known as the Bermuda Authentic Limbo Dancers. Erma left in 1960 and the couple subsequently divorced.
In 1959, Bryan Butterfield signed on as a dancer with the original cast of Don Gibson’s Gulf Stream Revue—later renamed the Holiday Island Revue—but he reactivated his Fire Dancers at the end of the season.
In December 1959, Bryan, Erma and King Trott headed south to Jamaica for three months. King Trott said he and the Butterfields had sought out Bermudian hotelier Sir Howard Trott, who agreed to put the trio on the bill at the Half Moon Hotel in Montego Bay, where he owned shares.
The trio worked seven nights a week at hotels in Montego Bay, performing their 45-minute act as part of a supper-club format. At one point, they appeared on the same bill as the Lance Hayward Quartet, which performing in Jamaica during the same period (See Clarence “Tootsie” Bean profile.)
Butterfield’s winter pilgrimage to Jamaica lasted about nine years, according to King Trott. The cast changed over the years but Butterfield and Trott were the constants.
Butterfield and his dancers had to turn down an offer to perform at the 40 Thieves Club’s opening show on March 1, 1962, because they were finishing up the season in Jamaica, but made their first appearance at the fabled Front Street club five days later on March 6.
In 1963, Butterfield married second wife, Sandy Powell. She joined the show as a dancer and steel pan player in 1969. Never wanting for work in hotels and clubs during the 60s and 70s, the Authentic Limbo Dancers also performed overseas, as part of the Bermuda Department of Tourism’s annual promotional tours.
Butterfield also appeared in two travel documentaries and three films, The Last Lagoon, Return to Bermuda and Passages to Bermuda with Jonathan Winters.
Butterfield continued to entertain tourists—with his fire blowing and walking on broken-bottle routines—up to the 1990s.
But by then, tourism was in decline and with it, the demand for local entertainment.
Like many entertainers, Butterfield usually worked two jobs. For many years, he repaired harnesses in the upholstery and harness repair shop The Hill Company, which his father Stuart Butterfield co-owned with Cyril Simmons.
There was never a contest as to where his true passion lay.
Summing up his career, he said: “I enjoyed it. It was always something exciting.”
