
Maurice Seymour. [Harriet Hoctor] circa 1930. Harriet Hoctor Collection, Music Division.

Note from Harriet Hoctor, circa 1917. Harriet Hoctor Collection, Music Division.
Hoctor began dancing professionally on the vaudeville stage while still a teenager. One of her early contracts was signed by her aunt, Annie Kearney, acting as her guardian. She made her Broadway debut as a chorus girl in the Jerome Kern musical Sally, which brought her to the attention of its producer, the famed Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. Ziegfeld would cast Hoctor as a featured dancer in many subsequent productions, and Hoctor even played herself in the 1936 motion picture tribute to the impresario, The Great Ziegfeld.
Not entirely satisfied performing in other people’s work, Hoctor began choreographing her own numbers. These dances highlighted her strengths, and also provided her opportunities to explore darker moods of ballet. One such dance was “The Raven,” based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Hoctor performed the piece as early as 1928, and it was featured prominently when she headlined her own revue in 1934. Describing the ballet for Variety magazine in 1933, critic Cecelia Ager wrote that the work “glows with brooding beauty, eerie excitement. It is complete, restrained, her best.” (January 3, 1933)

Bloom. [Harriet Hoctor as a question mark] circa 1925. Harriet Hoctor collection, Music Division.
Hoctor left the stage in the mid-1940s and opened her own school in the Boston area. For the next three decades, she trained a generation of dancers including a young Joyce Cuoco. In 1974, Hoctor retired from teaching and moved to the northern Virginia town of Lorton. She died on June 9, 1977, and is buried in her hometown of Hoosick Falls.
Learn more about this early 20th century ballerina in the Library’s Harriet Hoctor Collection, 1868-1977.