Enters, Angna, 1897-1989

Enters was born in New York City and graduated from North Division High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1925. She saw the first Denishawn concert tour the same year, and the following year, an American tour of Sergei Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes. In June 1926, Enters enrolled in Milwaukee State Normal School, a normal school for teachers, design and drawing (now the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee). Enters moved to New York to study at the Art Students League of New York in 1929, and began to study dance with Michio Itō the following year, eventually performing as Michio's partner in 1933. That year she created her first piece, an evocation of a statue of a Gothic Virgin, entitled "Ecclesiastique." The piece later became "Moyen Age." In 1934, she borrowed $25 with which to present her first solo program at the Greenwich Village Theater. Her solo program, The Theatre of Angna Enters, toured the United States and Europe until 1939 and was performed, though less often, until 1960. In 1934, Enters was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study Hellenistic art forms in Athens, Greece.

Enters was a visual artist with a prolific body of work, as well, from sketches and paintings to woodblock prints and lithographs. Her visual works were exhibited in the United States and Europe, sometimes coordinated to appear simultaneous to her performances. The sketches were often costume designs for her performance characters. Enters was an author of multiple autobiographies, and acted as an instructor at the Stella Adler School from 1957-1960. She was an artist-in-residence at the Dallas Theatre Center after husband Louis Kalomyne’s death in 1961, teaching courses on mime at Bailor University, and from 1962-1963, taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. From 1970-1971, Enters was an artist-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and her last known public performance was given there during that academic year.

Enters first met Louis Kantor Kantor in 1921. She changed her name formally to Angna and he changed his surname to Kalonyme in 1924. Enters married Kalonyme in 1936 in Spain, and were in a secret marriage nearly until Kalonyme’s death in 1961, when he publically acknowledged their relationship. Enters lived in several nursing homes in the New York, New York area from 1976 until her death in 1989 February.