My association with Katherine Dunham seemed to satisfy, at least for the moment, my taste for the exotic. I cannot say it added much to my knowledge of anthropology, but it broadened my experience of human nature.
I presented Katherine Dunham and her company in Buenos Aires and throughout South America during the season 1949-1950 when our association came to an end. In her artistic career Katherine Dunham has been greatly aided by the advice and by the practical help, in scenic and costume design, of her husband, the talented American painter and designer, John Pratt.
While the scope of Katherine Dunham’s dancing and choreography may be limited by her anthropological bias, she has a first-rate quality of showmanship. She has studied, revived, rearranged for the theatre primitive dances and creole dances, which are in that borderland that is somewhere at the meeting point of African and Western culture. Anthropology aside and for the moment forgotten, she is a striking entertainer.
F. AN AMERICAN GENIUS
It may well be that, considered as an individual, the American Martha Graham is one of the greatest dance celebrities in the United States. There are those who contend she is the greatest. She is certainly the most controversial. There seems to be no middle school of thought concerning her. One of them bursts forth with an enthusiasm amounting almost to idolatry. The other shouts its negatives quite as forcibly.
My first love and my greatest interest is ballet. However, that love and that interest do not obscure for me all other forms of dance, as my managerial career shows. Having presented prophets and disciples of what, for want of a more accurate term, is called the “free” dance, in the persons of Isadora Duncan and her “children” and Mary Wigman, I welcomed the opportunity to present the American High Priestess of the contemporary dance.
This product of a long line of New England forbears was a woman past fifty when she came under my management. Yet she was at the height of her powers, in the full bloom of the immense artistic accomplishment that is hers, a dancer of amazing skill, a choreographer of striking originality, an actress of tremendous power.
The first and by far the most important prophet of the contemporary dance, Martha Graham was originally trained in the Ruth St. Denis-Ted Shawn tradition. A quarter of a century ago, however, she broke away from that tradition and introduced into her works a quality of social significance and protest. As I think over her choreographic product, it seems to me that, in general—and this is a case where I must generalize—her work has exhibited what may be described as two major trends. One has been in the direction of fundamental social conflicts; the other, towards psychological abstraction and a vague mysticism.
About all her work is an austerity, stark and lean; yet this cold austerity in her creations is always presented by means of a brilliant technique and with an intense dramatic power. I made it a point for years to see as many of her recital programmes as I could, and I was never sure what I was going to see. Each time there seemed to me to be a new style and a new technique. She was constantly experimenting and while, often, the experiments did not quite come off, she always excited me, if I did not always understand what she was trying to say.
I have the greatest admiration for Martha Graham and for what she has done. She has championed the cause of the American composer by having works commissioned, while she has, at the same time, championed the cause of free movement and originality in the dance. Yet, so violent, so distorted, so obscure, and sometimes so oppressive do I find some of her works that I am baffled. It is these qualities, coupled with the complete introspection in which her works are steeped, that make it so extremely difficult to attract the public in sufficient numbers to make touring worthwhile or New York seasons financially possible without some sort of subsidy. I shall have something to say, later on in this book, on this whole question of subsidy of the arts. Meanwhile, Martha Graham has chosen a lonely road, and the introspectiveness of her work does not make it any less so. The more’s the pity, for here is a great artist of the first rank.
Martha Graham completed my triptych of modern dancers, commencing with Isadora Duncan and continuing with Mary Wigman as its center piece. In many respects, Martha Graham is by far the greatest of the three; yet, to me, she is lacking in a quality that made the dances of Isadora Duncan so compelling. It is difficult to define that quality. Negatively, it may be that it is this very introspection. Perhaps it is that Martha Graham is no modernist at all.
Modernism in dance, I feel, has become very provincial, for it would seem that every one and her sister is a modernist. Isadora was a modernist. Fokine was a modernist. Mary Wigman was a modernist. Today, we have Balanchine and Robbins, modernists. Scratch a choreographer, scrape a dancer ever so lightly, and you will find a modernist. It is all very, very provincial.
Much of what is to me the real beauty of the dance—the lyric line, the unbroken phrase, the sequential pattern of the dance itself—has, in the name of modernism, been chopped up and broken.
Martha Graham, of all the practitioners of the “free” dance, troubles me least in this respect. Many of her works look like ballets. Yet, at the same time, she disturbs me; never soothes me; and, since I have dedicated myself in this book to candor, I shall admit I can take my dance without too much over-intellectualization. Yet, in retrospect, I find there are few ballets that have so much concentrated excitement as Martha Graham’s Deaths and Entrances.
The choreography, the dancing, the art of Martha Graham are greatly appreciated by a devoted but limited public. The lamentable thing about it to me is that it so limited. She has chosen the road of the solitary and lonely experimenter. Martha Graham, of all the dancers I have known, is, I believe, the most single-purposed, the most fanatical in her devotion to an idea and an ideal. About her and everything she does is an extraordinary integrity, a consummate honesty. Generous to a fault, Martha Graham always has something good to say about the work of others, and she possesses a keen appreciation of all forms of the dance. The high position she so indisputably holds has been attained, as I happen to know, only through great privation and hardship, often in the face of cruel and harsh ridicule. Her remarkable technique could only have been acquired at the expense of sheer physical exhaustion. In the history of the dance her name will ever remain at the head of the pioneers.
UP to now I have dealt with those artists of the dance whose forms of dance expression were either modern, free, or exotic. All had been, at one time or another, under my management. The rest of this candid avowal will be devoted to that form of theatrical dance known as ballet. Since I regard ballet as the most satisfactory and satisfying form of civilized entertainment, ballet will occupy the major portion of the book. Nearly two full decades of my career as impresario have been devoted to it.
For a long time I have been alternately irritated and bored by an almost endless stream of gossip about ballet, and by that outpouring of frequently cheap and sometimes incredible nonsense that has been published about ballet and its artists. Surprisingly, perhaps, comparatively little of this has come from press agents; the press agents have, in the main—exceptions only going to prove the rule, in this case—been ladies and gentlemen of taste and discretion, and they have publicized ballet legitimately as the great art it is, and, at the same time, have given of their talents to help make it the highly popular art it is.
But there has been a plethora of tripe in the public prints about ballet, supplied by hacks, blind hero-worshippers, self-abasing sycophants, and producers. The last are quite as vocal as any of the others. They are not, of course, “producers.” They call themselves either “managers” or “managing-directors.” I shall have something to say, later on, about this phase of their work. They talk, give interviews, often of quite incredible stupidity; and, instead of being managers, are masters of mismanagement. All are, in one degree or another, would-be Diaghileffs. They all suffer from a serious disease: a sort of chronic Diaghileffitis, which is spasmodically acute. If anything I can say or point out in this book can help, as it were, to add a third dimension to the rather flat pictures of ballet companies and ballet personalities, creative, interpretive, executive, that have been offered to the public, I shall be glad. For ballet is a great art, and my last thought would be to wish to denigrate, debunk, or disparage any one.
While “the whole truth” cannot always be told for reasons that should be obvious, I shall try to tell “nothing but the truth.”
The ballet we have today, however far afield it may wander in its experimentation, in its “novelties,” stems from a profoundly classical base. That base, emerging from Italy and France, found its full flowering in the Imperial Theatres of Russia.
I cannot go on with my story of my experiences with ballet on the American continent without paying a passing tribute to the Ladies of the Maryinsky (and some of the Gentlemen, as well), who exemplified the Russian School of Ballet at its best; many of them are carrying on in their own schools, and passing on their great knowledge to the youth of the second half of the twentieth century, in whose hands the future of ballet lies.
I should like to do honor to many ladies of the Maryinsky. To do so would mean an overly long list of names, many of which would mean little to a generation whose knowledge of dancers does not go back much further than Danilova. It would mean a considerable portion of the graduating classes of the Russian Imperial School of the Ballet: that School, dating from 1738, whose code was monastic, whose discipline was strict, whose training the finest imaginable. Through this school and from it came the ladies and gentlemen of the Maryinsky, those figures that gave ballet its finest flowering on the stages of the Maryinsky Theatre in Petrograd and the Grand Theatre in Moscow.
Anna Pavlova, Mathilde Kchessinska, Olga Preobrajenska, Lubov Egorova, Tamara Karsavina, Lydia Kyasht, Lydia Lopokova. There were men, too: Michel Fokine, Mikhail Mordkin, Vaslav Nijinsky, Adolph Bolm, Theodore Kosloff, Alexandre Volinine, Laurent Novikoff. The catalogue would be too long, if continued. No slight is intended. The turn of the century, or thereabouts, saw most of the above named in the full flush of their performing abilities.
What has become of them? Six of the seven ladies are still very much alive, each making a valued contribution to ballet today. The mortality rate among the men has been heavier; only three of the seven men are now alive; yet these three are actively engaged in that most necessary and fundamental department of ballet: teaching.
Because the present has its basic roots in the past, and because the future must emerge from the present, let me, in honoring those outstanding representatives of the recent past, pause for a moment to sketch their achievements and contributions.
MATHILDE KCHESSINSKA
In the early twentieth century hierarchy of Russian Ballet, Mathilde Kchessinska was the undisputed queen, a tsarina whose slightest wish commanded compliance. She was a symbol of a period.
Mathilde Kchessinska was born in 1872, the daughter of a famous Polish character dancer, Felix Kchessinsky. A superb technician, according to all to whom I have talked about her, and to the historians of the time, she is credited with having been the first Russian to learn the highly applauded (by audiences) trick of those dazzling multiple turns called fouettés, guaranteed to bring the house down and, sometimes today, even when poorly done. In addition to a supreme technique, she is said to have been a magnificent actress, both “on” and “off.”
Hers was an exalted position in Russia. Her personal social life gave her a power she was able to exercise in high places and a personal fortune which permitted her to give rein to a waywardness and wilfulness that did not always coincide with the strict disciplinarian standards of the Imperial Ballet.
Although she was able to control the destinies of the Maryinsky Theatre, to hold undisputed sway there, to have everything her own way, all that most people today know about her is that she was fond of gambling, that the Grand Dukes built her a Palace in Petrograd, and that Lenin made speeches to the mob from its balcony during the Revolution.
More rot has been told and written about her by those with more imagination than love of accuracy, than about almost any other person connected with ballet, not excepting Serge Diaghileff. In yarn upon yarn she has been identified with one sensational escapade and affair after another. None of these, so far as I know, she has ever troubled to contradict.
Mathilde Kchessinska was the first Russian dancer to win supremacy for the native Russian artist over their Italian guests. An artist in life as well as on the stage, today, at eighty, the Princess Krassinska-Romanovska, the morganatic wife of Grand Duke André of Russia, she still teaches daily at her studio in Paris, contributing to ballet from the fund of her vast experience and knowledge. Many fine dancers have emerged from her hands, but perhaps the pupil of whom she is the proudest is Tatiana Riabouchinska.
OLGA PREOBRAJENSKA
Sharing the rank of ballerina assoluta with Kchessinska at the Maryinsky Theatre was Olga Preobrajenska. Preobrajenska’s career paralleled that of the Princess Krassinska-Romanovska; she was born in 1871, and graduated from the Imperial School in the class ahead of the Princess. Yet, in many respects, they were as unlike as it is possible for two females to differ.
Kchessinka was always chic, noted for her striking beauty, expressive arms and wrists, a beautifully poised head, an indescribably infectious smile. She was a social queen who used her gifts and her powers for all they were worth. It was a question in the minds of many whether Kchessinska’s private life was more important than her professional career. The gods had not seen fit to smile too graciously on Preobrajenska in the matter of face and figure. Her tremendous success in a theatre where, at the time, beauty of form was regarded nearly as highly as technique, may be said to have been a triumph of mind over matter. Despite these handicaps or, perhaps, because of them, she succeeded in working out her own distinctive style and bearing.
Free from any Court intriguing, Olga Preobrajenska was a serious-minded and noble person, a figure that reflected her own nobility of mind on ballet itself. Whereas Kchessinska’s career was, for the most part, a rose-strewn path, Preobrajenska’s road was rocky. Her climb from a corps de ballet dancer to the heights was no overnight journey. It was one that took a good deal of courage, an exhibition of fortitude that happily led to a richly deserved victory. Blessed with a dogged perseverance, a divine thirst for knowledge, coupled with a desire ever to improve, she forced herself ahead. She danced not only in every ballet, but in nearly every opera in the repertoire that had dances. In her quarter of a century on the Imperial stage she appeared more than seven hundred times. It was close on to midnight when her professional work was done for the day; then she went to the great teacher, Maestro Enrico Cecchetti, for a private lesson, which lasted far into the early hours of the morning. Hers was a life devoted to work. For the social whirl she had neither time nor interest.
These qualities, linked with her fine personal courage and gentleness, undoubtedly account for that unbounded admiration and respect in which she is held by her colleagues.
Preobrajenska remained in Russia after the revolution, teaching at the Soviet State School of Ballet from 1917 through 1921. In 1922, she relinquished her post, left Russia and settled in Paris. Today, she maintains one of the world’s most noteworthy ballet schools, still teaching daily, passing on to the present generation of dancers something of herself so that, though dancers die, dancing may live.
It was during her teaching tenure at the Soviet State School of Ballet, the continuing successor in unbroken line and tradition to the Imperial Ballet School from the eighteenth century, that a young man named Georgi Balanchivadze came into her ken. Georgi Balanchivadze is better known throughout the world of the dance today as George Balanchine. In the long line of pupils who have passed through Preobrajenska’s famous Paris school, there is space only to mention two of whom she is very proud: Irina Baronova and Tamara Toumanova.
Frequently, I have had great pleasure in attending some of Preobrajenska’s classes in Paris, and I am proud to know her. It was during my European visit in the summer of 1950 that I happened to be at La Scala, Milan, when Preobrajenska was watching a class being given there by the Austrian ballet-mistress, Margaret Wallman. This was at the time of the visit to Milan of Galina Ulanova, the greatest lyric ballerina of the Soviet Union. The meeting of Ulanova and Preobrajenska, two great figures of Russian ballet, forty-one years apart in age, but with the great common bond of the classical dance, each the recipient of the highest honors a government can pay an artist, was, in its way, historic.
I arranged to have photographs taken of the event, a meeting that was very touching. Ulanova had come to see a class as well. The two great artists embraced. Ulanova was deeply moved. Their conversation was general. Unfortunately, there was little time, for the Soviet Consular officials who accompanied Ulanova were not eager for her to have too long a conversation.
At eighty-two, Preobrajenska has no superior as a teacher. At her prime, she was a dancer of wit and elegance, excelling in mimicry and the humorous. With her colleagues of that epoch, as with Ulanova, she nevertheless had one outstanding quality in common: a sound classicism.
LUBOV EGOROVA
Less exalted in the hierarchy of the Russian Imperial Ballet, since she never attained the assoluta distinction there, but, nevertheless, a very important figure in ballet, is Lubov Egorova (Princess Troubetzkoy).
Born some nine years later than Preobrajenska and eight later than Kchessinska, Egorova, who was merely a ballerina at the Maryinsky, was one of the first great Russian dancers to leave Russia; she was a member of the exploring group that made a Western European tour during a summer holiday from the Maryinsky, in 1908—perhaps the first time that Russian Ballet was seen outside the country.
In 1917, Egorova left Russia for good and, joining the Diaghileff Ballet, appeared in London, in 1921, dancing the role of Princess Aurora in the lavish, if ill-starred, revival of Tchaikowsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, or, as Diaghileff called his Benois production, The Sleeping Princess. As a matter of fact, she was one of three Auroras, alternating the role with two other great ladies of the ballet, Olga Spessivtseva and Vera Trefilova.
In 1923, Egorova founded her own school in Paris, and has been teaching there continuously since that time. Many famous dancers have emerged from that school, dancers of all nationalities, carrying the gospel to their own lands.
The basic method of ballet training has altered little. Since the last war, there have been some new developments in teaching methods. Although the individual methods of these three ladies from the Maryinsky may have differed in detail, they have all had the same solid base, and from these schools have come not only the dancers of today, but the teachers of the future.
TAMARA KARSAVINA
The Russian emigré dancers would seem to have distributed themselves fairly equally between Paris and London, (excluding, of course, those who have made the States their permanent home). While the three Maryinsky ladies I have discussed became Parisian fixtures, another trio made London their abiding place.
Most important of the London trio was Tamara Karsavina, who combined in her own person the attributes of a great dancer, a great beauty, a great actress, a great artist, and a great woman. John van Druten, the noted playwright, sums her up thus: “I can tell you that Tamara Karsavina was the greatest actress and the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, the incarnation of Shakespeare’s ‘wightly wanton with a velvet brow, with two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes,’ and that I wrote sonnets to her when I was twenty.”
Born in 1885, the daughter of a famous Russian dancer and teacher, Platon Karsavin, Karsavina, unlike the Ladies of the Maryinsky who have made Paris their home, was ready for change: that change in ballet that is sometimes called the Romantic Revolution. She was receptive to new ideas, and became identified with Fokine and Diaghileff and their reforms in ballet style.
Diaghileff had to have a ballerina for his company, and it soon became obvious to both Fokine and Diaghileff that Pavlova would not fit into their conception of things balletic. The modest, unassuming, charming, gracious, beautiful and enchanting Karsavina took over the ballerina roles of the Diaghileff Company. It was in 1910 that Karsavina came into her own with the creation of the title role in The Firebird, and a revival of Giselle. Her success was tremendous. The shy, modest Tamara Karsavina became La Karsavina; without the guarantee of her presence in the cast, Diaghileff was for many years unable to secure a contract in numerous cities, including London.
All through her career, a career that brought her unheard of success, adulation, worship, Karsavina remained a sweet, simple, unspoiled lady.
She was not only the toast of Europe for her work with the Diaghileff Company, but she returned frequently to the Maryinsky, dashing back and forth between Petrograd and Western Europe. An aversion to sea travel in wartime prevented her visiting America with the Diaghileff Company on either of its American tours. She did, however, make a brief American concert tour in 1925, partnered by Pierre Vladimiroff. Neither the conditions nor the circumstances of this visit were to her advantage, and Americans were thus prevented from seeing Karsavina at anything like her best.
Karsavina has painted her own picture more strikingly than anyone else can; and has painted it in a book that is a splendid work of art. It is called Theatre Street. Tamara Karsavina’s Theatre Street is a book and a portrait, a picture of a person and of an era that is, at the same time, a shining classic of the theatrical dance. But not only does it tell the story of her own career so strikingly that it would be presumptuous of me to expand on her career in these pages, but she shows us pictures of Russian life, of childhood in Russia that take rank with any ever written.
After the dissolution of a previous Russian marriage, Karsavina, in 1917, married a British diplomat, Henry Bruce, who died in 1950. Her son, by this marriage, is an actor and director in the British theatre. Karsavina herself lives quietly and graciously in London, but by no means inactively. She is a rock of strength to British ballet, through her interest and inspiration. A great lady as well as a great artist, it would give me great pleasure to be able to present her across the American continent in a lecture tour, in the course of which illuminating dissertation she would elucidate, as no one I have ever seen or heard, the important and expressive art of mime.
LYDIA KYASHT
Classmate of Karsavina at the Imperial School, and born in the same year, is Lydia Kyasht, who was the first Russian ballerina to become a permanent fixture in London.
Kyasht’s arrival in the British capital dates back to 1908, the year she became a leading soloist at the Maryinsky Theatre. There were mixed motives for her emigration to England. There were, it appears, intrigues of some sort at the Maryinsky; there was also a substantial monetary offer from the London music hall, the Empire, where, for years, ballet was juxtaposed with the rough-and-tumble of music hall comedians, and where Adeline Genée had reigned as queen of English ballet for a decade. Kyasht’s Russian salary was approximately thirty-five dollars a month. The London offer was for approximately two hundred dollars a week.
Her first appearance at the Empire, in Leicester Square, long the home of such ballet as London had at that time, was under her own name as Lydia Kyaksht. When the Empire’s manager in dismay inquired: “How can one pronounce a name like that?” he welcomed the suggestion that the pronunciation would be made easier for British tongues if the second “k” were dropped. So it became Kyasht, and Kyasht it has remained.
Kyasht was the first Russian dancer to win a following in London, and in her first appearances there she was partnered by Adolph Bolm, later to be identified with Diaghileff and still later with ballet development in the United States.
The Empire ballets were, for the most part, of a very special type of corn. Kyasht appeared in, among others, a little something called The Water Nymph and in another something charmingly titled First Love, with my old friend and Anna Pavlova’s long-time partner, Alexandre Volinine, as her chief support. There was also a whimsy called The Reaper’s Dream, in which Kyasht appeared as the “Spirit of the Wheatsheaf,” seen and pursued in his dream by a reaper, the while the corps de ballet, costumed as an autumn wheatfield, watched and wondered.
Most important, however, was Kyasht’s appearance in the first English presentation, on 18th May, 1911, of Delibes’ Sylvia. Sylvia, one of the happiest of French ballets, had had to wait thirty-five years to reach London, although the music had long been familiar there. Even then, London saw a version of a full-length, three-act work, which, for the occasion, had been cut and compressed into a single act. It took forty-one more years for the uncut, full-length work to be done in London, with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet production, staged by Frederick Ashton, at Covent Garden, in the Royal Opera House, on 3rd of September, 1952. The original British Sylvia, Lydia Kyasht, was, by this date, a member of the teaching staff at the famous Sadler’s Wells School.
Lydia Kyasht remained at the Empire for five years. At the conclusion of her long engagement, she sailed for New York to appear as the Blue Bird in a Shubert Winter Garden show, The Whirl of the World, with Serge Litavkin as her partner; Litavkin later committed suicide in London, as the result of an unhappy love affair (not with Lydia Kyasht).
Kyasht’s American venture brought her neither fame nor glory. In the first place, a Shubert Winter Garden spectacle, in 1913, was not a setting for the classical technique of Ballet; then, for better or worse, Kyasht was stricken ill with typhoid fever, a mischance that automatically terminated her contract. But before she became ill, still on the unhappier side, was the Shubertian insistence that Kyasht should be taught and that she should perfect herself in the 1913 edition of “swing,” the “Turkey Trot.” Such was the uninformed and uncaring mind of your average Broadway manager, that he wanted to combine the delicacy of the “Turkey Trot,” of unhallowed memory, with what he elegantly characterized as “acrobatic novelties.”
But Kyasht was saved from this humiliation by the serious fever attack and returned to London, where she made her permanent home and where, for the most part, she devoted herself to teaching. As a teacher able to impart that finish and refinement that is so essential a part of a dancer’s equipment, she has had a marked success.
Today, she is, as I have said, active in the teaching of ballet department at that splendid academy, the Sadler’s Wells School, about which I shall have something to say later on.
LYDIA LOPOKOVA
The third of the Maryinsky ladies to settle in England, to whom I cannot fail to pay tribute, is Lydia Lopokova.
Lopokova is the youngest of the three, having been born in 1891. Her graduation from the Imperial School was so close to the great changes that took place in Russian ballet, that she had been at the Maryinsky Theatre only a few months when, as a pupil of Fokine, she was invited to join the Diaghileff Ballet, at that time at the height of its success in its second Paris season.
Writing of Lopokova’s early days at the Imperial School, Karsavina says in Theatre Street: “Out of the group of small pupils given now into my care was little Lopokova. The extreme emphasis she put into her movements was comic to watch in the tiny child with the face of an earnest cherub. Whether she danced or talked, her whole frame quivered with excitement; she bubbled all over. Her personality was manifest from the first, and very lovable.”
Of her arrival to join the Diaghileff Company in Paris, Karsavina says: “Young Lopokova danced this season; it was altogether her first season abroad. As she was stepping out of the railway carriage, emotion overcame her. She fainted right away on the piles of luggage. It had been her dream to be in Paris, she told the alarmed Bakst who rendered first aid; the lovely sight (of the Gare du Nord) was too much for her. A mere child, she reminded me again of the tiny earnest pupil when, in the demure costume of Sylphides, she ecstatically and swiftly ran on her toes.”
Lopokova’s rise to high position with the Diaghileff Ballet in England and Europe was rapid. But she was bored by success. There were new fields to be conquered, and off she went to New York, in the summer of 1911, to join the first “Russian Ballet” to be seen on Broadway. A commercial venture hastily rushed into the ill-suited Winter Garden, with the obvious purpose of getting ahead of the impending Diaghileff invasion of America, due at a later date. The popular American vaudeville performer, Gertrude Hoffman, temporarily turned manager, sparked this “Saison de Ballets Russes.”
Hoffman, in conjunction with a Broadway management, imported nearly a hundred dancers, with Lydia Lopokova as the foremost; others included the brothers Kosloff, Theodore and Alexis, who remained permanently in the United States; my friend, Alexandre Volinine; and Alexander Bulgakoff. A word about the 1911 “Saison de Ballets Russes” may not be amiss. The ethics of the entire venture were, to say the least, open to question. Among the works presented were Schéhérazade, Cléopâtre, and Sylphides—all taken without permission from the Diaghileff repertoire, and with no credit (and certainly no cash) given to Michel Fokine, their creator. All works were restaged from memory by Theodore Kosloff, and with interpolations by Gertrude Hoffman. The outstanding success of the whole affair was Lydia Lopokova.
When, after an unsuccessful financial tour outside New York, Lopokova and Volinine left the company, the “Saison de Ballets Russes” fell to pieces.
Venturing still farther afield, Lopokova joined Mikhail Mordkin’s company briefly; then, remaining in America for five years, she toyed seriously with the legitimate theatre, and made her first appearance as an actress (in English) with that pioneer group, the Washington Square Players (from which evolved The Theatre Guild), at the Bandbox Theatre, in East 57th Street, in New York, and later in a Percy Mackaye piece called The Antic, under the direction of Harrison Grey Fiske.
Then the Diaghileff Ballet came to America; came, moreover, badly in need of Lopokova; came without Karsavina, without any woman star; came badly crippled. In New York, and free, was Lydia Lopokova. It was Lydia Lopokova who was the ballerina of the company through the two American tours. It was Lydia Lopokova who was the company’s bright and shining individual success.
She returned to Europe with Diaghileff and was his ballerina from 1917 to 1919, earning for herself in London a popularity second to none. But, bored again by success, she was suddenly off again to America. This time, the venture was even less noteworthy, for it was a Shubert musical comedy—and a rather dismal failure. “I was a flop,” was Lopokova’s comment, “and thoroughly deserved it.” In 1921, she returned to Diaghileff, and danced the Lilac Fairy in his tremendous revival of The Sleeping Princess. During the following years, up to the Diaghileff Ballet’s final season, Lopokova was in and out of the company, appearing as a guest artist in the later days.
After a short and unhappy marriage with one of Diaghileff’s secretaries had been dissolved, Lopokova became Mrs. J. Maynard Keynes, the wife of the brilliant and distinguished English economist, art patron, friend of ballet and inspirer of the British Arts Council. On Keynes’s elevation to the peerage, Lopokova, of course, became Lady Keynes.
Invariably quick in wit, impulsive, possessor of a genuine sense of humor, Lady Keynes remains eager, keen for experiment, restless, impish, and still puckish, always ready to lend her enthusiastic support to ventures and ideas in which she believes.
MARIE RAMBERT
One of the most potent forces in the development of ballet in England is Marie Rambert. She was a pioneer in British ballet. She still has much to give.
Marie Rambert—unlike her London colleagues: Karsavina, Kyasht, and Lopokova—was not a Maryinsky lady. Born Miriam Rambach, in Poland, she was a disciple of Emile Jacques Dalcroze, and was recommended to Diaghileff by her teacher as an instructor in the Dalcroze type of rhythmic movement. The Russians who made up the Diaghileff Company were not impressed either by the Dalcroze method or its youthful teacher. They rebelled against her, taunted her, called her “Rhythmitchika,” and left her alone. There was one exception, however. That exception was Vaslav Nijinsky, who was considerably influenced by his studies with Rambert, an influence that was made apparent in three of his choreographic works: Sacre du Printemps, Afternoon of a Faun (this, incidentally, the first to show the influence), and Jeux.
Despite the attitude of the Russian dancers, it was her contacts with the Diaghileff Ballet that aroused Rambert’s interest in ballet. She had had early dancing lessons in the Russian State School in Warsaw; now she became a pupil of Enrico Cecchetti. In 1920, she established her own ballet school in the Notting Hill Gate section of London, and it was not long after that the Ballet Club, a combination of ballet company with the school, was founded, an organization that became England’s first permanent ballet company.
Rambert’s influence on ballet in England has been widespread. When, after the death of Diaghileff, the Camargo Society was formed in London, along with Ninette de Valois, Lydia Lopokova, J. Maynard Keynes, and Arnold L. Haskell, Rambert was a prime mover.
In her school and at the Ballet Club, she set herself the task of developing English dancers for English ballet. From her school have come very many of the young dancers and, even more important, many of the young choreographers who are making ballet history today. To mention but a few: Frederick Ashton, Harold Turner, Antony Tudor, Hugh Laing, Walter Gore, Frank Staff, William Chappell, among the men; Peggy van Praagh, Pearl Argyle, Andrée Howard, Diana Could, Sally Gilmour, among the women.
Rambert is married to that poet of the English theatre, Ashley Dukes. Twenty-odd years ago they pooled their individual passions—hers for building dancers, his for building theatres and class-rooms—and built and remodelled a hall into a simple, little theatre, which they christened the Mercury, in Ladbroke Road. Its auditorium is as tiny as its stage. Two leaps will suffice to cross it. The orchestra consisted of a single pianist. On occasion a gramophone assisted. Everything had to be simple. Everything had to be inexpensive. The financial difficulties were enormous. Here the early masterpieces of Ashton and Tudor were created. Here great work was done, and ballets brought to life in collaboration between artists in ferment.
I cannot do better than to quote the splendid tribute of my friend, “Freddy” Ashton, when he says: “Hers is a deeply etched character, a potent bitter-sweet mixture; she can sting the lazy into activity, make the rigid mobile and energise the most lethargic.... She has the unique gift of awakening creative ability in artists. Not only myself, but Andrée Howard, Antony Tudor, Walter Gore and Frank Staff felt our impulse for choreography strengthen and become irresistible under her wise and patient guidance. Even those who were not her pupils or directly in her care—the designers who worked with her, William Chappell, Sophie Fedorovitch, Nadia Benois, Hugh Stevenson, to name only a few—all felt the impact of her singular personality.”
The work Marie Rambert did with the Ballet Club and the Ballet Rambert in their days at the Mercury Theatre was of incalculable value. The company continues today but its function is somewhat different. Originally the Ballet Rambert was a place where young choreographers could try out their ideas, could make brave and bold experiments. During my most recent visit to London, in the summer of 1953, I was able to see some of her more recent work on the larger stage of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre. I was profoundly impressed. Outstanding among the works I saw were an unusually fine performance of Fokine’s immortal Les Sylphides, which has been continuously in her repertoire since 1930; Movimientos, a work out of the London Ballet Workshop in 1952, with choreography and music by the young Michael Charnley, with scenery by Douglas Smith and costumes by Tom Lingwood; Frederick Ashton’s exquisite Les Masques, an old tale set to a delicate score by Francis Poulenc, with scenery and costumes by the late and lamented Sophie Fedorovitch; and Walter Gore’s fine Winter Night, to a Rachmaninoff score, with scenery and costumes by Kenneth Rowell. There was also an unusually excellent production of Giselle, which first entered her repertoire in its full-length form in 1946, with Hugh Stevenson settings and costumes.
While there was a period when Rambert seemed to be less interested in ballets than in dancers, and the present organization would appear to be best described as one where young dancers may be tested and proven, yet Rambert alumnae and alumni are to be found in all the leading British ballet companies.
In the Coronation Honours List in 1953, Marie Rambert was awarded the distinction of Companion of the British Empire.
MIKHAIL MORDKIN
Although he was under my management for only a brief time, I must, I feel, make passing reference to Mikhail Mordkin as one of the Russian emigré artists who have been identified with ballet in America. His contributions were neither profound nor considerable; but they should be assessed and evaluated.
Mordkin, born in Russia, in 1881, was a product of the Moscow School, and eventually became a leading figure and one-time ballet-master of the Bolshoi Theatre.
So far as America is concerned, I sometimes like to think his greatest contribution was his masculinity. Before he first arrived here in support of Anna Pavlova in her initial American appearance, the average native was inclined to take a very dim view indeed of a male dancer. Mordkin’s athleticism and obvious virility were noted on every side.
Strange combination of classical dancer, athlete, and clown, Mordkin’s temperament was such that he experienced difficulty throughout his career in adjusting himself to conditions and to people. He broke with the Imperial Ballet; broke with Diaghileff; split with Pavlova. These make-and-break associations could be extended almost indefinitely.
For the record, I should mention that, following upon his split with Pavlova, he had a brief American tour with his own company, calling it the “All Star Imperial Russian Ballet,” and brought as its ballerina, the doyenne of Russian ballerinas, Ekaterina Geltzer. Again, in 1928, he returned to the States, under the management of Simeon Gest, with a company that included Vera Nemtchinova, Xenia Macletzova, and the English Hilda Butsova, along with Pierre Vladimiroff.
Mordkin’s successes in Moscow had been considerable, but outside Russia he always lagged behind the creative procession, largely, I suspect, because of a stubborn refusal on Mordkin’s part to face up to the fact that, although the root of ballet is classicism, styles change, the world moves forward. Ballet is no exception. Mordkin clung too tenaciously to the faults of the past, as well as to its virtues.
From the ballet school he founded in New York has come a number of first-rate dancing talents. The later Mordkin Ballet, in 1937-1938, and 1938-1939, left scarcely a mark on the American ballet picture. It lacked many things, not the least of which was a ballerina equal to the great classical roles. Its policy, if any, was as dated as Mordkin himself.
If there was a contribution to ballet in America made by Mordkin, it was a fortuitous one. Choreographically he composed nothing that will be remembered. But there was a Mordkin company of sorts, and some of its members formed the nucleus of what eventually became Ballet Theatre.
On 15th July, 1944, Mikhail Mordkin died at Millbrook, New Jersey.
VASLAV NIJINSKY
Nijinsky has become a literature and a legend. The story of his tragic life has been told and re-told. His feats as a dancer, his experiments as a choreographer, became a legend, even while he lived.
I regret I never knew him. Those who did know him and with whom I have discussed him, are, for the large part, idolators. That he was a genius they are all agreed. They insist he could leap higher, could remain longer in the air—but there is little point in dwelling on the legend. It is well-known; and legends are the angel’s food on which we thrive.
Nijinsky’s triumphs came at a time when there were great figures bursting over the horizon; at a time when there was so little basis for comparison; at a time when it was extremely difficult for the public to appraise, because the public had so little basis for comparison.
How separate fact from fiction? It is difficult, if not quite impossible. It was the time of the “greatests”: Kubelik, the “greatest” violinist; Mansfield, the “greatest” actor; Irving, the “greatest” actor; Modjeska, the “greatest” actress; Bernhardt, the “greatest” actress; Ellen Terry, the “greatest” actress; Duse, the “greatest” actress.
It is such an easy matter when, prompted by the nostalgic urge, to contemplate longingly a by-gone “Golden Age.” In music, it is equally simple: Anton Rubinstein, Franz Liszt, de Pachmann, Geraldine Farrar, Enrico Caruso ... and so it goes. Each was the “greatest.” Nijinsky has become a part and parcel of the “greatest” legend.
Jan Kubelik, one of the greatest violinists of his generation, is an example. When I brought Kubelik for his last American appearance in 1923, I remember a gathering in the foyer of the Brooklyn’s Academy of Music at one of the concerts he gave there. The younger generation of violinists were out in force, and a number of them were in earnest conversation during the interval in the concert.
Their general opinion was that Kubelik had remained away from America too long; that he was, in fact, slipping. Sol Elman, the father of Mischa, listened attentively. When the barrage had expended itself, he spoke.
“My dear friends,” he said, “Kubelik played the Paganini concerto tonight as splendidly as ever he did. Today you have a different standard. You have Elman, Heifetz, and the rest. All of you have developed and grown in artistry, technique, and, above all, in knowledge and appreciation. The point is: you know more; not that Kubelik plays less well.”
It is all largely a matter of first impressions and their vividness. It is the first impressions that color our memories and often form the basis of our judgments. As time passes, I sometimes wonder how reliable the first impressions may be.
I am unable to state dogmatically that Nijinsky was the “greatest” dancer of our time or of all time. On the other hand, there cannot be the slightest question that he was a very great personality. The quality of personality is the one that really matters.
Today there are, I suppose, between five and six hundred first-class pianists, for example. These pianists are, in many cases, considerably more than competent. But to find the great personality in these five to six hundred talents is something quite different.
The truly great are those who, through something that can only be described as personality, electrify the public. The public, once electrified, will come to see them again and again and again. There are, perhaps, too many good talents. There never can be enough great artists.
Vaslav Nijinsky was one of the great ones—a great artist, a great personality. There are those who can argue long and in nostalgic detail about his technique, its virtues and its defects. Artistry and personality transcend technique; for mere technique, however flawless, is not enough.
It must be borne in mind that Nijinsky’s public career in the Western World was hardly more than seven years long. The legend of Nijinsky commenced with his first appearance in Paris in Le Spectre de la Rose, in 1912. It may have been started, fostered, and developed by Diaghileff, continued by Nijinsky’s wife. It is quite possible this is true; but true or not, it does not affect the validity of the legend.
The story of Nijinsky’s peculiarly romantic marriage, his subsequent madness, his alleged partial recovery, his recent death have all been set down for posterity by his wife. I am by no means an all-out admirer of these books; and I am not able to accept or agree with many of the statements and implications in them. Yet the loyalty and devotion she exhibited towards him can only be regarded as admirable.
The merit of her ministrations to the sick man, on the one hand, hardly condones her literary efforts, on the other. Frequently, I detect a quality in the books that reveals itself more strongly as the predatory female than as the protective wife-mother. I cannot accept Romola Nijinsky’s reiterated portraits of Diaghileff as the avenging monster any more than I can the following statement in her latest book, The Last Days of Nijinsky, published in 1952:
“Undoubtedly, the news that Vaslav was recuperating became more and more known; therefore it was not surprising that one day he received a cable with an offer from Mr. Hurok, the theatrical impresario, asking him to come over to New York and appear. My son-in-law, who had just arrived to spend the week-end with us, advised me to cable back accepting the offer, for then we automatically could have escaped from Europe and would have been able to depart at once. But I felt I could not accept a contract for Vaslav and commit him. There was no question at the time that Vaslav should appear in public. Nevertheless, I hoped that the impresario, who was a Russian himself and who had made his name and fortune in America managing Russian dancers in the past, would have vision enough and a humanitarian spirit in helping to get the greatest Russian dancer out of the European inferno. What I did not know at the time was that there was quite a group of dancers who had got together and who worked in silence to keep Nijinsky out of the United States and from public life. Illness had removed the artist with whom they could not compete. They dreaded his coming back.”
While the entire paragraph tends to give a distorted picture of the situation, the last three sentences are as far from the truth as they possibly can be. The implied charge is almost too stupid to contradict or refute. Were it not for the stigma it imputes to many fine artists living in this country, I should ignore it completely. However, the facts are quite simple. It is by no means an easy matter to bring into the United States any person in ill health, either physical or mental. So far as the regulations were concerned, Nijinsky was but another alien. It was impossible to secure a visa or an entry permit. It was equally impossible to secure the proper sort of doctors’ certificates that could have been of material aid in helping secure such papers.
I have a vivid memory of a meeting of dancers at the St. Regis Hotel in New York to discuss what could be done. Anton Dolin was a prime mover in the plan to give assistance. There was a genuine enthusiasm on the part of the dancers present. Unfortunately, the economics of the dance are such that dancers are quite incapable of undertaking long-term financial commitments. But a substantial number of pledges were offered.
It certainly was not a question of “quite a group of dancers who had got together and who worked in silence to keep Nijinsky out of the United States and from public life.” There was no question or suggestion that he should appear in public, incidentally. There was only the sheer inability to get him into the country. If there was any “dread” of “his coming back,” it could only have been the dread that their former colleague, ill in mind and body, might be in danger of being exploited by the romantic author.
Nijinsky, the legend, will endure as long as ballet, because the legend has its roots in genius. Legend apart, no one from the Maryinsky stable, no one in the fairly long history of ballet, as a matter of fact, has given ballet a more complete service. And it should be remembered that this service was rendered in a career that actually covered less than a decade.
A QUARTET OF IMPERIALISTS
There is left for consideration a Russian male quartet, three of them still living, who, in one degree or another, have made contributions to ballet in our time, either in the United States or Europe. Their contributions vary in quality and degree, exactly as the four gentlemen differ in temperament and approach. I shall first deal briefly with the three living members of the quartet, two of whom are American citizens of long standing.
THEODORE KOSLOFF
I commence with one whose contributions to ballet have been the least. I mention him at all only because, historically speaking, he has been identified with dance in America a long time. With perhaps a single notable exception, Theodore Kosloff’s contributions in all forms have been slight.
The best has been through teaching, for it is as a teacher that he is likely to be remembered longest. Spectacular in his teaching methods as he is in person, it has been from his school that has come a substantial number of artists of the dance who have made a distinctive place for themselves in the dance world of America.
Outstanding among these are Agnes de Mille, who has made an ineradicable mark with her highly personal choreographic style, and Nana Gollner, American ballerina of fine if somewhat uncontrolled talents, the latter having received almost all her training at Kosloff’s hands and cane.
Theodore Kosloff was born in 1883. A pupil of the Moscow rather than the Petersburg school, he eventually became a minor soloist at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, appearing in, among others, The Sleeping Beauty and Daughter of Pharaoh. When Diaghileff recruited his company, Kosloff and his wife, Maria Baldina, were among the Muscovites engaged. Kosloff was little more than a corps de ballet member with Diaghileff, with an occasional small solo. But he had a roving and retentive eye.
When Gertrude Hoffman and Morris Gest decided to jump the Russian Ballet gun on Broadway, and to present their Saison de Ballets Russes at the Winter Garden in advance of Diaghileff’s first American visit, it was Theodore Kosloff who restaged the Fokine works for Hoffman, without so much as tilt of the hat or a by-your-leave either to the creator or the owner.
Remaining in the States after the demise of the venture, Kosloff for a time appeared in vaudeville with his wife, Baldina, and his younger brother, Alexis, also a product of the Moscow School. One of these tours took them to California, where Theodore settled in Hollywood. Here, almost simultaneously, he opened his school and associated himself with Cecil B. de Mille as an actor in silent film “epics.” He was equally successful at both.
Kosloff’s purely balletic activities thereafter included numerous movie-house “presentations”—the unlamented spectacles that preceded the feature film in the silent picture days, in palaces like Grauman’s Egyptian and Grauman’s Chinese; a brief term as ballet-master of the San Francisco Opera Ballet; and colossal and pepped-up versions of Petroushka and Schéhérazade, the former in Los Angeles, the latter at the Hollywood Bowl.
Today, at seventy, Kosloff pounds his long staff at classes in the shadow of the Hollywood hills, directing all his activity at perspiring and aspiring young Americans, who in increasing numbers are looking towards the future through the medium of ballet.
LAURENT NOVIKOFF
The three living members of this male quartet were all Muscovites, which is to say, products of the Imperial School of Moscow and dancers of the Bolshoi Theatre, rather than products of the Maryinsky. In Russian ballet this was a sharp distinction and a fine one, with the Maryinskians inclined to glance down the nose a bit at their Moscow colleagues. And possibly with reason.
Laurent Novikoff was born five years later than Theodore Kosloff; he graduated from the Moscow School an equal number of years later. He remained at the Bolshoi Theatre for only a year before joining the Diaghileff Ballet in Paris for an equal length of time. On his return to Moscow at the close of the Diaghileff season, he became a first dancer at the Bolshoi, only to leave to become Anna Pavlova’s partner the next year. As a matter of fact, the three remaining members of the quartet were all, at one time or another, partners of Pavlova.
With Pavlova, Novikoff toured the United States in 1913 and in 1914. Returning once again to Moscow, he staged ballets for opera, and remained there until the revolution, when he went to London and rejoined the Diaghileff Company, only to leave and join forces once again with Pavlova, remaining with her this time for seven years, and eventually opening a ballet school in London. In 1929, Novikoff accepted an invitation from the Chicago Civic Opera Company to become its ballet-master; and later, for a period of five years, he was ballet-master of the Metropolitan Opera Company.
As a dancer, Novikoff had a number of distinguished qualities, including a fine virility, a genuinely romantic manner, imagination and authority. As a choreographer, he can hardly be classified as a progressive. While he staged a number of works for Pavlova, including, among others, Russian Folk Lore and Don Quixote, most of his choreographic work was with one opera company or another. In nearly all cases, ballet was, as it still is, merely a poor step-sister in the opera houses and with the opera companies, often regarded by opera directors merely as a necessary nuisance, and only on rare occasions is an opera choreographer ever given his head.
A charming, cultured, and quite delightful gentleman, Laurent Novikoff now lives quietly with his wife Elizabeth in the American middle west.
ALEXANDRE VOLININE
Alexandre Volinine was Anna Pavlova’s partner for a longer time than any of the others. Born in 1883, he was a member of the same Moscow Imperial class as Theodore Kosloff, attained the rank of first dancer at the Bolshoi Theatre, and remained there for nine years.
In 1910, he left Russia to become Pavlova’s partner, a position he held intermittently for many years. Apart from being Pavlova’s chief support, he made numerous American appearances. He was a member of Gertrude Hoffman’s Saison Russe, at the Winter Garden, in 1911; and in the same year supported the great Danish ballerina, Adeline Genée, at the Metropolitan Opera House, in La Danse, “an authentic record by Mlle. Genée of Dancing and Dancers between the years 1710 and 1845.”
Volinine returned to the United States in 1912-1913, when, after the historical break between Pavlova and Mordkin, the latter formed his “All-Star Imperial Russian Ballet,” with Ekaterina Geltzer, Julia Sedova, Lydia Lopokova, and Volinine. This was an ill-starred venture from the start for no sooner had they opened at the Metropolitan Opera House than Mordkin and Sedova quarrelled with Geltzer and, so characteristic of Russian Ballet, the factions, in this case Polish and English versus Russian, took violent sides. Volinine was on the side of the former. As a result of the company split, the English-Polish section went off on a tour across the country with Volinine, who augmented their tiny salaries by five dollars weekly from his private purse. After they had worked their way through the Deep South and arrived at Creole New Orleans, the manager decamped for a time, and a tremulous curtain descended on the first act of Coppélia, not to rise.
By one means or another, and with some help from the British Consul in New Orleans, they managed to return to New York by way of a stuffy journey in a vile-smelling freighter plying along the coast. By quick thinking, and even quicker acting, including mass-sitting on the manager’s doorstep, they forced that individual to arrange for the passage back to England, which was accomplished with its share of excitement; once back in England, Volinine returned to his place as Pavlova’s first dancer.
Volinine was the featured dancer with Pavlova in 1916, when I first met her at the Hippodrome, and often accompanied us to supper. As the years wore on, I learned to know and admire him.
As a dancer, Volinine was a supreme technician, and, I believe, one of the most perfect romantic dancers of his time. In his Paris school today he is passing on his rare knowledge to the men of today’s generation of premières danseurs. His teaching, combined with his quite superb understanding of the scientific principles involved, are of great service to ballet. Michael Somes, the first dancer of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, is among those who go to Volinine’s Paris studio for those refining corrections obtainable only from a great teacher who has been a great dancer.
“Sasha” Volinine has, perhaps, spent as much or more of his professional life in England, Australia, and other English-speaking countries, as any Russian dancer. On the other hand, he speaks and understands less English, perhaps, than any of the others.
Often in America and London we have gone out to dine, to sup, often with a group. “Sasha” invariably would be the first to ask the headwaiter or maître d’hôtel for a copy of the menu. Immediately he would concentrate on it, poring over it, giving it seemingly careful scrutiny and study.
All the others in the party would have ordered, and then, after long cogitation, “Sasha” would summon the waiter and, pointing to something in the menu utterly irrelevant, would solemnly demand: “Ham and eggs.”
I am happy to count “Sasha” Volinine among my old friends, and it is always a pleasure to foregather with him when I am in Paris.
ADOLPH BOLM
If my old friend, Adolph Bolm, were here to read this, he probably would be the first to object to being classified with this quartet of “Imperialists.” He would have pointed out to me in his emphatic manner that by far the greater part of his career had been spent in the United States, working for ballet in America. He would have insisted that he neither thought nor acted like an “Imperialist”: that he was a progressive, not a reactionary; and he would, at considerable length, have advanced his theory that all “Imperialists” were reactionaries. He would have repeated to me that even when he was at the Maryinsky, he was a rebel and a leader in the revolt against what he felt were the stultifying influences of its inbred conservatism. This would have gone on for some time, for Bolm was intelligent, literate, articulate, and ready to make a speech at the drop of a ballet shoe, or no shoe at all.
I have placed Bolm in this book among the “Imperialists” because he had his roots in the Imperial Russian Ballet, where he was conditioned as child and youth; he was a product of the School in Theatre Street and a Maryinsky soloist for seven years; he was a contemporary and one-time colleague of the three other members of this quartet, either in Russia or with the Diaghileff Ballet Russe.
Born in St. Petersburg in 1884, the son of the concert-master and associate conductor of the French operatic theatre, the Mikhailovsky, Bolm entered the School at ten, was a first-prize graduate in 1904. He was never a great classical dancer; but he had a first-rate sense of the theatre, was a brilliant character dancer, a superlative mime.
Bolm was the first to take Anna Pavlova out of Russia, as manager and first dancer of a Scandinavian and Central European tour that made ballet history. He was, I happen to know, largely responsible in influencing Pavlova temporarily to postpone the idea of a company of her own and to abandon their own tour, because he believed the future of Russian Ballet lay with Diaghileff. Although the Nijinsky legend commences when Nijinsky first leapt through the window of the virginal bedroom of Le Spectre de la Rose, in Paris in 1911, it was Prince Igor and Bolm’s virile, barbaric warrior chieftain that provided the greater impact and produced the outstanding revelation of male dancing such as the Western World had not hitherto known.
Bolm was intimately associated with the Diaghileff invasion of the United States, when Diaghileff, a displaced and dispirited person sitting out the war in Switzerland, was invited to bring his company to America by Otto H. Kahn. But, owing to the war and the disbanding of his company, it was impossible for Diaghileff to reassemble the original personnel. It was a grave problem. Neither Nijinsky, Fokine, nor Karsavina was available. It was then that Bolm took on the tremendous dual role of first dancer and choreographer, engaging and rehearsing what was to all intents and purposes a new company in a repertoire of twenty-odd ballets. The Diaghileff American tours were due in no small degree to Bolm’s efforts in achieving what seemed to be the impossible.
After the second Diaghileff American tour, during which Bolm was injured, he remained in New York. Unlike many of his colleagues, his quick intelligence grasped American ideas and points of view. This was evidenced throughout his career by his interest in our native subjects, composers, painters.
With his own Ballet Intime, his motion picture theatre presentations of ballet, his Chicago Allied Arts, his tenure with the Chicago Opera Company, the San Francisco Opera Ballet, his production of Le Coq d’Or and two productions of Petroushka at the Metropolitan Opera House, he helped sow the seeds of real ballet appreciation across the country.
My acquaintance and friendship with Adolph Bolm extended over a long time. His experimental mind, his eagerness, his enthusiasm, his deep culture, his capacity for friendship, his hospitality—all these qualities endeared him to me. If one did not always agree with him (and I, for one, did not), one could not fail to appreciate and respect his honesty and sincerity. During a period when Ballet Theatre was under my management, I was instrumental in placing him as the régisseur general (general stage director to those unfamiliar with ballet’s term for this important functionary) of the company, feeling that his discipline, knowledge, taste, and ability would be helpful to the young company in maintaining a high performing standard. Unhappily, much of the good he did and could do was negated by an unfortunate attitude on the part of some of our younger American dancers, who have little or no respect for tradition, reputation, or style, and who seem actively to resent achievement—in an art that has its roots in the past although its branches stretch out to the future—rather than respect and admire it.
A striking example of this sort of thing took place when I had been instrumental, later on, in having Bolm stage a new version of Stravinsky’s Firebird, for Ballet Theatre, in 1945, with Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin.
My last meeting with Bolm took place at the opening performance of the Sadler’s Wells production of The Sleeping Beauty, in Los Angeles. I shall not soon forget his genuine enthusiasm and how he embraced Ninette de Valois as he expressed his happiness that the great full-length ballets in all their splendor had at last been brought to Los Angeles.
In his later years, Bolm lived on a hilltop in Hollywood; in Hollywood, but not of it, with Igor Stravinsky and Nicholas Remisoff as two of his closest and most intimate friends. One night, in the spring of 1951, Bolm went to sleep and did not wake again in this world.
His life had been filled with an intense activity, a remarkable productivity in his chosen field—thirty-five years of it in the United States, in the triple role of teacher, dancer, choreographer. As I have intimated before, Bolm’s understanding of the things that are at the root of the American character was, in my opinion, deeper and more profound than that of any of his colleagues. His achievements will live after him.
My last contacts with Bolm revealed to me a man still vital, still eager; but a little soured, a shade bitter, because he was conscious the world was moving on and felt that the ballet was shutting him out.
Before that bitterness could take too deep a root in the heart and soul of a gentle artist, a Divine Providence closed his eyes in the sleep everlasting.