were those who felt Miss Dunham’s closing words implied a threat. The
press, ever alert to scent a scandal, demanded a statement about my
attitude on segregation in theatres, and to know if I approved of
artists under my management threatening audiences. It was one of those
rare times when, for some reason, I could not be reached by telephone.
Faced with the necessity of making some sort of statement, my
representative issued one to the effect that Mr. Hurok deplored and was
unalterably opposed to discrimination of any kind anywhere; but that, as
a law-abiding citizen, however much he deplored such regulations, he was
bound to conform to the laws and regulations obtaining in those
communities and theatres where he was contractually obliged to have his
attractions appear. But I have taken care never again to submit artists
to any possible indignities, if there is any way of avoiding it.
I shall relate a last example of the sort of difficulties that arose on
this tour and, to my mind, it is the most stupid of them all, if there
can be said to be degrees of stupidity in such matters.
In addition to the large orchestra of conventional instruments we
carried, Miss Dunham had four Guatemalan percussionists who dramatically
beat out the Caribbean rhythms on a wide assortment of gourds, tam-tams,
and other native drums, both with the orchestra and in several scenes on
the stage.
It happened in a northern city. The head of the musicians’ union local
demanded to know if there were any “niggers” in our orchestra. My
representative, who feels very strongly about such matters and who
resents the term used by the local union president, replied that he did
not understand the question. All members of the orchestra, he said, were
members of the American Federation of Musicians, and had played as a
unit across the entire country, and such a question had never arisen.
The local union official thereupon tersely informed him the colored
players would not be permitted to play with the other musicians in the
orchestra pit in that city; if they attempted to do so, he would forbid
the white players to play. My representative, refusing to bow to such an
ukase, appealed to the head office of the Musicians’ Union, in
Chicago--only to be informed by them that, however much headquarters
disapproved of and deplored the situation, each union local was
autonomous in its local rulings and there was nothing they could do.
Now comes the irony of the situation. My representative, on visiting the
theatre, saw that the stage boxes abutted the orchestra pit on the same
level with it “Why not place the percussionists there?” he thought. He
proposed this to the union official, and was informed that this would be
permitted, “so long as there is a railing between the white players and
the black.”
It was only later, on thumbing through the local telephone directory, my
representative discovered there were two musicians’ locals there. One
of them was listed with the word “colored” after it, in parenthesis.
Yes, we still have a long road ahead in the matter of fair employment
practices and equal opportunities for all.
Having had a satisfying taste of the theatre, Miss Dunham eventually
turned to it as her exclusive medium of expression, and branched out
into a full-fledged theatre piece, with plot and all, called _Carib
Song_, which, transmuted into _Caribbean Rhapsody_, proved more
successful on the other side of the Atlantic than it did in the States.
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.
5. Three Ladies of the Maryinsky--And
Others
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.