I
The celebrated saying of the German poet, ‘Und neues Leben blüht aus den Ruinen’ applies better than anything else to the Russian ballet, which has risen out of the West European choreographic ruins. The Russian ballet marks a new era in the history of the art of dancing. The Russian ballet is a new word in the dance world. It brings the smell of trees and flowers, the songs of birds, the leaps of gazelles and lions and the very soil of nature to the stage. It breathes the spectral shadows of the trees and mountains; it begins with the simplest mushroom and ends with the most complicated hot-house plant. It emanates nature with all its uncouthness and grace. Like the Russian composers and poets, the Russian dancers strive to echo Nature with all its majesty and mystery.
Even with the beginning of the nineteenth century the Russian ballet begins a course entirely different from that which the schools of Western Europe were preaching and teaching. Though the ballet-masters and instructors are foreigners, yet they are actuated by outward circumstances to apply their academic theories to the conditions of a different school. With the advent of a national school of music and drama, at the head of which stood Balakireff, Borodine, Seroff, Moussorgsky, Tschaikowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff in music, and Ostrowsky, Turgenieff, Gogol and others in the drama, the Russian ballet is forced in the same channels. The Russian ballet grows gradually into a new nationalistic art, and separates itself altogether from the French-Italian aristocratic academicism. The frequent remarks of the foreign critics, suggesting that the Russian ballet was and is a direct offspring and copy of the classic French-Italian schools, are absolutely wrong. It is true that the Russians borrowed from the French the skeleton and from the Italians the mechanic contrivances, but they built up the body themselves and created something entirely different from what Western Europe knew of the ballet.
A born dancer, the Russian could never stand the prescribed poses, smiles, tears, steps and gestures, that were and are still practised outside. He is ready to undergo the most strenuous training, and follows microscopically the instructions of the teachers, in order to acquire the necessary technique; but when it comes to a performance, he will put his spontaneous ideas and impulses above the technique and act according to his emotions and inspiration. This is a peculiarity of the Russian. He is and remains an individual. No school can put him on the same level with his fellow-students. Is not Pavlova quite different from Fokina or Karsavina?
No other nation cares so much for racial beauty as the Russian. And in this it is essentially democratic. All Russian art is based on the peasant, and not on aristocratic ideals. It expresses this by being simple, direct, spontaneous and rugged. The greatest factor in separating the Russian ballet from the western, is the Russian folk-dance. It owes everything to folk-art. No outside influence has ever been able to change the Russian æsthetic taste. In art, particularly in the ballet, the peasant ideals force themselves upon all aristocratic and bureaucratic classes. Already as a youth he sucks from the atmosphere the innumerable forms of dance expression. In his blood lives unconsciously the whole choreographic code, as his ancestors have known and practised it for centuries. The design of a peasant is the æsthetic scale of a Russian artist, particularly of a dancer. Aristocratic ideals never amounted to anything in Russia. The fact is, the nobleman follows in matters of æsthetic taste the moujik, but never vice versa. The benefit of this has been that neither the court nor foreign academicism could influence the Russian art of dancing.
Besides the racial motives, the question of scientific education has been a hobby with the Russian art pedagogues since the early part of the last century. The Russians are almost fanatic in this respect and have specialized their educational institutions to such a degree that they stand unique. The method of training the dancers in other countries was centred mainly in training the step technique and was, so to speak, purely choreographic. The Russians took into consideration all the arts that are related to dancing, and made a rule that all pupils in the dancing schools should have at least an elementary training in human anatomy, in sculpture, drama, architecture, painting, music and in general educational subjects. To know every branch of art correspondingly well—this made it necessary that children be educated in an institute from their childhood on. Thus the education for the Russian ballet is given in the two Imperial Ballet Schools, one in Petrograd, the other in Moscow, both being connected with the dramatic departments in which children are trained for the stage. The course in the school lasts eight years, with an extra one or two years’ post-graduate practice at some opera stage, after which a graduate receives his ‘Free Artist’ degree which places him on an equal rank with the graduates of a college, university or musical conservatory.
Marius Petipa, the director and leading spirit of the Petrograd ballet school, has, upon one occasion, said to the writer: ‘We employ the French, the Italian, the Danish and the Russian instructors in order to give the best of every school and style to our pupils. We teach things that no other school would teach. For instance, our pupils must know psychology, which is supposed to be unnecessary for a dancer. But I say, no. How can a girl personify the Snow Maiden when she does not know the psychology of a fairy? It’s ridiculous, you might think, as fairies are only legendary figures. But the very fact that they are imaginary makes it necessary for a girl to know how to avoid showing any human characteristics.
‘The foreign schools do not care in what steps a dancer should express such subtle emotions as jealousy, longing, bliss and sorrow. Abroad they prescribe pirouettes for joy and happiness. They prescribe acting in this, dancing in that phrase. It is not so with us. We teach the pupil to see the various human emotions in historic sculpture and painting. We show them the attitudes of various celebrated actresses in this or that emotion. Then, we go back to psychology and leave it to the artist to formulate the position that he would occupy in various emotions. So you see psychology is very important to a dancer.
‘Dancing is the cream of architecture and sculpture. We teach our future dancers to know the difference between architecture and sculpture and then between a dance and a dramatic pose, which are just as different as opera singing and concert singing. All our graduates must be accomplished dancers, actors, acrobats, architects and designers. We teach the difference between a Gothic and Byzantine line, a Moorish and Romanesque design. We have to analyze music and sculpture to their elementary parts in order to be able to show the manifold manifestations of the human soul, and the manifold forms of beauty. It is in this way that a dancer comes to know which step or gesture corresponds to the emotions of a Romanesque Italian, Gothic German or Byzantine Russian.
‘I have been assailed by our critics and composers as being too strict in demanding technique from our dancers. But tell me, please, can any talent make a man an artist without technical ability, where mathematical laws are required as in dancing and in music? Can there ever be a Rubinstein, Paderewski or Kubelik without the acquired harmonic and melodic skill on the instrument which I call technique? Just as little chance has a man of being a great dancer if he does not possess the ability to control his body, though he be the greatest choreographic genius in the world. Art is technique plus talent. No great artist in dancing was ever produced without technique.
‘Do you know what Lubke said in his immortal History of Sculpture, that applies also to a dancer? I am telling all my pupils when they leave the institution that, like sculptor in the clay, a dancer in himself must seek the “Image of God,” the spark of divine life. When he fails to find this in separate lines, poses, gestures, attitudes and mimic expressions, he must search for it in the whole, and, by thoughtful study and thinking, he will certainly attain the reflex of immortal beauty—the image of deity. This I call artistic creation. In sculpture as in dancing the divine and heroic are the aims of the artistic achievements. Without this striving after the divine spark nothing is produced but lifeless figures and dead forms. A dancer, like any other artist, should aspire after spirit-breathing beauty.’
Pavlowa
a painting by John Lavery
This briefly expresses the fundamental traditions of the Russian ballet school. To a certain extent it is academic, but it has never interfered with the racial and the individual tendencies of the artists. Though there are only three large independent ballet corps in Russia, those of Petrograd, Moscow, and Warsaw, yet nearly every one of the sixty or more provincial opera houses keeps its local ballet corps in connection with the operatic and dramatic staff. While in foreign countries ballet has been appreciated mainly as an accessory to the opera for its spectacular effects, its æsthetic appeal being regarded as not possessing a high order of merit, in Russia it is considered a great and independent art of the stage, standing on a plane with opera, both musically and dramatically. When a few years ago the Russian dancers made their appearance abroad the public was startled, as no one could imagine that any good thing could come out of Czardom. It is a great mistake to suppose that the Russian ballet is an aristocratic or autocratic institution. By no means. Like Russian drama and music the Russian ballet is a national institution and a national achievement.
In how far the Russian ballet differs from her sister institutions outside is best to be seen in such old-fashioned ballets as Les Sylphides, which was danced by Taglioni, and is danced by the artists of the French-Italian schools and figures in the repertoires of the Russian ballet. Another work of similar nature is the Coppélia. Not only are these two time-worn ballets wholly changed in their thematic and musical sense but in the very form of conception. The Russian Sylphides and Coppélia are old scenes in modern light, the French-Italian Sylphides and Coppélia are pitiable museum shows. Where a French-Italian ballerina would leap and whirl, a Russian acts and poses. Like the art of an actress that of a Russian ballerina is in the first place a personification of the character in whose rôle she is dancing. Pavlova as she depicts the incomparable fury of Glazounoff’s L’Autômne Bacchanale, could not by any means be a Cleopatra as personified by Astafieva. Karsavina with all her dramatic thrill and arabesques is a mediocrity in the rôles in which Pavlova excels. The dramatic issue is the foremost question in the Russian ballet, often to such an extent that it minimizes the musical significance. The most talented of the foreign ballet dancers do not begin to go into the dramatic details of a dance as the Russians do.
To get an idea of the Russian ballet with all its true atmosphere one must go to Russia. The performances of the Diaghileff company which foreign audiences have seen, belong to the revolutionary school, but not to the typical classic dance of Russia, which we shall discuss later. The Russian ballet dancer is free from all the stiffness, decadent artificiality, preconceived emotions, and fossilized formalities of the French-Italian ballet dancers. This freedom he owes, in the first place, to the thorough training in the school; second, to the distinctly racial traditions of the Russian drama and art; and third, to the serious critical attitude of the audiences. To say that the Russian ballet has not travelled in ideals far from those of Milan in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, as a foreign dance critic has said, is untrue. The difference between these two schools is just as real as that between the Catholic and the Protestant church: the one believes in the form, the other in the spirit.