In the dances from Prince Igor, accompanied by a chorus, the Russians loosen their restraint to a degree which would mean a totally unrestrained performance in the hands of another group of dancers. It is almost impossible to believe, after witnessing these wild Polovtsian dances, that the action has been perfectly ordered by Fokine and can be repeated exactly at any time. The ballet occupies almost all of the fourth act of Borodine’s opera. I believe that the choruses to which these dances are performed were sung at a concert of the MacDowell Chorus in Carnegie Hall, March 3, 1911. The New York Winter Garden once utilized the music for a ballet. The scene used by the Russians, painted by Roerich, is marvelously suggestive of barbarism; the now languorous, now passionate music, pulsing with rhythm, is admirably adapted to dancing. Usually Mme. Fokina and Bolm are seen in these dances, but it is the ballet corps itself which becomes the important feature in their success.
“How excellently,” says one foreign critic, “every means that the theatre offers has been made use of to produce the desired effect; the menace of the coming cloud of barbarians that is to lie for centuries on the desolate face of Russia (for we are in the camp of the Polovtsians, forerunners of the great invasion); not the loud blustering of a Tamburlaine the Great, but the awful, quiet vigor, half melancholy, half playful, of a tribe that is but a little unit in the swarm; the infinite horizons of the steppe, with the line of the buried tumuli stretching away to endless times and places, down the centuries into Siberia; the long-drawn, resigned, egoless music (Borodine drew his themes from real Tartar-Mongol sources); the women that crouch, unconscious of themselves, or rise and stretch lazy limbs, and in the end fling themselves carelessly prone when their dance is over; the savage-joyful panther leaping of the men; the stamping feet and quick, nerve-racking beat of the drum; and more threatening than all, the gambolling of the boys, like kittens unwittingly preparing themselves for the future chase.”
But whose is the guiding hand, the hand that combines the rhythms, the colors, and the human element in these works? It is Fokine’s; without Fokine I do not see very well how these ballets could come into existence. (I am now speaking of Fokine, of course, entirely as a producer. He is also known as a dancer. One must bear in mind, also, that Nijinsky’s three ballets—he contrived the action for l’Après-midi d’un Faune, Jeux, and The Sacrifice to the Spring—were very original and effective.) Until Fokine began to work, the ballet-master had been content to arrange all his coryphées in straight lines across the stage, each dancer making the same simultaneous movement as her neighbor. Fokine divined the ineffectiveness of this false symmetry. He divided his forces into many groups, each group a unit in movement. (The ultimate result of the application of this principle was Nijinsky’s staging of The Sacrifice to the Spring, in which each dancer was set a separate simultaneous task.) Nor did Fokine allow any one group of dancers the whole of any movement in the music. He subdivided the movements into phrases. He really divided his ballet into choirs, just as Richard Strauss and Reger subdivided the orchestra, in which, in the time of Bellini and Donizetti, large bodies of the strings used to play in unison. Then each choir was given certain phrases to interpret, some in the background, some in the foreground, until the polyphony of the music was perfectly synchronized with the action of the ballet. Many of the ideas for Fokine’s ballets were derived from pictures. It is possible to see at once the pictorial resemblance between The Legend of Joseph and Veronese’s The Marriage at Cana, or between Midas and Mantegna’s Parnasse in the Louvre. But Fokine also learned how to control movement, and how to preserve balance from pictures. In the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice there is a room devoted to large paintings by Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio, depicting events in Venetian history. In one of them is a procession, and a study of the different groups of marchers and bystanders will give you an excellent idea of the effective and pictorial intricacy of a Fokine ballet. In The Legend of Joseph Fokine attains one of his most thrilling effects in the last scene, where the handmaidens of the refused Potiphar’s wife, clad in black gauze, with bare arms and legs, wave their arms in a frenzy of hysterical disdain at the offending Joseph. Shortly after seeing the ballet, in walking through the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum, I came across an Egyptian fresco which almost seemed to me at first, in the exact spirit in which Fokine had caught its feeling, to be a photograph of the action I had seen on the stage.
Russians are natural dancers. It is said that only Russians and Poles can learn to do the mazurka properly, in which the women engage in that peculiar gliding step which someone characterized as the definite expression of Meredith’s phrase, “gliding women.” So, under the guidance of Fokine, with the inspiration which such music and color as are provided for them can give, the Russians engaged in the carrying out of these ballets easily rise to an unattainable (for other dancers) height of seeming spontaneity. They have that “like-to-do-it” and creative (as opposed to reproductive) air which every stage director knows is almost impossible to instill into a large company with any hope that it will be retained after the first performance. But the Russians never lose it. A ballet, given so often as Sheherazade, during a period extending over many seasons, always seems freshly produced. There are no slovenly details. The wild orgy of the Polovtsian dances of Prince Igor is invariably exposed with a feeling on the part of the spectator that he is witnessing the intense enjoyment of the participants.
Another important point is the variety in the ballets, a variety which covers not only subject and music, but also treatment in decoration and staging, so that such an ultra-modern work as The Sacrifice to the Spring, staged by Nijinsky in an attempt to emulate the style of the futurists in painting, with music by Strawinsky, who might be called a master of dissonance, and with decorations in hard and primitive colors by Roerich, finds itself naturally side by side with the charming and poetic Sylphides, gracefully staged by Fokine, with music by Chopin (orchestrated), and with decorations in pale green and white by Bakst. Of course, some ballets, because of their fables, or the nature of their music, naturally resemble one another. Sheherazade, Cléopâtre, and Thamar all have certain points in common; so have Les Sylphides, Carnaval, and Papillons. There is a resemblance between Daphnis et Chloë, Narcisse, and l’Après-midi d’un Faune. But it is easy to vary these likenesses by not putting them into juxtaposition, by mingling them with the bizarre Petrouchka, the barbaric Polovtsian dances from Prince Igor, the idealistic Spectre de la Rose, with Weber’s Invitation to the Dance as its accompaniment, the gorgeous and pompous Legend of Joseph, the frivolous Midas, the exotic Le Dieu Bleu, or the pageantry of the dances from Rimsky-Korsakow’s Sadko.
It is impossible, of course, to ignore the genius and virtuosity of individual interpretation entirely in a study of the Russian Ballet, minimize as one may its importance. There have been very many pages written in an attempt to capture the charm and genius of Nijinsky on paper. He has been described variously as “half-human, half-god,” as a tongue of flame, and as a jet of water spurting from a fountain. The word “youth” expresses something of the wonder of this marvelous boy. He never seems to be doing anything difficult, and yet his command of technique is incredible. He always seems spontaneous, and yet I have been told that, like Olive Fremstad, he does not make the slightest movement of a finger which has not been carefully thought out. He seems to me to be the greatest of stage artists (and I include all concert musicians as well as opera singers and actors in this sweeping statement). I mean by this that he communicates more of beauty and emotion to me as a spectator than other interpretative artists do. All impressions of this sort are necessarily personal, but they do not for that reason lack value. It is essential, however, to see Nijinsky in a variety of parts to get his true measure. As the lover of the sylphs in Les Sylphides he is a pale efféminé, a Chopiniac, a charming Aubrey Beardsley drawing, a lovely thing in line, and grace, and sentiment. In Petrouchka he is a puppet, and—remarkable touch—a puppet with a soul. His performance in this ballet (the characters are marionettes, but the story is something like that of Pagliacci) is, perhaps, his most wonderful achievement. He suggests only the puppet in action; his facial expression never changes; yet the pathos is greater, more keenly carried over the footlights, than one would imagine possible under any conditions. I have seen Fokine in the same rôle, and although he gives you all the gestures, the result is not the same. It is genius that Nijinsky puts into his interpretation of the part. Who can ever forget Nijinsky as Petrouchka when thrown by his master into his queer black box, mad with love for the dancer, who, in turn, prefers the Moor puppet, rushing about waving his pathetically stiff arms in the air, and finally beating his way with his clenched fists through the paper window and cursing the stars? It is a more poignant expression of grief than most Romeos can give us. Jeux shows us the love games of a trio (two women and a man) searching for a tennis ball in a garden at twilight. It recalls itself to me chiefly for the glissando (the music is by Debussy) with which the ballet begins as the tennis ball bounces across the stage, followed by Nijinsky, who bounds across the broad stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in two leaps. These leaps are triumphs of dexterity, grace of motion, and thrill, and he does not waste them. They have given rise to the rumor that Nijinsky’s element is the air. In l’Après-midi d’un Faune he makes only one of these quick movements, but with such astonishing effect that on one occasion (it was the third time I had seen this stage arrangement of Debussy’s prelude to Mallarmé’s poem) my companion, a well-known dramatic critic who sits stolidly through performances by all the great tragedians, burst into tears. In Sheherazade, as the black slave of the harem who dominates the story of the ballet, Nijinsky utilizes his leap to dominate the bacchanale, which is the climax of that piece of sensual excitement. As the crowd of women, wives of the sultan, and black slaves, drunk with wine and lust, enter into the wildest dance, the negro in silver trousers in the centre of the stage leaps higher and higher straight into the air above the heads of his companions.... The descent, with the indescribable curve of the legs, is something to be seen. In Carnaval, Nijinsky enacts the Harlequin with great roguishness and impertinence. To the piece called Reconaissance he dances with Karsavina, as Colombine, the most entrancing of polkas. His dancing of the piece called Paganini, however, is most memorable. At that point where the dominant seventh on E flat emerges through a deft use of the pedal, he represents the effect to perfection by suddenly sitting down, as a writer on the “London Times” once noted. It is not, as a matter of fact, as a mere dancer that Nijinsky excels, although he does excel even there, but it is in the poetic interpretation of his rôle, the genius in his playing, that he expresses so much more than his nearest rival. He is incomparable as a dancer, as you may very well see in works like Carnaval and Les Sylphides, in which dancing dominates the action; but even in these ballets he never loses sight of characterization, and the shaded values of ensemble.
Tamara Karsavina is a very beautiful woman, although her beauty has not the subtle quality of the more gifted Anna Pavlowa. She is an artist and a fine dancer, a mime of great talent. She fits more perfectly into an ensemble scheme than Pavlowa, who was once a member of this organization herself. She is delicate and flower-like and she suggests vice with a great degree of verisimilitude. Her Salome, with the painted roses on her nude knees and breasts, is a fragile bit of decadence. As the temptress Queen of The Golden Cock she suggests the strange perverted power of a Kundry, an Astarte, or a Loreley. In The Legend of Joseph it is her duty to sit at a table without changing her expression throughout almost an entire act. It is a difficult task; one must perceive the depths of the woman’s boredom, which does not express itself even in impatience, and she must dominate the scene. She accomplishes her tasks beautifully, as she does also the long walk across the stage in stilted Venetian shoes at the close of the scene. In Petrouchka she is a fitting companion to Nijinsky, and her little dance with the cornet is a delicious and entrancing moment; her Chloë is exquisite, soft, Greek, and girlish, and in Ravel’s ballet and in Florent Schmitt’s Salome she dances on her toes in bare feet (remember that half the so-called “toe-dancers” resort to padded and reinforced slippers for their power). I never lack enthusiasm for Karsavina; but I cannot place her near Nijinsky.
The crescendo of eulogy with which these notes progress seems unavoidable. If one is in sympathy with the aims of this group of artists (Gordon Craig is not, I believe), one must recognize the success with which they have carried them out. Naturally, there are flaws. Doboujinsky’s costumes for Midas are certainly very hard in color; Steinberg’s music for the same ballet, a series of futile brass blares; the story itself (Bakst should confine himself to painting), a bore. Miassine is scarcely the dancer one would have chosen for so important a rôle as Joseph, which, on the other hand, he is suited to physically. Karsavina’s portrayal of the ultimate emotions of Potiphar’s wife is a little unconvincing. I do not even admire Bakst’s setting for his very lovely costumes in l’Après-midi d’un Faune. But these are very small insects in the amber of enjoyment.
November, 1915.