Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

CHAPTER IX
THE IMPERIAL RUSSIAN BALLET

IT is now time to pick up the thread of the story of the ballet.

We have seen how a new spirit in dancing came from the West; for the new spirit in ballet we must look to the East.[2] Many strange and fine things of the spiritual order have come out of Russia in these latter times. Our music, our literature, our art, have been profoundly affected by the spirit of that people which appears to have all the unfathomable reservoirs of barbaric life to draw upon. But perhaps there has come to us nothing so supremely excellent, so unsurpassably beautiful, as Russian dancing.

As with all other peoples who still preserve the traditions of the elder generations, with the Russians dancing is a natural act. The peasants learn the graceful national dances, which vary from province to province, as simply as they learn their mother tongue. In summer, on the evenings of Sundays and holidays, the gaily-decked youths and maidens collect in a field or on a bridge near the village and dance to the music of the twittering balalaika or the monotonous ululations of a cheap concertina. Unfortunately in Russia, as everywhere else, the old order is giving place to the new, and for the immemorial national dances are being substituted foreign quadrilles and lancers. But though the character of the dance changes, the passion and the natural aptitude for it remain. In the People’s Palace at St Petersburg the young men and girls from the factories may be seen dancing the intricate measures of the mazurka with an ease and abandon which some of the trained dancers of Western Europe might envy.

To this native spirit, however, the ballet owes little or nothing. Doubtless it has in a manner fertilised the soil, created a public interested in the dance and, if heredity counts for anything, provided a raw material ready for the ballet-master to mould to his will. But the ballet, as I have said before, is in its origin aristocratic, and nowhere more so than in Russia. The Russian ballet is entirely the product of the Court. It was of course originally a foreign importation. The first ballet was presented in 1675, before the Tsar Alexis, the second of the Romanovs. Peter the Great, in his efforts to westernise Russia, introduced the Western modes of dancing, and, as he was his own shipwright, so he was his own dancing-master. He sets about teaching his Court, and himself made such “caprioles,” says Bergholz, that any dancing-master might envy him.

But the institution of the ballet in Russia was due to the Empress Anne. In 1735 she appointed the Neapolitan composer Francesca Areja to compose the music and conduct the orchestra, and a Frenchman, Landé, to act as ballet-master. She commanded an Italian intermedio with a ballet to be played before her once a week. At first, as there were yet no professional dancers, the young noblemen of the military cadet schools were instructed in the dance. Gradually they were superseded by a specially trained corps. Landé collected a number of boys and girls of the poorer classes and trained them free of charge. So delighted was the Empress with their performance that she undertook to defray all the expenses of their education out of the Imperial exchequer. Landé received a fee for teaching them, rooms were provided for them in one of the palaces, and we learn that the children were entrusted to the care of a widow of one of the Court coachmen. Such were the modest beginnings of the famous Dramatic School of St Petersburg.

Catherine II. followed in the footsteps of her predecessor. In her reign the services of the cadets were no longer required. To her initiative was due the erection of the Grand Theatre, which is now supplanted by the famous Marianski Theatre. She organised the theatre and brought it into relation with the bureaucratic regime, appointing a director, with two committees under his control, one in Moscow and one in St Petersburg, to superintend theatrical spectacles.

Didelot, who was called to St Petersburg in 1802, raised the ballet to a level of excellence which was not surpassed even in Milan. As a ballet-master he was a martinet, almost a fanatic in his passion for his art. Under him the ballet took that prominent place in Russian life which it has never since lost. He regarded plastique and mime as even more important features in the ballet than dancing itself. He insisted that there was no limit to what the ballet could express, and to prove his case staged Racine’s tragedy, Phèdre, in ballet form with considerable success. So great became the popularity of the ballet that even when opera came into fashion it was the custom for the corps de ballet to repeat in dumb show during the entr’actes the foregoing act of the opera.