TAMAR KARSAVINA
IN Shehérazade
Photograph: Bert, Paris
a youthful spirit. Nor would we have it otherwise. We will leave the rest to time. The years will deepen and dignify his art. If he is too happy to enter into certain phases of the spirit we will gladly bear with his shortcomings. We are content to take him as he is—the genial, leaping, happy dionysiac fawn!
It is interesting to record here some of his impressions and his remarks about himself.
“I love dancing to the music of Chopin,” he says, “you see we are fellow-countrymen. I am not a Russian really; my parents were Poles, and I am a Catholic and not Orthodox. I always imagine that it is only a Pole who can really interpret Chopin; we understand the melancholy of his music.”
With regard to the milieu of his performance he has said: “One thing I am determined not to do, and that is to go on the music-hall stage. I have had several tempting offers; but after all what is money? I think more of art than of money, and I refuse to be sandwiched between performing dogs and acrobats.”
Before he appeared at Covent Garden he said, “I am frightened of London. I like the town, it is so big and serious, but the thought of dancing at Covent Garden makes me feel nervous.”
After he had danced there, however, he was not nervous of criticising the Covent Garden audience. “They are not very demonstrative compared with the Parisians, but they are faithful, they seem to come again and again in great numbers. But they have a horrible habit—during the last piece on the programme there is always a constant stream of people going out. I think this is disgracefully ill-mannered, and I refuse now to dance in the last piece on the programme. I refuse to dance to an audience that is melting away—it is an insult to art. At Paris, all the times I have danced there, not a single person has stirred at a single performance until the curtain fell at the end. And here at London we end quite early—at eleven o’clock. That gives people plenty of time to get their suppers, doesn’t it? Fortunately the stage at Covent Garden is conveniently big. It has one disadvantage—it does not slope at all. It is quite flat, so that when I was dancing there at first I kept falling forwards.”