Madame Karsavina, the première danseuse of the Diaghilew company, is in every way a fit colleague for the incomparable Nijinsky. Although still quite young, she is fast making for herself a reputation that will probably be second to none in the Russian ballet. Last year the retirement of Mademoiselle Preobrajenskaya from regular work and the withdrawal of Madame Pavlova left her an arduous task to fulfil in St Petersburg. In order to fill the gaps that she alone was capable of filling, she was obliged to study new parts which the retired dancers had made peculiarly their own—an undertaking of considerable delicacy. But her genius enabled her to draw even from the most exacting critics that quiet smile of inward appreciation which she has acutely declared to be the highest tribute to the artist. She is hard-working, very ambitious, and takes her art very seriously in all its branches.
Of her performances at Covent Garden, all were marked by such rare technique and instructed grace that it is difficult to put any one before another; but certainly she never surpassed her achievement in Le Spectre de la Rose. Her dancing caught the very spirit of a maiden’s reverie, and nothing could have been more finely imagined than those transitions from languor into quick rushes of darting movement, which illustrate the abrupt and irrational episodes of a troubled dream. She was the very embodiment of faint desire. We felt, as it were, a breath of perfume, and were troubled in spite of ourselves. Moreover, the long partnership between the two performers seemed to have resulted in a very special and intimate harmony. For the most part they simply floated about the stage as though borne upon a common current of emotion. There was a marriage, not only between their bodily movements, but between their spirits, such as I have never noted in the union of any other dancers. In Scheherazade Madame Karsavina proved herself to be the possessor of a dramatic sense which the other ballets had not sufficiently displayed. As the faithless Zobeide, she mimed with astonishing subtlety an inward conflict of warring emotions, fear mingling with desire, rapture giving place to despair. Her gestures were charged with the same passionate significance as those of Ida Rubinstein and Astafieva.
ANNA PAVLOVA
Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd.
Both her miming and her dancing were characterised by a certain natural softness of movement, the quality of languor rather than of passion, which was nevertheless consistent with the greatest firmness of outline.
While in Paris, Madame Karsavina sketched a comparison of the French and Russian ballets, which indicates her own conception of the art: “Our school is the same. We derive equal inspiration from the great traditions of the dance, bequeathed by Auguste Vestris and Jean-Georges Noverre. Only the French ballet has rested in these traditions, without troubling to renew them. The academic style of the French dancers is the same as that of a century ago. After having carefully studied these traditions and profited by them, we have sought something more. We have wished to present faithful images of the life round about us. Our epoch is finer, depend upon it, than any other. Human emotions have been refined or transformed. The spectacles of former times no longer move us very deeply. I have been to see Coppelia at the Opera. It is good, very good. But Coppelia is quite démodé. Really it is possible to imagine choregraphic arrangements more modern, more closely in touch with life—this fine and various and over-brimming life of to-day.”
When Madame Anna Pavlova was leaving Russia, she parted with an old general, who was saying good-bye to her, with the farewell wish, “May all that is best be yours!” To this he replied, “How can the best be ours when you are depriving us of the very best we had?” Not every member of the Imperial ballet has yet visited Paris and London, and therefore it is difficult for those who have never been to Russia to speak in terms of comparison, but we are willing to believe in the justice of the general’s appraisement.
Madame Pavlova received her training at the Imperial Ballet School at St Petersburg. She speedily passed upwards through the various ranks of the ballet, until she became prima ballerina at the Marianski Theatre. She made her début on the foreign stage at Munich, and subsequently appeared in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and New York. When she came to London in 1910 she immediately had the town at her feet. London was at a disadvantage, however, compared with New York, for whereas in America she performed in the ballet, at the Palace Theatre in London she appeared exclusively in solo dances, or with her partner, Mikail Mordkin. The British amateur of the dance, therefore, has seen but a part of her genius, for that pure mimesis, in which she excels no less than in the actual dancing itself, requires for its full scope the interaction of characters which belongs to the ballet proper. She herself told me that she preferred playing in the ballet to dancing alone, but it is difficult to believe that her personality could find fuller expression than in the single dances in which she has the whole stage to herself. Moreover, when in England she was deprived of the splendid setting of the Russian décor, the backcloth at the Palace Theatre being a rather distracting and futile example of the British scene-painter’s art.