MIKAIL MORDKIN
IN The Arrow Dance
Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.
A comparison of the art of Mordkin and Nijinsky would be almost irrelevant. Their style differs just in the same degree as their physique. If Nijinsky is the winged Mercury of the dance, Mordkin is the Apollo. Nijinsky’s is the dancing of motion, Mordkin’s of repose; the temper of the one is volatile, of the other equable and restrained; wit, gaiety, elegance, ebullience of youthful spirits, are the characteristics of the younger dancer; dignity, power, and a slumbering passion, of the elder. The hint of Puck-like fancy is entirely absent in Mordkin’s performances; his dramatic qualities are less elastic than Nijinsky’s, his personality less various, more rigidly settled in a definite mould.
While other Russian dancers pass with meteoric flight across the English stage, Madame Lydia Kyasht burns like a fixed star of all but the first magnitude. Discerning critics observed her with pleasure behind the footlights of the Empire Theatre for the first time one autumn evening in 1908. She had been summoned from Russia to dance in London for four weeks,—she has been dancing there for three years and her engagement has still two more to run. Her position as première danseuse in an English ballet has both its advantages and its dangers. Appearing in a ballet that is really very little more than a ballet of amateurs, she achieves without great difficulty the effect desired I suppose by every ballet-dancer,—that of a visitant from some more gracious and ethereal sphere. She trips where her companions tramp. She alone has wings. Yet, although her art profits by the contrast, it suffers from the isolation. It is difficult for her to keep it keyed to its highest pitch when she is deprived of the stimulus of criticism and emulation. Moreover, as there is no competent master of the ballet to compose for her, she is compelled to be her own choregrapher, and the work of composition demands a different order of intelligence from that of the executant. Yet in spite of these unfavourable conditions, the character of her dancing remains remarkably pure. If it lacks the dazzling executive brilliance of her former fellow-pupils, Pavlova and Karsavina, it is marked by a certain statuesque dignity which is somewhat notable in a ballerina. Even a great dancer may have arresting attitudes but fail to connect them. Lydia Kyasht passes from attitude to attitude in a single continuous sequence of admirable poses which flow one into another without a pause and without a flaw. Her purity of line is never broken by one of those inartistic feats of athletic dexterity which sometimes disfigure the dancing of Adeline Genée. She invariably resists the besetting temptation of a clever dancer to let accomplishment trespass upon grace. Unfortunately the good fairy who has endowed her with so many gifts appears to have withheld the greatest of them all—imagination. Finish and refinement can never make amends for the absence of mood. At times her dancing leaves us so cold that we are persuaded that she is dancing with her head but not with her heart.
It is worth while remarking that when any Russian dancer appears in England or America, she is almost invariably described as the “première danseuse of the Russian Imperial Ballet.” This denomination is vague, and usually inaccurate. Theoretically there can be only two ballerine assolute in all the Russias—one in St Petersburg and one in Moscow. As a matter of fact, in St Petersburg at the present moment both Kschesinskaya and Preobrajenskaya hold this rank, although of the two, the former is granted precedence. The latter has now nominally retired, but she continues to make six or eight appearances every season. Madame Kschesinskaya has never performed in England. She once visited London privately, but when she found that an engagement there would necessitate appearing nightly, she declared that such a task was “blood-drying work,” and fled incontinently to Russia. In the Russian capital she herself chooses the occasions when she deigns to appear. The ballerina assoluta of Moscow is Mademoiselle Catrina Geltzer, who has recently appeared at the Alhambra. Madame Pavlova belongs to the grade known as ballerina, or première danseuse, the next below that of ballerina assoluta. She is marked out to succeed to the place vacated by Madame Preobrajenskaya in the supreme rank in the hierarchy. Madame Karsavina and Mademoiselle Balashova are at present equal in degree to Madame Pavlova. Madame Lydia Kyasht is in Russia still only première sujet.
LYDIA KYASHT