UP to now I have dealt with those artists of the dance whose forms of dance expression were either modern, free, or exotic. All had been, at one time or another, under my management. The rest of this candid avowal will be devoted to that form of theatrical dance known as ballet. Since I regard ballet as the most satisfactory and satisfying form of civilized entertainment, ballet will occupy the major portion of the book. Nearly two full decades of my career as impresario have been devoted to it.
For a long time I have been alternately irritated and bored by an almost endless stream of gossip about ballet, and by that outpouring of frequently cheap and sometimes incredible nonsense that has been published about ballet and its artists. Surprisingly, perhaps, comparatively little of this has come from press agents; the press agents have, in the main—exceptions only going to prove the rule, in this case—been ladies and gentlemen of taste and discretion, and they have publicized ballet legitimately as the great art it is, and, at the same time, have given of their talents to help make it the highly popular art it is.
But there has been a plethora of tripe in the public prints about ballet, supplied by hacks, blind hero-worshippers, self-abasing sycophants, and producers. The last are quite as vocal as any of the others. They are not, of course, “producers.” They call themselves either “managers” or “managing-directors.” I shall have something to say, later on, about this phase of their work. They talk, give interviews, often of quite incredible stupidity; and, instead of being managers, are masters of mismanagement. All are, in one degree or another, would-be Diaghileffs. They all suffer from a serious disease: a sort of chronic Diaghileffitis, which is spasmodically acute. If anything I can say or point out in this book can help, as it were, to add a third dimension to the rather flat pictures of ballet companies and ballet personalities, creative, interpretive, executive, that have been offered to the public, I shall be glad. For ballet is a great art, and my last thought would be to wish to denigrate, debunk, or disparage any one.
While “the whole truth” cannot always be told for reasons that should be obvious, I shall try to tell “nothing but the truth.”
The ballet we have today, however far afield it may wander in its experimentation, in its “novelties,” stems from a profoundly classical base. That base, emerging from Italy and France, found its full flowering in the Imperial Theatres of Russia.
I cannot go on with my story of my experiences with ballet on the American continent without paying a passing tribute to the Ladies of the Maryinsky (and some of the Gentlemen, as well), who exemplified the Russian School of Ballet at its best; many of them are carrying on in their own schools, and passing on their great knowledge to the youth of the second half of the twentieth century, in whose hands the future of ballet lies.
I should like to do honor to many ladies of the Maryinsky. To do so would mean an overly long list of names, many of which would mean little to a generation whose knowledge of dancers does not go back much further than Danilova. It would mean a considerable portion of the graduating classes of the Russian Imperial School of the Ballet: that School, dating from 1738, whose code was monastic, whose discipline was strict, whose training the finest imaginable. Through this school and from it came the ladies and gentlemen of the Maryinsky, those figures that gave ballet its finest flowering on the stages of the Maryinsky Theatre in Petrograd and the Grand Theatre in Moscow.
Anna Pavlova, Mathilde Kchessinska, Olga Preobrajenska, Lubov Egorova, Tamara Karsavina, Lydia Kyasht, Lydia Lopokova. There were men, too: Michel Fokine, Mikhail Mordkin, Vaslav Nijinsky, Adolph Bolm, Theodore Kosloff, Alexandre Volinine, Laurent Novikoff. The catalogue would be too long, if continued. No slight is intended. The turn of the century, or thereabouts, saw most of the above named in the full flush of their performing abilities.
What has become of them? Six of the seven ladies are still very much alive, each making a valued contribution to ballet today. The mortality rate among the men has been heavier; only three of the seven men are now alive; yet these three are actively engaged in that most necessary and fundamental department of ballet: teaching.