Lydia Kyasht remained at the Empire for five years. At the conclusion of her long engagement, she sailed for New York to appear as the Blue Bird in a Shubert Winter Garden show, The Whirl of the World, with Serge Litavkin as her partner; Litavkin later committed suicide in London, as the result of an unhappy love affair (not with Lydia Kyasht).
Kyasht’s American venture brought her neither fame nor glory. In the first place, a Shubert Winter Garden spectacle, in 1913, was not a setting for the classical technique of Ballet; then, for better or worse, Kyasht was stricken ill with typhoid fever, a mischance that automatically terminated her contract. But before she became ill, still on the unhappier side, was the Shubertian insistence that Kyasht should be taught and that she should perfect herself in the 1913 edition of “swing,” the “Turkey Trot.” Such was the uninformed and uncaring mind of your average Broadway manager, that he wanted to combine the delicacy of the “Turkey Trot,” of unhallowed memory, with what he elegantly characterized as “acrobatic novelties.”
But Kyasht was saved from this humiliation by the serious fever attack and returned to London, where she made her permanent home and where, for the most part, she devoted herself to teaching. As a teacher able to impart that finish and refinement that is so essential a part of a dancer’s equipment, she has had a marked success.
Today, she is, as I have said, active in the teaching of ballet department at that splendid academy, the Sadler’s Wells School, about which I shall have something to say later on.
LYDIA LOPOKOVA
The third of the Maryinsky ladies to settle in England, to whom I cannot fail to pay tribute, is Lydia Lopokova.
Lopokova is the youngest of the three, having been born in 1891. Her graduation from the Imperial School was so close to the great changes that took place in Russian ballet, that she had been at the Maryinsky Theatre only a few months when, as a pupil of Fokine, she was invited to join the Diaghileff Ballet, at that time at the height of its success in its second Paris season.
Writing of Lopokova’s early days at the Imperial School, Karsavina says in Theatre Street: “Out of the group of small pupils given now into my care was little Lopokova. The extreme emphasis she put into her movements was comic to watch in the tiny child with the face of an earnest cherub. Whether she danced or talked, her whole frame quivered with excitement; she bubbled all over. Her personality was manifest from the first, and very lovable.”
Of her arrival to join the Diaghileff Company in Paris, Karsavina says: “Young Lopokova danced this season; it was altogether her first season abroad. As she was stepping out of the railway carriage, emotion overcame her. She fainted right away on the piles of luggage. It had been her dream to be in Paris, she told the alarmed Bakst who rendered first aid; the lovely sight (of the Gare du Nord) was too much for her. A mere child, she reminded me again of the tiny earnest pupil when, in the demure costume of Sylphides, she ecstatically and swiftly ran on her toes.”
Lopokova’s rise to high position with the Diaghileff Ballet in England and Europe was rapid. But she was bored by success. There were new fields to be conquered, and off she went to New York, in the summer of 1911, to join the first “Russian Ballet” to be seen on Broadway. A commercial venture hastily rushed into the ill-suited Winter Garden, with the obvious purpose of getting ahead of the impending Diaghileff invasion of America, due at a later date. The popular American vaudeville performer, Gertrude Hoffman, temporarily turned manager, sparked this “Saison de Ballets Russes.”