A QUARTET OF IMPERIALISTS
There is left for consideration a Russian male quartet, three of them still living, who, in one degree or another, have made contributions to ballet in our time, either in the United States or Europe. Their contributions vary in quality and degree, exactly as the four gentlemen differ in temperament and approach. I shall first deal briefly with the three living members of the quartet, two of whom are American citizens of long standing.
THEODORE KOSLOFF
I commence with one whose contributions to ballet have been the least. I mention him at all only because, historically speaking, he has been identified with dance in America a long time. With perhaps a single notable exception, Theodore Kosloff’s contributions in all forms have been slight.
The best has been through teaching, for it is as a teacher that he is likely to be remembered longest. Spectacular in his teaching methods as he is in person, it has been from his school that has come a substantial number of artists of the dance who have made a distinctive place for themselves in the dance world of America.
Outstanding among these are Agnes de Mille, who has made an ineradicable mark with her highly personal choreographic style, and Nana Gollner, American ballerina of fine if somewhat uncontrolled talents, the latter having received almost all her training at Kosloff’s hands and cane.
Theodore Kosloff was born in 1883. A pupil of the Moscow rather than the Petersburg school, he eventually became a minor soloist at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, appearing in, among others, The Sleeping Beauty and Daughter of Pharaoh. When Diaghileff recruited his company, Kosloff and his wife, Maria Baldina, were among the Muscovites engaged. Kosloff was little more than a corps de ballet member with Diaghileff, with an occasional small solo. But he had a roving and retentive eye.
When Gertrude Hoffman and Morris Gest decided to jump the Russian Ballet gun on Broadway, and to present their Saison de Ballets Russes at the Winter Garden in advance of Diaghileff’s first American visit, it was Theodore Kosloff who restaged the Fokine works for Hoffman, without so much as tilt of the hat or a by-your-leave either to the creator or the owner.
Remaining in the States after the demise of the venture, Kosloff for a time appeared in vaudeville with his wife, Baldina, and his younger brother, Alexis, also a product of the Moscow School. One of these tours took them to California, where Theodore settled in Hollywood. Here, almost simultaneously, he opened his school and associated himself with Cecil B. de Mille as an actor in silent film “epics.” He was equally successful at both.
Kosloff’s purely balletic activities thereafter included numerous movie-house “presentations”—the unlamented spectacles that preceded the feature film in the silent picture days, in palaces like Grauman’s Egyptian and Grauman’s Chinese; a brief term as ballet-master of the San Francisco Opera Ballet; and colossal and pepped-up versions of Petroushka and Schéhérazade, the former in Los Angeles, the latter at the Hollywood Bowl.