Ballet was at a cross-road. I was at a cross-road in my career in ballet. It was at this indecisive point there emerged a new light on the balletic horizon. It called itself Ballet Theatre. It interested me very much.
[10.] The Best of Plans ... Ballet Theatre
DURING the very late ’thirties, Mikhail Mordkin had had a ballet company, giving sporadic performances on Sunday nights, occasionally on week-day evenings, and, now and then, some out-of-town performances. It was a small company, largely made up of Mordkin’s pupils, of which one, Lucia Chase, was prima ballerina. Miss Chase was seen in, among other parts, the title role of Giselle, in which she was later replaced by Patricia Bowman.
This little company is credited with having given the first performance on this continent of the full-length Tchaikowsky Sleeping Beauty. In order that the record may be quite clear on this point, the production was not that of the Petipa masterpiece, but rather Mordkin’s own version. It was presented at Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1937. Waterbury is the home town of Lucia Chase. Lucia Chase was the Princess Aurora of the production. So far as the records reveal, there was a single performance.
The season of 1938-1939 was the Mordkin company’s last. It was, as a company, foredoomed to failure from the very start, in my opinion. Its repertoire was meagre, unbalanced; it had no dancers who were known; it lacked someone of ballerina stature.
Towards the end of the company’s existence, Mordkin had an associate, Richard Pleasant, whose interest in ballet had, in earlier days, caused him to act as a supernumerary in de Basil company productions, and who had an idea: an idea that has lurked in the minds of a number of young men I know, to wit: to form a ballet company. It is one thing to want to form a ballet company, another to do it. In addition to having the idea, one must have money—and a great deal of it.
In this case, idea and money came together simultaneously, for the Mordkin school and company had Lucia Chase, with ambitions and interest as well. Lucia Chase had money—a great deal of it—and she wanted to dance. She had substantially financed the Mordkin company. Pleasant went ahead with his plan for a grandiose organization—with his ideas and Chase’s money. The Mordkin company was closed up; and a new company, on a magnificent scale, calling itself Ballet Theatre, was formed.
The Mordkin venture had been too small, too limited in its scope, too reactionary in thought, so Mordkin himself was pushed into the background, soon to be ousted altogether, and the tremendous undertaking went forward on a scale the like of which this country had never seen. In a Utopia such a pretentious scheme would have a permanent place in the cultural pattern, for the company’s avowed policy, at the outset, was to act as a repository for genuine masterpieces of all periods and styles of the dance; it would be to the dance what a great museum is to the arts of sculpture and painting. The classical, the romantic, the modern, all would find a home in the new organization. The company was to be so organized that it could compete with the world’s best. It should be large. It should have ample backing.
The company’s debut at the Center Theatre, in New York’s Rockefeller Center, on 11th January, 1940, was preceded by a ballyhoo of circus proportions. The rehearsal period preceding this date was long and arduous. The company’s slogans included one announcing that the works were “staged by the greatest collaboration in ballet history.” It was a “super” organization—imposing, diverse and diffuse. But it was a big idea, albeit an impractical one. Its impracticability, however, did not lessen the impact of its initial impression. More than thirteen years have elapsed since Ballet Theatre made its bow, and one can hardly regard its initial roster of contributors even now without an astonished blink of the eyes. There were twenty principal dancers, fifteen soloists, a corps de ballet of fifty-six. In addition, there was a Negro group numbering fourteen. There was an additional Spanish group of nineteen. The choreographers numbered eleven; an equal number of scene and costume designers; three orchestra conductors. Eighteen composers, living and dead, contributed to the initial repertoire of as many works.