Even with the beginning of the nineteenth century the Russian ballet begins a course entirely different from that which the schools of Western Europe were preaching and teaching. Though the ballet-masters and instructors are foreigners, yet they are actuated by outward circumstances to apply their academic theories to the conditions of a different school. With the advent of a national school of music and drama, at the head of which stood Balakireff, Borodine, Seroff, Moussorgsky, Tschaikowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff in music, and Ostrowsky, Turgenieff, Gogol and others in the drama, the Russian ballet is forced in the same channels. The Russian ballet grows gradually into a new nationalistic art, and separates itself altogether from the French-Italian aristocratic academicism. The frequent remarks of the foreign critics, suggesting that the Russian ballet was and is a direct offspring and copy of the classic French-Italian schools, are absolutely wrong. It is true that the Russians borrowed from the French the skeleton and from the Italians the mechanic contrivances, but they built up the body themselves and created something entirely different from what Western Europe knew of the ballet.
A born dancer, the Russian could never stand the prescribed poses, smiles, tears, steps and gestures, that were and are still practised outside. He is ready to undergo the most strenuous training, and follows microscopically the instructions of the teachers, in order to acquire the necessary technique; but when it comes to a performance, he will put his spontaneous ideas and impulses above the technique and act according to his emotions and inspiration. This is a peculiarity of the Russian. He is and remains an individual. No school can put him on the same level with his fellow-students. Is not Pavlova quite different from Fokina or Karsavina?
No other nation cares so much for racial beauty as the Russian. And in this it is essentially democratic. All Russian art is based on the peasant, and not on aristocratic ideals. It expresses this by being simple, direct, spontaneous and rugged. The greatest factor in separating the Russian ballet from the western, is the Russian folk-dance. It owes everything to folk-art. No outside influence has ever been able to change the Russian æsthetic taste. In art, particularly in the ballet, the peasant ideals force themselves upon all aristocratic and bureaucratic classes. Already as a youth he sucks from the atmosphere the innumerable forms of dance expression. In his blood lives unconsciously the whole choreographic code, as his ancestors have known and practised it for centuries. The design of a peasant is the æsthetic scale of a Russian artist, particularly of a dancer. Aristocratic ideals never amounted to anything in Russia. The fact is, the nobleman follows in matters of æsthetic taste the moujik, but never vice versa. The benefit of this has been that neither the court nor foreign academicism could influence the Russian art of dancing.
Besides the racial motives, the question of scientific education has been a hobby with the Russian art pedagogues since the early part of the last century. The Russians are almost fanatic in this respect and have specialized their educational institutions to such a degree that they stand unique. The method of training the dancers in other countries was centred mainly in training the step technique and was, so to speak, purely choreographic. The Russians took into consideration all the arts that are related to dancing, and made a rule that all pupils in the dancing schools should have at least an elementary training in human anatomy, in sculpture, drama, architecture, painting, music and in general educational subjects. To know every branch of art correspondingly well—this made it necessary that children be educated in an institute from their childhood on. Thus the education for the Russian ballet is given in the two Imperial Ballet Schools, one in Petrograd, the other in Moscow, both being connected with the dramatic departments in which children are trained for the stage. The course in the school lasts eight years, with an extra one or two years’ post-graduate practice at some opera stage, after which a graduate receives his ‘Free Artist’ degree which places him on an equal rank with the graduates of a college, university or musical conservatory.
Marius Petipa, the director and leading spirit of the Petrograd ballet school, has, upon one occasion, said to the writer: ‘We employ the French, the Italian, the Danish and the Russian instructors in order to give the best of every school and style to our pupils. We teach things that no other school would teach. For instance, our pupils must know psychology, which is supposed to be unnecessary for a dancer. But I say, no. How can a girl personify the Snow Maiden when she does not know the psychology of a fairy? It’s ridiculous, you might think, as fairies are only legendary figures. But the very fact that they are imaginary makes it necessary for a girl to know how to avoid showing any human characteristics.
‘The foreign schools do not care in what steps a dancer should express such subtle emotions as jealousy, longing, bliss and sorrow. Abroad they prescribe pirouettes for joy and happiness. They prescribe acting in this, dancing in that phrase. It is not so with us. We teach the pupil to see the various human emotions in historic sculpture and painting. We show them the attitudes of various celebrated actresses in this or that emotion. Then, we go back to psychology and leave it to the artist to formulate the position that he would occupy in various emotions. So you see psychology is very important to a dancer.
‘Dancing is the cream of architecture and sculpture. We teach our future dancers to know the difference between architecture and sculpture and then between a dance and a dramatic pose, which are just as different as opera singing and concert singing. All our graduates must be accomplished dancers, actors, acrobats, architects and designers. We teach the difference between a Gothic and Byzantine line, a Moorish and Romanesque design. We have to analyze music and sculpture to their elementary parts in order to be able to show the manifold manifestations of the human soul, and the manifold forms of beauty. It is in this way that a dancer comes to know which step or gesture corresponds to the emotions of a Romanesque Italian, Gothic German or Byzantine Russian.
‘I have been assailed by our critics and composers as being too strict in demanding technique from our dancers. But tell me, please, can any talent make a man an artist without technical ability, where mathematical laws are required as in dancing and in music? Can there ever be a Rubinstein, Paderewski or Kubelik without the acquired harmonic and melodic skill on the instrument which I call technique? Just as little chance has a man of being a great dancer if he does not possess the ability to control his body, though he be the greatest choreographic genius in the world. Art is technique plus talent. No great artist in dancing was ever produced without technique.
‘Do you know what Lubke said in his immortal History of Sculpture, that applies also to a dancer? I am telling all my pupils when they leave the institution that, like sculptor in the clay, a dancer in himself must seek the “Image of God,” the spark of divine life. When he fails to find this in separate lines, poses, gestures, attitudes and mimic expressions, he must search for it in the whole, and, by thoughtful study and thinking, he will certainly attain the reflex of immortal beauty—the image of deity. This I call artistic creation. In sculpture as in dancing the divine and heroic are the aims of the artistic achievements. Without this striving after the divine spark nothing is produced but lifeless figures and dead forms. A dancer, like any other artist, should aspire after spirit-breathing beauty.’
