Chapter III: Part 3

Argentinita was born of Spanish parents in Buenos Aires, in 1898, and taken back to Spain by them when she was four years old. At that early age she commenced her training in the Spanish dance in all its varied forms and styles, for she was equally at home in the Spanish Classic dance as she was in the Gypsy or Flamenco dances. Those who saw the poem she could make from _las Soleares_ of Andulasia, the basic rhythm of all Spanish gypsy dances, know how she gave them the magic of a magic land; or the gay _Alegrias_, performed in the sinuous manner, rich with contrasts of slow, soft, and energetic movements, with the characteristic stamping, stomping, sole-tapping, clapping, and finger-snapping. It was in the _Alegrias_ that Argentinita let her fancy roam with the slow tempo of the music. The European dance analysts had noted that here, as also at other times and places, Argentinita danced to please herself. When the tempo quickened, her mood changed to one of gaiety and abandon.

It is a difficult matter for me to pin down my memories of this splendid artist and her work: _las Sevillianas_, the national dance of Seville, danced by all classes and conditions of people, the Queen of Flamenco dances; or the _Bulerias_, the most typical of all gypsy dances, light and gay, the dance of the fiesta.

Argentinita was not only a dancer. She was an actress of the first order. She had been a member of Martinez Sierra’s interesting and vital creative theatre in Madrid. She sang _Chansons Populaires_ in a curiously throaty, plaintive little voice that could, nevertheless, fill the largest theatre, despite the cameo-like quality of her art, fill even the Metropolitan Opera House, with the sound, the color, the atmosphere of Spain.

Dancer of Spain that she was, her repertoire was not by any means confined to the dance and music and life of the peoples of the Iberian peninsula. She traveled far afield for her material, through the towns and villages of South and Central America. Yet she was no mere copyist. Works and ideas she found were transmuted into terms of the theatre by means of a subtle alchemy. She had a deep knowledge of the entire Spanish dance tradition, and knew it all, understood its wide historical and regional changes. In her regional works, from Spanish folk to the heart of the Andes, she kept the flavor of the original, but personalized the dances. About them all was a fundamental honesty; nothing was done for show. There were no heroics; no athleticism. In addition to the _Alegrias_, _Sevillianas_, _Fandangos_, _Jotas_ of Spain, the folk dances and folk songs of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and the remote places of Latin America and of its Indian villages were hers. None who ever saw her do it can ever quite obliterate the memory of _El Huayno_, implicit as it was with the stark dignity and nobility of the Inca woman, and called by one critic, “the greatest dance of our generation.”

I have a particularly fond memory of _On the Route to Seville_, in which a smoothie from the city outwitted and outdid the gypsies in larceny; and also I remember fondly that nostalgic picture of the Madrid of 1900, which she called, simply enough, _In Old Madrid_.

As our association developed and continued, I was happy to be able to extend the scope of her work and bring her from the solitary and non-theatrical dance recital platform on which, one after the other, from coast to coast, her journeys were a succession of triumphs, to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Here, with her own ensemble, chief among which was her exceptionally talented sister, Pilar Lopez, I placed them as guests with one ballet company or another--with Leonide Massine in Manuel de Falla’s _The Three-Cornered Hat_ and in _Capriccio Espangnol_, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, on the choreography of which she collaborated with Massine.

In addition to these theatre adaptations of the dances of Spain, she danced in her own dances, both solo and with Pilar Lopez. She trained and developed excellent men, notably José Greco and Manolo Vargas. I am especially happy in having been instrumental in bringing to the stage two of her most interesting theatrical creations. One was the ballet she staged to de Falla’s _El Amor Brujo_, which I produced for her. The other was the Garcia Lorca _El Café de Chinitas_. Argentinita had been a devoted friend of the martyred Loyalist poet, and to bring his work to the American stage was a project close to her heart and a real labor of love. Argentinita belonged to a close little circle of scholars, poets, and composers, which included Martinez Sierra, Jacinto Benavente, and the extraordinarily brilliant, genius-touched Garcia Lorca.

The production of _El Café de Chinitas_ was made possible during a Spanish festival I gave, one spring, at the Metropolitan Opera House. For this festival I engaged José Iturbi to conduct a large orchestra composed of members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Argentinita had succeeded in interesting the Marquis de Cuevas in the project. For _El Café de Chinitas_ the Marquis commissioned settings and costumes from Salvador Dali. The result was one of the most effective and best considered works for the theatre emanating from Dali’s brush. Dali, like Argentinita, had been a friend of the martyred patriot-poet-composer. His profounder emotions touched, Dali designed as effective a setting as the Metropolitan Opera House has seen. The first of the two scenes was a tremendously high wall on which hung literally hundreds of guitars, a “graveyard of guitars,” as Dali phrased it; while the second scene, the _Café de Chinitas_ itself, revealed the heroic torso of a female dancer with her arms upstretched in what could be interpreted as an attitude of the dance, or, if one chose, as a crucifixion. From where the hands held the castanets there dripped blood, as though the hands had been pierced. In terms of symbols, this was Dali’s representation of the crucifixion of his country by hideous civil war. This was Argentinita’s last production, and one of her happiest creations.

A victim of cancer, Argentinita died in New York on 24th September, 1945. I was at the hospital at the end, together with my friend and hers, Anton Dolin. Her doctors had long prescribed complete rest for her and special care. But her life was the dance, and stop she could not. Heroically she ignored her illness. If there was one thing about her more conspicuous than another, it was her tiny, dainty, slippered feet. No longer will they dart delicately into the lovely positions on the floor.

In Argentinita there was never either bitterness or unkindness to any one. I have seen, at first hand, Argentinita’s encouragement and unstinted help to others, and to lesser dancers. The success of others, whether it was the artists in her own programmes, or elsewhere, was a joy to her; nothing but the best was good enough. Her sister, Pilar Lopez, who survives her and who today dances with great success in Europe, carrying on her sister’s work, is a magnificent dancer. When the two sisters danced together, everything that could be done to make Pilar shine more brilliantly was done; and that, too, was the work of Argentinita. Her loyalty to me was something of which I am very proud.

Above all, it was the dignity and charm of the woman that played a great part in the superb image of the artist who was known as Argentinita.

_E. A TERPSICHOREAN ANTHROPOLOGIST_

The mixture of dance and song and anthropology, with a firm accent on sex, that struck a new note in the dance theatre, hailed from Chicago. Her name is Katherine Dunham. She is a dynamo of energy; she is elusive; she is unpredictable. She is a quite superb combination of exoticism and intellectuality.

Daughter of a French-Canadian and an American Negro, Katherine was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1914. Her theatrical experience has ranged from art museums to night clubs, from Broadway to London’s West End, to the _Théâtre des Champs Elysées_ in Paris, to European triumphs. Her early life was spent and her first dancing was done in Chicago. She flashed across the American entertainment world comet-like. More recently she has confined her activities almost exclusively to England and Europe.

I had no part in her beginnings. By the time I undertook to manage her, she had assembled her own company of Negro dancers and had oscillated between the rarefied atmosphere of women’s clubs and concert halls, on the one hand, to night clubs and road houses, on the other. The atmosphere of the latter was both smoky and rowdy. Katherine Dunham, I suspect, is something of a split personality, so far as her art is concerned. Possessor of a fine mind, it would seem to have been one frequently in turmoil. On the one side, there is a keen intellectual side to it, evidenced by both a Bachelor of Philosophy and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago, two Rosenwald Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her Masters degree is in anthropology. These studies she pursued, as I have said, on the one hand. On the other, she studied and practiced the dance with an equal fierceness.

Her intellectual pursuits have been concerned, for the most part, with anthropological researches into the Negro dance. Her first choreographic venture was her collaboration with Ruth Page, in Chicago, in _La Guiablesse_, a ballet on a Martinique theme, with a score based on Martinique folk melodies by the American composer, William Grant Still, a work with an all-Negro cast, seen both at the Century of Progress Exhibition and the Chicago Opera House, in 1933. Dunham became active in the Federal Dance Theatre, and its Chicago director. It was when she was doing the dances for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union depression-time revue, _Pins and Needles_, that she tried a Sunday dance concert in New York at the Forty-eighth Street Theatre. So successful was it that it was repeated every Sunday for three months.

Turning to the theatre, she added acting and singing to dancing and choreography, both on the stage and in films, appearing as both actress and singer in _Cabin in the Sky_. She intrigued me, both by the quality of her work, her exoticism, and her loyalty to her little troupe, for the members of which she felt herself responsible. I first met her while she was appearing at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, in San Francisco. She was closing her engagement. She was down and out, trying to keep her group together. I arranged for an audition and, after seeing her with her group, undertook to see what could be done. Present with me at this audition were Agnes de Mille, then in San Francisco rehearsing with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo what was to become her first choreographic triumph, _Rodeo_, together with Alexandra Danilova and Frederick Franklin.

My idea in taking over her management was to try to help her transform her concert pieces into revue material, suitable not only to the country’s concert halls, but also to the theatre of Broadway and those road theatres that were becoming increasingly unoccupied because of the paucity of productions to keep them open. Certain purely theatrical elements were added, including some singers, one of them being a Cuban tenor; and, to supplement her native percussion players, a jazz group, recruited from veterans of the famous “Dixieland Band.”

We called the entertainment the _Tropical Revue_. The _Tropical Revue_ was an immediate success at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York and, thanks to some quick work, I was able to secure additional time at the theatre and to extend the run to six weeks. This set up some sort of record for an entertainment of the kind. As an entertainment form it rested somewhere between revue and recital. Miss Dunham herself had three outstanding numbers. These were her own impressions of what she called different “hot” styles. These were responsible for some of the heat that brought on the sizzling of the scenery to which the critics referred. The first of her numbers was _Bahiana_, a limpid and languid impression of Brazil; then _Shore Excursion_, a contrasting piece, fast, hot, tough, and Cuban. The third was _Barrelhouse_, an old stand-by of hers, straight out of Chicago’s Jungletown.

_Tropical Revue_, during its two years under my management, was in an almost perpetual state of flux. It was revised and revised, and revised again. As the tours proceeded, Dunham did less and less dancing and more and more impersonation. But while her “bumps” grew more discreet, there was no lessening of the heat. Dunham’s choreography was best in theatricalized West Indian and Latin American folk dances, some of which approached full-scale ballets. The best of these, in my opinion, was _L’Ag’ya_, a three-scened work, Martinique at core, the high light of which was the “_ag’ya_,” a kicking dance. Here she was able to put to excellent use authentic Afro-Caribbean steps, and in the overall choreographic style, I would not feel it unfair to say that Dunham’s style had been considerably influenced by the Chicago choreographer and dancer, Ruth Page, with whom Dunham had collaborated early in her career.

It did not take me long to discover the public was more interested in sizzling scenery than it was in anthropology, at least in the theatre. Since the _Tropical Revue_ was fairly highly budgeted, it was necessary for us, in order to attract the public, to emphasize sex over anthropology. Dunham, with a shrewd eye to publicity, oscillated between emphasis first on one and then on the other; her fingers were in everything. In addition to running the company, dancing, singing, revising, she lectured, carried on an unending correspondence by letter and by wire, entertained lavishly, and added considerably, I am sure, to the profits of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Columns were written about her, and fulsome essays, a good deal of which was balderdash.

The handling of this tour presented its own special set of problems. Not the least of these was the constantly recurring one of housing. We have come a long way in the United States in disposing of Jim Crow; but there is still a great deal to be done. Hotel accommodations for the artists of the _Tropical Revue_ were a continual source of worry. One Pacific Coast city was impossible. When, after days of fruitless searching, our representative thought he had been able to install them in a neighboring town, the Chinese owner of the hotel, on learning his guests were not white, canceled the reservations.

A certain midwestern city was another trouble spot, where, in one of the city’s leading hostelries, the employees threatened to strike because of the presence there of some of the principal artists. This was averted by some quick work on the part of our staff. It should be noted, too, that these unfortunate difficulties were all in cities north of what we hoped was the non-existent Mason and Dixon Line.

Miss Dunham, quite naturally, was disturbed and exercised by this discrimination. In order to avoid this kind of unpleasantness, I had tried to restrict the bookings to northern cities. However, it became necessary to play an engagement in a southern border city. The results were not happy. At the time of making the booking, I did not realize that in this border state segregation was practiced in its Municipal Auditorium.

The house was sold out on the opening night. Owing to wartime transportation difficulties, the company was late in arriving. Just before the delayed curtain’s rise, Miss Dunham requested four seats for some of her local friends. She was asked by the manager of the Auditorium if they were colored. Miss Dunham replied that they were; whereupon the manager offered to place chairs for them in the balcony, since colored persons were not permitted in the orchestra stalls. Miss Dunham protested, and objected to her friends being seated other than in the orchestra. The fact was there were no seats available in the stalls, since the house was sold out. However, had it not been for the segregation rule, four extra chairs could have been placed in the boxes.

The performance was enthusiastically received, with repeated curtain calls at its close. Miss Dunham responded with a speech. She thanked the audience for its appreciation and its warm response. Then, smarting under the accumulated pressures of discrimination throughout the tour, climaxed by the incident involving her friends, she paused, and added: “This is good-bye. I shall not appear here again until people like me can sit with people like you. Good-bye, and God bless you--and you may need it.”

While there was no overt hostile demonstration in the theatre, there were those who felt Miss Dunham’s closing words implied a threat. The press, ever alert to scent a scandal, demanded a statement about my attitude on segregation in theatres, and to know if I approved of artists under my management threatening audiences. It was one of those rare times when, for some reason, I could not be reached by telephone. Faced with the necessity of making some sort of statement, my representative issued one to the effect that Mr. Hurok deplored and was unalterably opposed to discrimination of any kind anywhere; but that, as a law-abiding citizen, however much he deplored such regulations, he was bound to conform to the laws and regulations obtaining in those communities and theatres where he was contractually obliged to have his attractions appear. But I have taken care never again to submit artists to any possible indignities, if there is any way of avoiding it.

I shall relate a last example of the sort of difficulties that arose on this tour and, to my mind, it is the most stupid of them all, if there can be said to be degrees of stupidity in such matters.

In addition to the large orchestra of conventional instruments we carried, Miss Dunham had four Guatemalan percussionists who dramatically beat out the Caribbean rhythms on a wide assortment of gourds, tam-tams, and other native drums, both with the orchestra and in several scenes on the stage.

It happened in a northern city. The head of the musicians’ union local demanded to know if there were any “niggers” in our orchestra. My representative, who feels very strongly about such matters and who resents the term used by the local union president, replied that he did not understand the question. All members of the orchestra, he said, were members of the American Federation of Musicians, and had played as a unit across the entire country, and such a question had never arisen. The local union official thereupon tersely informed him the colored players would not be permitted to play with the other musicians in the orchestra pit in that city; if they attempted to do so, he would forbid the white players to play. My representative, refusing to bow to such an ukase, appealed to the head office of the Musicians’ Union, in Chicago--only to be informed by them that, however much headquarters disapproved of and deplored the situation, each union local was autonomous in its local rulings and there was nothing they could do.

Now comes the irony of the situation. My representative, on visiting the theatre, saw that the stage boxes abutted the orchestra pit on the same level with it “Why not place the percussionists there?” he thought. He proposed this to the union official, and was informed that this would be permitted, “so long as there is a railing between the white players and the black.”

It was only later, on thumbing through the local telephone directory, my representative discovered there were two musicians’ locals there. One of them was listed with the word “colored” after it, in parenthesis.

Yes, we still have a long road ahead in the matter of fair employment practices and equal opportunities for all.

Having had a satisfying taste of the theatre, Miss Dunham eventually turned to it as her exclusive medium of expression, and branched out into a full-fledged theatre piece, with plot and all, called _Carib Song_, which, transmuted into _Caribbean Rhapsody_, proved more successful on the other side of the Atlantic than it did in the States.

My association with Katherine Dunham seemed to satisfy, at least for the moment, my taste for the exotic. I cannot say it added much to my knowledge of anthropology, but it broadened my experience of human nature.

I presented Katherine Dunham and her company in Buenos Aires and throughout South America during the season 1949-1950 when our association came to an end. In her artistic career Katherine Dunham has been greatly aided by the advice and by the practical help, in scenic and costume design, of her husband, the talented American painter and designer, John Pratt.

While the scope of Katherine Dunham’s dancing and choreography may be limited by her anthropological bias, she has a first-rate quality of showmanship. She has studied, revived, rearranged for the theatre primitive dances and creole dances, which are in that borderland that is somewhere at the meeting point of African and Western culture. Anthropology aside and for the moment forgotten, she is a striking entertainer.

F. _AN AMERICAN GENIUS_

It may well be that, considered as an individual, the American Martha Graham is one of the greatest dance celebrities in the United States. There are those who contend she is the greatest. She is certainly the most controversial. There seems to be no middle school of thought concerning her. One of them bursts forth with an enthusiasm amounting almost to idolatry. The other shouts its negatives quite as forcibly.

My first love and my greatest interest is ballet. However, that love and that interest do not obscure for me all other forms of dance, as my managerial career shows. Having presented prophets and disciples of what, for want of a more accurate term, is called the “free” dance, in the persons of Isadora Duncan and her “children” and Mary Wigman, I welcomed the opportunity to present the American High Priestess of the contemporary dance.

This product of a long line of New England forbears was a woman past fifty when she came under my management. Yet she was at the height of her powers, in the full bloom of the immense artistic accomplishment that is hers, a dancer of amazing skill, a choreographer of striking originality, an actress of tremendous power.

The first and by far the most important prophet of the contemporary dance, Martha Graham was originally trained in the Ruth St. Denis-Ted Shawn tradition. A quarter of a century ago, however, she broke away from that tradition and introduced into her works a quality of social significance and protest. As I think over her choreographic product, it seems to me that, in general--and this is a case where I must generalize--her work has exhibited what may be described as two major trends. One has been in the direction of fundamental social conflicts; the other, towards psychological abstraction and a vague mysticism.

About all her work is an austerity, stark and lean; yet this cold austerity in her creations is always presented by means of a brilliant technique and with an intense dramatic power. I made it a point for years to see as many of her recital programmes as I could, and I was never sure what I was going to see. Each time there seemed to me to be a new style and a new technique. She was constantly experimenting and while, often, the experiments did not quite come off, she always excited me, if I did not always understand what she was trying to say.

I have the greatest admiration for Martha Graham and for what she has done. She has championed the cause of the American composer by having works commissioned, while she has, at the same time, championed the cause of free movement and originality in the dance. Yet, so violent, so distorted, so obscure, and sometimes so oppressive do I find some of her works that I am baffled. It is these qualities, coupled with the complete introspection in which her works are steeped, that make it so extremely difficult to attract the public in sufficient numbers to make touring worthwhile or New York seasons financially possible without some sort of subsidy. I shall have something to say, later on in this book, on this whole question of subsidy of the arts. Meanwhile, Martha Graham has chosen a lonely road, and the introspectiveness of her work does not make it any less so. The more’s the pity, for here is a great artist of the first rank.

Martha Graham completed my triptych of modern dancers, commencing with Isadora Duncan and continuing with Mary Wigman as its center piece. In many respects, Martha Graham is by far the greatest of the three; yet, to me, she is lacking in a quality that made the dances of Isadora Duncan so compelling. It is difficult to define that quality. Negatively, it may be that it is this very introspection. Perhaps it is that Martha Graham is no modernist at all.

Modernism in dance, I feel, has become very provincial, for it would seem that every one and her sister is a modernist. Isadora was a modernist. Fokine was a modernist. Mary Wigman was a modernist. Today, we have Balanchine and Robbins, modernists. Scratch a choreographer, scrape a dancer ever so lightly, and you will find a modernist. It is all very, very provincial.

Much of what is to me the real beauty of the dance--the lyric line, the unbroken phrase, the sequential pattern of the dance itself--has, in the name of modernism, been chopped up and broken.

Martha Graham, of all the practitioners of the “free” dance, troubles me least in this respect. Many of her works look like ballets. Yet, at the same time, she disturbs me; never soothes me; and, since I have dedicated myself in this book to candor, I shall admit I can take my dance without too much over-intellectualization. Yet, in retrospect, I find there are few ballets that have so much concentrated excitement as Martha Graham’s _Deaths and Entrances_.

The choreography, the dancing, the art of Martha Graham are greatly appreciated by a devoted but limited public. The lamentable thing about it to me is that it so limited. She has chosen the road of the solitary and lonely experimenter. Martha Graham, of all the dancers I have known, is, I believe, the most single-purposed, the most fanatical in her devotion to an idea and an ideal. About her and everything she does is an extraordinary integrity, a consummate honesty. Generous to a fault, Martha Graham always has something good to say about the work of others, and she possesses a keen appreciation of all forms of the dance. The high position she so indisputably holds has been attained, as I happen to know, only through great privation and hardship, often in the face of cruel and harsh ridicule. Her remarkable technique could only have been acquired at the expense of sheer physical exhaustion. In the history of the dance her name will ever remain at the head of the pioneers.

5. Three Ladies of the Maryinsky--And Others

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.

Because the present has its basic roots in the past, and because the future must emerge from the present, let me, in honoring those outstanding representatives of the recent past, pause for a moment to sketch their achievements and contributions.

_MATHILDE KCHESSINSKA_

In the early twentieth century hierarchy of Russian Ballet, Mathilde Kchessinska was the undisputed queen, a tsarina whose slightest wish commanded compliance. She was a symbol of a period.

Mathilde Kchessinska was born in 1872, the daughter of a famous Polish character dancer, Felix Kchessinsky. A superb technician, according to all to whom I have talked about her, and to the historians of the time, she is credited with having been the first Russian to learn the highly applauded (by audiences) trick of those dazzling multiple turns called _fouettés_, guaranteed to bring the house down and, sometimes today, even when poorly done. In addition to a supreme technique, she is said to have been a magnificent actress, both “on” and “off.”

Hers was an exalted position in Russia. Her personal social life gave her a power she was able to exercise in high places and a personal fortune which permitted her to give rein to a waywardness and wilfulness that did not always coincide with the strict disciplinarian standards of the Imperial Ballet.

Although she was able to control the destinies of the Maryinsky Theatre, to hold undisputed sway there, to have everything her own way, all that most people today know about her is that she was fond of gambling, that the Grand Dukes built her a Palace in Petrograd, and that Lenin made speeches to the mob from its balcony during the Revolution.

More rot has been told and written about her by those with more imagination than love of accuracy, than about almost any other person connected with ballet, not excepting Serge Diaghileff. In yarn upon yarn she has been identified with one sensational escapade and affair after another. None of these, so far as I know, she has ever troubled to contradict.

Mathilde Kchessinska was the first Russian dancer to win supremacy for the native Russian artist over their Italian guests. An artist in life as well as on the stage, today, at eighty, the Princess Krassinska-Romanovska, the morganatic wife of Grand Duke André of Russia, she still teaches daily at her studio in Paris, contributing to ballet from the fund of her vast experience and knowledge. Many fine dancers have emerged from her hands, but perhaps the pupil of whom she is the proudest is Tatiana Riabouchinska.

_OLGA PREOBRAJENSKA_

Sharing the rank of _ballerina assoluta_ with Kchessinska at the Maryinsky Theatre was Olga Preobrajenska. Preobrajenska’s career paralleled that of the Princess Krassinska-Romanovska; she was born in 1871, and graduated from the Imperial School in the class ahead of the Princess. Yet, in many respects, they were as unlike as it is possible for two females to differ.

Kchessinka was always _chic_, noted for her striking beauty, expressive arms and wrists, a beautifully poised head, an indescribably infectious smile. She was a social queen who used her gifts and her powers for all they were worth. It was a question in the minds of many whether Kchessinska’s private life was more important than her professional career. The gods had not seen fit to smile too graciously on Preobrajenska in the matter of face and figure. Her tremendous success in a theatre where, at the time, beauty of form was regarded nearly as highly as technique, may be said to have been a triumph of mind over matter. Despite these handicaps or, perhaps, because of them, she succeeded in working out her own distinctive style and bearing.

Free from any Court intriguing, Olga Preobrajenska was a serious-minded and noble person, a figure that reflected her own nobility of mind on ballet itself. Whereas Kchessinska’s career was, for the most part, a rose-strewn path, Preobrajenska’s road was rocky. Her climb from a _corps de ballet_ dancer to the heights was no overnight journey. It was one that took a good deal of courage, an exhibition of fortitude that happily led to a richly deserved victory. Blessed with a dogged perseverance, a divine thirst for knowledge, coupled with a desire ever to improve, she forced herself ahead. She danced not only in every ballet, but in nearly every opera in the repertoire that had dances. In her quarter of a century on the Imperial stage she appeared more than seven hundred times. It was close on to midnight when her professional work was done for the day; then she went to the great teacher, Maestro Enrico Cecchetti, for a private lesson, which lasted far into the early hours of the morning. Hers was a life devoted to work. For the social whirl she had neither time nor interest.

These qualities, linked with her fine personal courage and gentleness, undoubtedly account for that unbounded admiration and respect in which she is held by her colleagues.

Preobrajenska remained in Russia after the revolution, teaching at the Soviet State School of Ballet from 1917 through 1921. In 1922, she relinquished her post, left Russia and settled in Paris. Today, she maintains one of the world’s most noteworthy ballet schools, still teaching daily, passing on to the present generation of dancers something of herself so that, though dancers die, dancing may live.

It was during her teaching tenure at the Soviet State School of Ballet, the continuing successor in unbroken line and tradition to the Imperial Ballet School from the eighteenth century, that a young man named Georgi Balanchivadze came into her ken. Georgi Balanchivadze is better known throughout the world of the dance today as George Balanchine. In the long line of pupils who have passed through Preobrajenska’s famous Paris school, there is space only to mention two of whom she is very proud: Irina Baronova and Tamara Toumanova.

Frequently, I have had great pleasure in attending some of Preobrajenska’s classes in Paris, and I am proud to know her. It was during my European visit in the summer of 1950 that I happened to be at La Scala, Milan, when Preobrajenska was watching a class being given there by the Austrian ballet-mistress, Margaret Wallman. This was at the time of the visit to Milan of Galina Ulanova, the greatest lyric ballerina of the Soviet Union. The meeting of Ulanova and Preobrajenska, two great figures of Russian ballet, forty-one years apart in age, but with the great common bond of the classical dance, each the recipient of the highest honors a government can pay an artist, was, in its way, historic.

I arranged to have photographs taken of the event, a meeting that was very touching. Ulanova had come to see a class as well. The two great artists embraced. Ulanova was deeply moved. Their conversation was general. Unfortunately, there was little time, for the Soviet Consular officials who accompanied Ulanova were not eager for her to have too long a conversation.

At eighty-two, Preobrajenska has no superior as a teacher. At her prime, she was a dancer of wit and elegance, excelling in mimicry and the humorous. With her colleagues of that epoch, as with Ulanova, she nevertheless had one outstanding quality in common: a sound classicism.

_LUBOV EGOROVA_

Less exalted in the hierarchy of the Russian Imperial Ballet, since she never attained the _assoluta_ distinction there, but, nevertheless, a very important figure in ballet, is Lubov Egorova (Princess Troubetzkoy).

Born some nine years later than Preobrajenska and eight later than Kchessinska, Egorova, who was merely a _ballerina_ at the Maryinsky, was one of the first great Russian dancers to leave Russia; she was a member of the exploring group that made a Western European tour during a summer holiday from the Maryinsky, in 1908--perhaps the first time that Russian Ballet was seen outside the country.

In 1917, Egorova left Russia for good and, joining the Diaghileff Ballet, appeared in London, in 1921, dancing the role of Princess Aurora in the lavish, if ill-starred, revival of Tchaikowsky’s _The Sleeping Beauty_, or, as Diaghileff called his Benois production, _The Sleeping Princess_. As a matter of fact, she was one of three Auroras, alternating the role with two other great ladies of the ballet, Olga Spessivtseva and Vera Trefilova.

In 1923, Egorova founded her own school in Paris, and has been teaching there continuously since that time. Many famous dancers have emerged from that school, dancers of all nationalities, carrying the gospel to their own lands.

The basic method of ballet training has altered little. Since the last war, there have been some new developments in teaching methods. Although the individual methods of these three ladies from the Maryinsky may have differed in detail, they have all had the same solid base, and from these schools have come not only the dancers of today, but the teachers of the future.

_TAMARA KARSAVINA_

The Russian _emigré_ dancers would seem to have distributed themselves fairly equally between Paris and London, (excluding, of course, those who have made the States their permanent home). While the three Maryinsky ladies I have discussed became Parisian fixtures, another trio made London their abiding place.

Most important of the London trio was Tamara Karsavina, who combined in her own person the attributes of a great dancer, a great beauty, a great actress, a great artist, and a great woman. John van Druten, the noted playwright, sums her up thus: “I can tell you that Tamara Karsavina was the greatest actress and the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, the incarnation of Shakespeare’s ‘wightly wanton with a velvet brow, with two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes,’ and that I wrote sonnets to her when I was twenty.”

Born in 1885, the daughter of a famous Russian dancer and teacher, Platon Karsavin, Karsavina, unlike the Ladies of the Maryinsky who have made Paris their home, was ready for change: that change in ballet that is sometimes called the Romantic Revolution. She was receptive to new ideas, and became identified with Fokine and Diaghileff and their reforms in ballet style.

Diaghileff had to have a _ballerina_ for his company, and it soon became obvious to both Fokine and Diaghileff that Pavlova would not fit into their conception of things balletic. The modest, unassuming, charming, gracious, beautiful and enchanting Karsavina took over the _ballerina_ roles of the Diaghileff Company. It was in 1910 that Karsavina came into her own with the creation of the title role in _The Firebird_, and a revival of _Giselle_. Her success was tremendous. The shy, modest Tamara Karsavina became _La Karsavina_; without the guarantee of her presence in the cast, Diaghileff was for many years unable to secure a contract in numerous cities, including London.

All through her career, a career that brought her unheard of success, adulation, worship, Karsavina remained a sweet, simple, unspoiled lady.

She was not only the toast of Europe for her work with the Diaghileff Company, but she returned frequently to the Maryinsky, dashing back and forth between Petrograd and Western Europe. An aversion to sea travel in wartime prevented her visiting America with the Diaghileff Company on either of its American tours. She did, however, make a brief American concert tour in 1925, partnered by Pierre Vladimiroff. Neither the conditions nor the circumstances of this visit were to her advantage, and Americans were thus prevented from seeing Karsavina at anything like her best.

Karsavina has painted her own picture more strikingly than anyone else can; and has painted it in a book that is a splendid work of art. It is called _Theatre Street_. Tamara Karsavina’s _Theatre Street_ is a book and a portrait, a picture of a person and of an era that is, at the same time, a shining classic of the theatrical dance. But not only does it tell the story of her own career so strikingly that it would be presumptuous of me to expand on her career in these pages, but she shows us pictures of Russian life, of childhood in Russia that take rank with any ever written.

After the dissolution of a previous Russian marriage, Karsavina, in 1917, married a British diplomat, Henry Bruce, who died in 1950. Her son, by this marriage, is an actor and director in the British theatre. Karsavina herself lives quietly and graciously in London, but by no means inactively. She is a rock of strength to British ballet, through her interest and inspiration. A great lady as well as a great artist, it would give me great pleasure to be able to present her across the American continent in a lecture tour, in the course of which illuminating dissertation she would elucidate, as no one I have ever seen or heard, the important and expressive art of mime.

_LYDIA KYASHT_

Classmate of Karsavina at the Imperial School, and born in the same year, is Lydia Kyasht, who was the first Russian _ballerina_ to become a permanent fixture in London.

Kyasht’s arrival in the British capital dates back to 1908, the year she became a leading soloist at the Maryinsky Theatre. There were mixed motives for her emigration to England. There were, it appears, intrigues of some sort at the Maryinsky; there was also a substantial monetary offer from the London music hall, the Empire, where, for years, ballet was juxtaposed with the rough-and-tumble of music hall comedians, and where Adeline Genée had reigned as queen of English ballet for a decade. Kyasht’s Russian salary was approximately thirty-five dollars a month. The London offer was for approximately two hundred dollars a week.

Her first appearance at the Empire, in Leicester Square, long the home of such ballet as London had at that time, was under her own name as Lydia Kyaksht. When the Empire’s manager in dismay inquired: “How _can_ one pronounce a name like that?” he welcomed the suggestion that the pronunciation would be made easier for British tongues if the second “k” were dropped. So it became Kyasht, and Kyasht it has remained.

Kyasht was the first Russian dancer to win a following in London, and in her first appearances there she was partnered by Adolph Bolm, later to be identified with Diaghileff and still later with ballet development in the United States.

The Empire ballets were, for the most part, of a very special type of corn. Kyasht appeared in, among others, a little something called _The Water Nymph_ and in another something charmingly titled _First Love_, with my old friend and Anna Pavlova’s long-time partner, Alexandre Volinine, as her chief support. There was also a whimsy called _The Reaper’s Dream_, in which Kyasht appeared as the “Spirit of the Wheatsheaf,” seen and pursued in his dream by a reaper, the while the _corps de ballet_, costumed as an autumn wheatfield, watched and wondered.

Most important, however, was Kyasht’s appearance in the first English presentation, on 18th May, 1911, of Delibes’ _Sylvia_. _Sylvia_, one of the happiest of French ballets, had had to wait thirty-five years to reach London, although the music had long been familiar there. Even then, London saw a version of a full-length, three-act work, which, for the occasion, had been cut and compressed into a single act. It took forty-one more years for the uncut, full-length work to be done in London, with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet production, staged by Frederick Ashton, at Covent Garden, in the Royal Opera House, on 3rd of September, 1952. The original British Sylvia, Lydia Kyasht, was, by this date, a member of the teaching staff at the famous Sadler’s Wells School.

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.”

Hoffman, in conjunction with a Broadway management, imported nearly a hundred dancers, with Lydia Lopokova as the foremost; others included the brothers Kosloff, Theodore and Alexis, who remained permanently in the United States; my friend, Alexandre Volinine; and Alexander Bulgakoff. A word about the 1911 “Saison de Ballets Russes” may not be amiss. The ethics of the entire venture were, to say the least, open to question. Among the works presented were _Schéhérazade_, _Cléopâtre_, and _Sylphides_--all taken without permission from the Diaghileff repertoire, and with no credit (and certainly no cash) given to Michel Fokine, their creator. All works were restaged from memory by Theodore Kosloff, and with interpolations by Gertrude Hoffman. The outstanding success of the whole affair was Lydia Lopokova.

When, after an unsuccessful financial tour outside New York, Lopokova and Volinine left the company, the “Saison de Ballets Russes” fell to pieces.

Venturing still farther afield, Lopokova joined Mikhail Mordkin’s company briefly; then, remaining in America for five years, she toyed seriously with the legitimate theatre, and made her first appearance as an actress (in English) with that pioneer group, the Washington Square Players (from which evolved The Theatre Guild), at the Bandbox Theatre, in East 57th Street, in New York, and later in a Percy Mackaye piece called _The Antic_, under the direction of Harrison Grey Fiske.

Then the Diaghileff Ballet came to America; came, moreover, badly in need of Lopokova; came without Karsavina, without any woman star; came badly crippled. In New York, and free, was Lydia Lopokova. It was Lydia Lopokova who was the _ballerina_ of the company through the two American tours. It was Lydia Lopokova who was the company’s bright and shining individual success.

She returned to Europe with Diaghileff and was his _ballerina_ from 1917 to 1919, earning for herself in London a popularity second to none. But, bored again by success, she was suddenly off again to America. This time, the venture was even less noteworthy, for it was a Shubert musical comedy--and a rather dismal failure. “I was a flop,” was Lopokova’s comment, “and thoroughly deserved it.” In 1921, she returned to Diaghileff, and danced the Lilac Fairy in his tremendous revival of _The Sleeping Princess_. During the following years, up to the Diaghileff Ballet’s final season, Lopokova was in and out of the company, appearing as a guest artist in the later days.