THE FOUR PIONEERS

THE FOUR PIONEERS


INTRODUCTION

Called at various times "Papa Shawn" and the "Father of American Dance," Ted Shawn was the kind of parent who required submission and inspired rebellion in his offspring. The first of the famous Denishawn "children" to leave the fold was Martha Graham in 1923. Although Shawn had been her primary teacher and had featured her in his dances, she felt that she must strike out on her own.

The next defectors from Denishawn left in a group in 1928, joining forces for the next sixteen years. Doris Humphrey, star performer and main teacher in the Denishawn school; Charles Weidman, also a performer and teacher there; and Pauline Lawrence, school accompanist, together established the Humphrey-Weidman Dance Company in New York City. These "unholy three" were voted out of Denishawn for dis¬loyalty when Humphrey and Weidman refused to give up their experiments with movement to tour with the Ziegfield Follies. The tour was to raise money for "Greater Denishawn," at that point, a huge, unpaid-for house in the suburbs of New York City.

Shortly before that confrontation, Humphrey had been chided by Shawn for not teaching straight Denishawn tech¬nique in classes. Instead, she had been testing the discoveries she was beginning to make about dance movement.

Paramount among these, and the basis for the technique she was to develop, was her concept that dance takes place in an arc of unbalance, that is the motion which occurs between the ver¬tical (standing) and the horizontal (lying down) positions. This is the basis of the Humphrey Fall and Recovery Theory.

Martha Graham had also begun to develop a new dance technique which continued to evolve out of her choreography during her entire career. The style which she developed was sharp, angular, and percussive; the most distinctive movement, in her technique, the contraction and release involving the torso, resulted from her observations of breathing.

This was the beginning of American modern dance. For the first time American dancers were creating new movements for new subject matter, and reflecting their own era rather than a previous one. Their movements evolved from the meaning of the dance, rather than from previously learned steps developed by peoples of a different culture. In the process of finding new techniques to express their art, these modern dance pioneers broke the existing rules; indeed, that was their intent, for they were anti-Denishawn, anti-ballet, anti-the past.

The percussive, angular, and often distorted movements of early modern dance expressed the tensions of contemporary life. Similar developments in other arts resulted in the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque and the dissonant music of Hindemith and Schoenberg. At the same time, dance ceased to be regarded primarily as entertainment, and through the new aesthetics, it achieved the status of a serious, creative, indepen¬dent art form.

All levels of the dancers' space were used, resulting in a rela¬tionship to gravity that was in direct contrast to the danse verti¬cale of the Romantic ballet. The torso became fully active as it was freed of its balletic rigidity, and the dancers angled their limbs, in contrast to the extended line of ballet. Interestingly, many of these movements can be traced to the Denishawn ori¬gins of the pioneers, particularly to the Oriental and Delsartean influences. The difference between the old and the new was that these modern dance originators used the principles they had learned from Denishawn to create new movements. Their first dances accordingly showed a lingering Denishawn influ¬ence, but in time they worked away from it, although their warm-up exercises continued to include a combination of yoga and ballet.

The dancers' costumes and stage settings were extremely simplified, often to the point of starkness. The dance itself was performed either to music written for it by a contemporary composer or to no music at all; occasionally, music of the pre-¬classic or classic period was used. The dancers performed wher¬ever they could: in lofts, studios, and small theaters in New York City, and in colleges and university auditoriums and gymnasi¬ums throughout the country.

Critics played an important role in bringing this avant-garde movement before the public eye and in expanding its small but devoted following. John Martin, a staff critic for The New York Times from 1927 to 1962, had a background in theater but soon began covering modern dance performances extensively, becoming the foremost champion of the fledgling art and the first "dean" of dance critics.

By the time that Louis Horst founded Dance Observer in 1934, he was already an old friend of the modern dancers. As a musician he had accompanied classes and performances at Denishawn. He left in 1925, becoming Martha Graham's advi¬sor, critic, and music composer. In addition, he developed a for¬mal approach to the teaching of dance composition, which has been experienced by countless students over the years. This approach uses art forms and styles from all periods of human history except that in which ballet developed. Dance Observer presented reviews, articles, and advertisements devoted princi¬pally to modern dance, and Horst continued monthly publica¬tion until his death in 1964.

Walter Terry, who studied with Shawn, Graham, Humphrey, Limon, and others, was another critic who supported modern dance through his reviews in the New York Herald-Tribune. Martin, Horst, and Terry have all written definitive books on dance.

In 1931 Hanya Holm came from Germany to open the New York branch of the Mary Wigman School. She had stud¬ied with Dalcroze, Laban, and Wigman before becoming a Wigman company member and teacher. By 1936 she had established the Hanya Holm School and Company, and the New York Wigman School was dissolved. German modern dance, which up to this time had developed parallel to American modern dance, was thus injected into the main¬stream of American modern dance. This dance form, charac¬terized by its use of space and of improvisation as a teaching tool, has retained its uniqueness through the followers of the Laban-Wigman-Holm tradition in this country.
Modern dance coalesced as a movement through the efforts of two far-sighted young women, Martha Hill and Mary Jo Shelly, who established the Bennington College School of the Dance in 1934. There they invited the leading modern dancers to teach and create. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm were the permanent faculty from 1934 until its closing in 1941.
The economic stability, the artistic freedom, the space, and the chance to perform gave these four pioneers the opportuni¬ty to focus their energies on the creation of larger works dur¬ing the summer months. Some of these works composed and presented there remain as milestones of modern dance, such as Deaths and Entrances and Letter to the World by Martha Graham, With My Red Fires and Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor by Doris Humphrey, and Trend by Hanya Holm.

World War II began a period of disruption in the careers of the pioneers. The Bennington School of the Dance closed; male dancers were drafted into the armed forces; tours of the "gymnasium circuit" of colleges and universities, long a finan¬cial mainstay of modern dance companies, declined. Financial difficulties forced the disbandment of the Hanya Holm Company in 1944. Miss Holm turned to choreography for Broadway musicals while continuing to teach at her New York studio and at the Colorado College summer sessions.

Nineteen forty-four also saw the end of Doris Humphrey's performing career, owing to an arthritic hip. For a brief time she considered total retirement. But then she found a vehicle for her creativity in Jose Limon, a former member of her com¬pany who had just been released from the U.S. Army. She became artistic director for his company and composed some of her best-known works for it. She also continued to teach choreography.

Following the breakup of his partnership with Doris Humphrey in 1945, Charles Weidman continued to teach, choreograph, and maintain a company and studio theater. Because he had depended heavily on her, he found it difficult going alone as his financial problems grew. However, in spite of the drawbacks, he was able to choreograph a number of important works in the years that followed.
Of the original four pioneers, only Martha Graham was still in full command of her performing powers at the end of World War II. And the peak of her creative career was still ahead of her.

Two other important dancers of this generation were Helen Tamiris and Lester Horton.

Helen Tamiris combined ballet and Delsartean theory learned from Irene Lewisohn to create her own style of modern dance. In 1930 she attempted to unify modern dancers through the cooperative performances of the Dance Repertory Theater, but unification was not to be realized. Together with her husband, Daniel Nagrin, she founded the Tamiris-Nagrin Company in 1960, which was dissolved with her death in 1966.

Influenced by Denishawn, Mary Wigman, the Japanese dancer Michio Ito, American Indians, and ballet, Lester Horton organized a dance company in Los Angeles in 1932, which was notable as the first company to include African-Americans. Although he was aware of the activities of the modern dancers in New York, he preferred to work in isolation from them. Following his untimely death in 1953, some of the dancers from his company continued their own careers, including Alvin Ailey, Carmen de Lavallade, Bella Lewitzky, Joyce Trisler, and James Truitte. Through these dancers Horton's eclectic, indi¬vidualistic technique and choreography were kept alive.
From The Vision of Modern Dance: In the Words of Its Creators, Edited by Jean Morrison Brown, Naomi Mindlin and Charles H. Woodford.

Ballets Russes

Ballets Russes


The world of ballet was by no means insulated from this revolution of dance-makers. But in a world where dance is made within institutions-a company with a school attached-an innovative dance-maker has no choice but to come to terms with the tradi¬tion that the institution represents. The choreographers who figured prominently in the evolution of ballet in eighteenth ¬and nineteenth-century Europe-men like Jean Georges Noverre, Charles Louis Didelot, Auguste Bournonville, and Marius Petipa-were ballet masters of major companies. They did not have to reinvent dance from the ground up; their innovations rejected some prece¬dents from earlier times while building on others. This was the model envi¬sioned by Mikhail Fokine when, at the time of Isadora Duncan's visit to Russia, he sent an artistic manifesto to the director of the Imperial Theaters. Fokine believed that the great classical tradi¬tion that the Russians had inherited from the French and lovingly nurtured for much of the century-since 1869 under the leadership of Marius Petipa at St. Peterburg's Maryinsky Theater-had gone stale. Fokine revered Petipa but he wanted to let in fresh air. His approach to reform was both aesthetic and scien¬tific. In place of a loosely organized succession of "numbers," "entries," and so on, he called for a unified work of art whose performance would be unin¬terrupted even by pauses for leading dancers to acknowledge applause; in place of "mere gymnastics" and conven¬tional gestures, he called for expressive dancing that would make use of the whole body down to "the last muscle." And, through careful research into the time and place in which each ballet was set, he believed that all elements of a production-"music, painting, and the plastic arts"-could be harmoniously blended to express a single, underlying theme.

The director of the Maryinsky Theater ignored this manifesto but per¬mitted the precociously talented Fokine to dabble in choreography. Fokine had made his debut as a dancer in 1898 on his eighteenth birthday; at the age of twenty-two he was already teaching classical technique to the junior girls at the Imperial Ballet School. In the years following Duncan's visit, he pressed his campaign to reform the Russian ballet tradition. His first efforts to stage ballets with Greek themes and Duncanesque freedom of movement and costume ¬including bare feet and bare knees for the ballerinas - provoked opposition and he was forced to compromise: in one ballet the dancers appeared in tights with toes and knees painted on. The radical nature of his ideas can be appreciated from the comments of a ballet who, a few years later, danced barefoot, for the first time in a Fokine ballet: "This gave me a strange sensation of nakedness, like walking in public in a nightgown."

But gradually barriers fell. In 1906 a production he put together for students won praise from the recent retired Marius Petipa, whose own historical spectacles Fokine had criticized as "unauthentic." In 1908 he present two precedent-shattering works. In Une Nuit d'Egypte, an erotic divertissement featuring Anna Pavlova and himself in the major roles, dancers turned their profiles to the audience in the style of Egyptian tomb paintings, which shocked traditionalists accustomed to the predominantly frontal display of the classical canon; as the hero, Fokine danced with bare knees showing belt the border of his striped kilt; and the ballerinas bent and twisted their upper bodies in unconventional and provocative poses. For Chopiniana he adopter not only the serious music favored by Isadora Duncan but, according to some accounts, her fluid and expressive are movements as well. Another possible influence on Fokine's plastic use of the arms was the appearance in St. Petersburg of a troupe of Siamese court dancers in 1900. In 1905, he choreo¬graphed a brief solo for Anna Pavlova, called The Swan, in which her tremu¬lous arm movements represented the last futile efforts of a dying creature to regain the freedom of flight it had once known; when Pavlova began touring the world with her own company after 1910, this became her signature piece.

For all the excitement provoked by Fokine's innovations, it is by no means certain that he could have realized the full range of his ambitious reforms with¬in the tradition-bound Imperial Ballet. Serge Diaghilev gave him the opportu¬nity he had dreamed of. As tsarist Russia slipped further into financial and political chaos, Diaghilev received per¬mission to bring a troupe of Maryinsky principals to Paris in 1909, with Fokine as ballet master. Audiences in the West were astonished by the technical facility and expressive power of the Russian dancers, who included Pavlova and the nineteen-year-old Vaslav Nijinsky. The settings and costumes by Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois blazed with color. And the ballets themselves, choreographed by Fokine, challenged preconceived ideas of classical dance.
Yet another of those photographs (left) that have become indissolubly linked with a dancer: Anna Pavlova as The Swan, a solo dance that Mikhail Fokine choreo¬graphed for her in 1905 to music by Camille Saint-Satins. Pavlova's tireless touring with her own company did much to stimulate worldwide enthusiasm for ballet. Like many modern dance-makers she had an interest in non-Western dance traditions. In London she met a young Indian art student named Uday Shankar; he helped her stage, and danced with her in, Radha-Krishna (1923) and other dances below). Shankar (1900-77) became a forceful popularizer of Indian dance in the West; in his later years he worked to reinvigorate traditional dance forms in India.

In Cleopatre, an adaptation of Une Nuit d'Egypte, the queen and her paramour made love on stage (discreetly hidden behind veils) while half-naked slaves and attendants cavorted orgiastically. Scheherazade featured an even wilder orgy and a merciless massacre onstage.
For three years, triumph followed triumph, confirming Fokine's dictum that choreographic style should change from ballet to ballet in accord with theme and music. The same audiences that thrilled to Fokine's acrobatic "Tar¬tar" dances set to music from Borodin's
opera Prince Igor were deeply moved by the abstract Romanticism of Les Sylphides, a revised version of Chopiniana, which emerged as the first entirely plotless ballet. In 1911 Fokine collaborated with Igor Stravinsky on Petrouchka, a Russian folk tale, with Nijinsky in the title role; this charac¬ter's jerky, mechanical movements and turned-in toes dramatized his helpless¬ness as a puppet of fate.

Fokine broke with Diaghilev in 1912, and although he later returned to the Ballets Russes, he never again equaled his innovative achievements during those first three Paris seasons. Diaghilev, whose financially shaky company need¬ed a steady supply of novelties to attract audiences, was neither a choreographer nor a dancer nor a composer nor an artist of any kind. Yet he had a hand in every aspect of the works his company produced. It was his idea to present three short ballets in a single evening, a format which has become standard for ballet companies around the world. He hired, and fired, and rehired the Stravinskys and Saties, the Fokines and Nijinskys, the Baksts and Benoises, the Picassos and Cocteaus whose talents merged in such exciting and often sur¬prising ways that the contributors fought bitterly for years over who deserved credit for which aspect of this or that ballet. All his ballet masters--Fokine, Nijinsky, Leonide Massine, Bronislawa Nijinska (Nijinsky's sister), and George Balanchine - were extraordinarily talented, and he rarely second-guessed them; but their average age when he took them on was under twenty-three. There was never any doubt about who was in charge. Ultimately, it was Diaghilev's taste that was reflected in the style and the content of the Ballets Russes; his unique company was his instrument of self-expression.



When Vaslav Nijinsky, the most acclaimed male dancer of his day, began creating innovative ballets for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1912, it looked for a time as if the young Nijinsky might achieve the choreo¬graphic goal that had eluded Fokine: to mold a first-class ballet company into a means of personal expression.

Nijinsky was born in Kiev in 1890 of Polish extraction. His parents headed their own touring dance company in Russia; from an early age he and his younger sister Bronislawa appeared on¬stage with their father, who was noted for his enormous leaps. At the age of ten, Nijinsky enrolled in the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, where his teachers recognized his natural tal¬ent almost immediately. On graduation in 1907 he danced a succession of im¬portant roles in such ballets as Giselle, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty.

His dancing offered a rare mix of strength and facility. Propelled by pow¬erfully muscled thighs, his leaps were legendary not only for their height but for the impression he gave of pausing in midair at the top of the arc. In the words of critic Edwin Denby: "When he moves he does not blur the center of weight in his body; one feels it as clearly as if he were still standing at rest, one can fol¬low its course clearly as it floats about the stage through the dance." He pro¬jected a vitality, a sensuality, that some saw as innocent, others as erotic.

Among his admirers was Serge Diaghilev, who sensed that a great ballet company could be built around this young dancer who combined a rig¬orous schooling in classical technique with an almost palpable emotional intensity.

The roles that Fokine choreographed for Nijinsky in the first three seasons
of the Ballets Russes allowed the dancer to display the full range of his powers to wildly appreciative audiences in Paris and London. As the Poet in Les Sylphides he embodied an abstract Romanticism seen through the lens of nostalgia; as the Favorite Slave in Scheherazade he was the devotee of sexu¬ality for whom even death is a kind of orgasm; in Le Spectre de la Rose his leap¬ing exit from the stage had the sensa¬tional finality of a record-setting broad jump; in Petrouchka he was poignancy itself. There was, it seemed, nothing he could not do, no role he could not bring to life onstage. He always had trouble communicating in words, but when he danced, he spoke with his entire body. Is it any wonder that, prompted by Diaghilev, he decided to take the next step and try his hand at making dances?

Having mastered technique as few dancers before or since, Nijinsky apparently had no interest in devising ever-more-challenging exercises in the traditional mode. Instead, he took up where Fokine had left off-seeking to express something of himself through the artistic medium of a classically trained ballet company.

In L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune (After¬noon of a Faun), the subject was sex¬ - adolescent sex. As the Faun, Nijinsky (adorned with a small tail, golden horns, and pointed ears) tried to entice some passing nymphs into joining him for a frolic. Intrigued, frightened, they dallied, then fled. One dropped her scarf. Like an animal playing with its prey, the Faun retrieved the scarf, draped it over a rock, and, throwing his head back in a soundless laugh, pressed out his longing against the smooth fab¬ric. Those in the audience who were not shocked by this explicit mime of masturbation were outraged by the anti¬classical movements that Nijinsky had devised for himself and the nymphs. The dancers moved back and forth across the stage like cutouts from a Greek frieze. Ballerinas who had spent years perfecting their turnout found it difficult to keep their feet parallel. Debussy's dreamlike music was no help in keeping time, as one dancer recalled: "[We] walked and moved quite gently to a rhythm that crossed over the beats giv¬en by the conductor. At every entrance one made-and there were several¬ - one began to count, taking the count from another dancer who was coming off. For every lift of the hand or head there was a corresponding sound in the score."

Although Diaghilev toned down the ending at the insistence of the Paris police, he relished the outcry that the piece provoked; controversy generated publicity and sold tickets. For Nijinsky, the critical attacks hit closer to home: "The Faun," he said simply, "is me."

It had taken the young choreographer 120 rehearsals to prepare this twelve ¬minute ballet for its premiere. A year later, in May 1913, he presented two new ballets that set off an even greater furor. Today, the better known is Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) because of its propulsive score by Igor Stravinsky. It was Stravinsky's idea to create a ball& around a savage ritual from pre-Christian Russia, in which an adolescent girl dances herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of spring. Diaghilev turned to Nijinsky as chore¬ographer only after Fokine, his original choice, had backed out over a monetary dispute.

To help Nijinsky set steps to the com¬plex rhythmic structure of the music, Diaghilev brought in an expert in eurhythmics, a method of matching body movements to musical rhythms invented by a Swiss music teacher, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1.865-1950). The result was more "counting," as in Faun; but because there were many more dancers doing many more things onstage for a much longer time, the counts were much, much more complicated. Nijinsky did not dance in Sacre. On opening night he stood in the wings stamping his foot and counting out loud for the benefit of the dancers. But no one could hear him above the din of the orchestra and the disapproving shouts end whistles from the audience that began even before the curtain went up. A near-riot ensued. It was hard to tell which the protesters disliked more: Stravinsky's pounding, discordant music or Nijinsky's frenetic, knock-kneed choreography. Among the words that critics used to describe the ballet: "harsh," “raw," "bitter," "brutal," "undigested," `coarse," "frank."

As a succes de scandale, Sacre had to equal: It was the avant-garde event of the season, the decade, some might say the century. Within twenty years Stravinsky's music had entered the con¬vert repertoire; its discordances and -rhythmic innovations had become part of the musical language of its time. But the ballet itself received only six perfor¬mances, and Nijinsky's choreography has been preserved only in the uncer¬¬¬tain memories of those who were there. Attempts to restage the original work lave met with no definitive agreement )n whether the reconstructions rep¬resent was the original audience saw on opening night.

The other ballet that Nijinsky choreo¬graphed that spring, Jeux (Games), is almost entirely forgotten except by his¬torians of dance. But in its own way, Jeux (set to a specially commissioned score by Debussy) was as radical as Sacre, and marked an important mile¬stone in the evolution of ballet as an instrument of personal, rather than col¬laborative, creation. For perhaps the first time in the history of classical ballet the dancers portrayed characters who seemed to live in the same world as the spectators. The theme was sport-a game of tennis-but the subtext was sexual play, a three-way flirtation between Nijinsky and two female part¬ners. All three dancers wore sports clothes only slightly modified from out¬fits that anyone in the audience might have worn the previous weekend. As in Faun the movements were angular, stilt¬ed; at times the principals looked more like silent-movie actors than dancers.

To dancers trained in classical tech¬nique, the poses and attitudes that Nijinsky specified (to be executed on three-quarter point) were punishing: "I had to keep my head screwed on one side, both hands curled in as in one maimed from birth," said one ballerina. In his diary the choreographer was explicit about the source of his inspira¬tion: Diaghilev had been eager to have a young boy share their bed, an idea that Nijinsky rejected. Audiences were more puzzled than aroused by the encoded menage a srois they saw onstage, but Nijinsky's artistic courage could not be faulted; in the words of Lincoln Kirstein: "Few dancers before had translated pri¬vate tension into public parable."

But Nijinsky was unable to follow up on this breakthrough. In August 1913 the Ballets Russes company sailed from Southampton, England, for a tour of South America that Diaghilev, always hard-pressed for cash, had arranged even though he was so terrified of sea voyages that he could not bring himself to go. (He had been told by a fortune-teller that death would find him at sea.) To many in the company, it was startling to see Nijinsky without Diaghilev at his side. What followed was a progression of tragicomic events that played like a darker sequel to Jeux. On the voyage Nijinsky spent all his time with Romola de Pulszka, the daughter of a famous and wealthy Hungarian actress, who had recently joined the corps de ballet. Shortly after their arrival in Rio, Nijinsky and Romola announced their engagement; they were married on September 10, 1913. When the news reached Paris, Diaghilev was furious. Seizing on the pretext that Nijinsky had breached his contract by refusing so dance one night in Rio, Diaghilev fired his rebellious protege and appointed as ballet master in his place the seventeen¬-year-old Leonide Massine.

After the First World War began, Nijinsky was interned in Hungary as a Russian subject, only to be freed in 1916 by the string-pulling efforts of Diaghilev, who had secured a lucrative engagement for his company at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on the condition that Nijinsky dance. Although Nijinsky himself was already beginning to show signs of mental dete¬rioration, the Metropolitan engagement in the spring of 1916 created a stir, and a second New York season was arranged for the fall of the same year, this time with Nijinsky en full charge of the company. For a man who had trouble managing his own life, this was an impossible assignment. In addition, his contract stipulated that he produce two new ballets en three weeks for New York premieres. Only one was produced, a mimed narrative version of the German folk tale Till Eulenspiegel, set to Richard Strauss's tone poem. On opening night the second act was en such a raw state that the dancers had to improvise most of their steps.

After that, Nijinsky's mental decline was obvious to everyone. His last public appearance as a dancer was en Septem¬ber 1917. Over the next two years he planned a ballet to be set to the music of Bach and worked on an elaborate system of dance notation that he had invented. From 1919, when his condition was diagnosed as schizophrenia, until his death en 1950 he lived for the most part en a series of European asylums. After his departure from the scene, et became the fashion to denigrate his achieve¬ments as a choreographer, following the lead of Stravinsky and Fokine who claimed credit for most of Nijinsky's innovations. But other collaborators have testified to his hard work, high standards, and almost oppressive drive en bringing a dance to the stage. just before his final mental breakdown he confided to a colleague: "I wish to work independently of other troupes of dancers en which intrigue prevents the creation of real art. I am planning to dance alone with a small company and achieve some interesting results."

As dreams go, this seems modest enough. For dancers who eschewed bal¬let and followed the path blazed by Duncan and St. Denis, et would soon become the norm. But for Nijinsky et was a fantasy bred of madness. Even the greatest ballet masters had not enjoyed anything approaching artistic autono¬my. During his four decades at the helm of the Imperial Ballet en St. Petersburg, Marius Petipa well understood the limi¬tations within which he worked: an easily bored audience that demanded spectacles spited with divertissements, court politics that often dictated which juicy parts went to certain favorites, and a prohibition (handed down from the sovereign himself) against unhappy end¬ings that might suggest all was not well en the empire.

Martha Graham

Martha Graham

Until its demise in 1931 the Denishawn School served as a magnet for a second generation of modern dancers, first attracting them with its open-minded attitudes, then repelling them with its eclecticism and what one of its most illustrious graduates called the "weakling exoticism of a transplanted orientalism." This illustrious graduate was Martha Graham, who came to Denishawn in the summer of 1916 and left in 1923, ready to begin her own career which would take her-and modern dance itself-into uncharted realms of personal symbolism. Although she based many of her works on incidents from the world's storehouse of myths, the truths she sought were not abstract or universal but personal; each of her dances, she once said, was "a graph of the heart."

Graham was born in 1894 in a Penn¬sylvania town that is now a part of Pittsburgh. Like Isadora Duncan, she experienced the conflicting pulls of Puritanism and paganism. Her upbring¬ing in Pennsylvania was sedate; but when she was fourteen her family moved to California in search of a healthier climate for a younger sister who had asthma. The brilliant sunlight and open spaces around her new home in Santa Barbara had an intoxicating effect on the adolescent Graham. She heard her father, a physician who treated mental cases, say that he based his diagnoses on the way his patients moved: "The body never lies" was his maxim. The young Martha persuaded her father to take her to see Ruth St. Denis dance. She found the performance so exhilarating that she decided then and there to become a dancer, although she could not put this resolve into practice until the death of her father, who did not approve of the theater as a career.

A year after the Denishawn School opened, Graham enrolled. She was already in her early twenties, a late bloomer by dance standards, but her intensity, intelligence, and taut, lean body caught the attention of Ted Shawn. In 1920 Shawn created a ballet called Xochitl, in which Graham played a "Toltec" maiden who ferociously defends her honor against a drink-mad¬dened emperor. Critics called it "the first native American ballet," but its exotic costumes and sets identified it as a close cousin to Denishawn's trade¬mark "Oriental" spectacles.

A more important influence on Graham was Louis Horst, the school's music director, whose interests lay in the work of contemporary European com¬posers like Erik Satie and Zoltan Kodaly. He introduced Graham to more chal¬lenging scores and encouraged her to strike out on her own as a dancer and choreographer. By the time she left Denishawn in 1923, she had acquired a thorough grounding in crowd-pleasing stagecraft. Moving to New York she got a job in a Broadway revue called Greenwich Village Follies, dancing what she later referred to as "sexy little things." Meanwhile, she was refining her own ideas about dance, rejecting not only the "rigidity" of classical ballet but also the movement styles of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis. She felt the need for a new vocabulary of movement that could "make visible the interior landscape" in a rapidly changing world: "Life today is nervous, sharp, and zigzag. This is what I aim for in my dances."

Graham's first New York concert in 1926 still showed traces of Denishawn exoticism (one dance featured three of St. Denis's former students as Krishna's milkmaids). But with the aid of Horst, who had come east to be her music director, she was soon showing "sharper" stuff like Danse, a 1929 solo in which she did not move her feet at all but contorted the rest of her body to music by Arthur Honegger, and Heretic, a piece for her newly formed all-female dance company, set to a marchlike Breton folk song arranged for piano and played by Horst. The song kept repeat¬ing, and, with each repeat, Graham, as the title character dressed in white, "pleaded her case" with simple but eloquent gestures to a menacing "jury" of twelve women wearing long, dark dresses. Each time the women rejected her plea, they thumped their heels on the floor to emphasize their unwilling¬ness to listen, then threw themselves into new postures of stiff-legged con¬demnation; at the end the "heretic" sank to the floor in defeat, surrounded by the triumphant conformists.

In Lamentation, a landmark 1930 solo to a Kodaly Piano Piece, Graham was seen sitting on a wooden bench, shrouded in a tube of stretch jersey with only her face, hands, and bare feet showing. Rocking stiffly from side to side, she tugged and pulled and pushed at the confining fabric with her hands, elbows, knees, and shoulders, not so much trying to break free as to carve out a place of rest for her grief-wracked body in a comfortless world.

Over the next few years, Graham gave a series of recitals that drew appreciative notices from both inside and outside the dance community; in 1932 she became the first dancer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her manner was resolutely modern in a socially conscious, Depression-era way: no sets, no fancy costumes, nothing soft or pretty. "Like the modern painters and architects," she declared, "we have stripped our medium of decorative unessentials." Her themes came from Native American rituals, from a mythologized American history, from her own responses to newspaper headlines and machine technology, from her own struggles as a creative artist, from her relentless exploration of the "potential greatness" of the human body. In classes at her Greenwich Village studio, Graham built up a system of exercises that constituted her answer to the daily class of traditional ballet companies. Students began on the floor with stretches and leg extensions, then stood up for bends, lifts, hip swings, and turns in place, followed by jumping, walking, running, and skipping. Each class con¬cluded with what she described as "a series of falls forward, side, and back... In no fall does the body remain on the floor, but assumes an upright position as part of the exercise. My dancers fall so they may rise."

Central to her technique was pos¬tural control, which began with close observation of the act of breathing. Dancer Jane Dudley remembers Graham telling her classes: "If you breathe out through your teeth as hard as you can and then notice what's happened to your shoulders and your pelvis and your back, that's what a contraction is. Then if you breathe in and see how the back straightens and centers itself, that is a release."

"Contraction" and "release"-the muscular activity independent of the act of breathing-became the bywords of the Graham technique. Neither had anything to do with relaxation; she believed that movement should always be emphatic, expressive, disciplined. In her opinion it took at least ten years of hard work to make a dancer.

Graham treated her trained dancers as her personal choreographic instru¬ment; with few exceptions, no one else performed her dances. She created new pieces in the studio, demonstrating a movement she wanted and expecting her dancers to pick it up the first time. Rehearsals were long and exhausting. Enlivened by gestures and poses adapted from the dances of Asia, Graham's technique exerted a powerful influence on her movement vocabulary. In time, many of her best dancers left her in search of more creative freedom, as she had once left Denishawn. But Graham herself continued to grow as an artist. After 1934, instead of setting dances to previously written music, she started collaborating with composers like Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, and Samuel Barber on new works; the next year she began a long collaboration with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, whose enigmatic sets and props became as much a part of her dances as the dancers themselves.

In the late thirties she hired her first male dancers, the ballet-trained Erick Hawkins and the young and talented but largely untrained Merce Cunningham. With these new resources at her com¬mand, Graham fashioned a series of powerful "dance plays," often based explicitly or implicitly on the travails of women in Greek mythology. While more "theatrical" than her earlier works, these were hardly conventional narra¬tives; what happened onstage was best understood as taking place in the mind of a suffering, struggling archetypal fig¬ure, who was invariably Graham herself. To expand the possibilities of story¬telling through gesture, she borrowed the flexible staging of Asian dance dra¬ma forms like No, kabuki, and Chinese opera, where a few steps can indicate a journey, a few moments the passage of years.


Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman & Jose Limon

One way to make sense of the histo¬ry of modern dance in America is to read it as a family tree of creative parturition: after training in an estab¬lished company, a dancer or group of dancers with a fresh personal vision moves on to form a new company. A few years after Martha Graham broke with Denishawn, two other mainstays of that school, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, left to create a varied body of work that stressed movement initiated "from the inside out." Humphrey summed up her credo in the phrase "A movement without a motivation is unthinkable." Yet her repertoire ranged from rigorously formal exercises like Two Ecstatic Themes: Circular Descent, Pointed Ascent (1931) to humanistic "music visualizations" like Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor (1938) to socially conscious pieces like Inquest (1944). Weidman is best known for his wryly humorous pantomime in autobio¬graphical dances like And Daddy Was a Fireman (1943). Mexican-born Jose Limon, who emerged from the Humphrey-Weidman company after the Second World War, scored a success with his first major work, The Moor's Pavane (1949), which compressed the turbulent emotions of Shakespeare's Othello into the formal framework of a court dance.

Meanwhile, as modern dance's most prominent spokesperson, Martha Graham openly defied, in words and accomplishments, the primacy of ballet as the institutional center of the dance world. Her students taught the Graham technique to dancers around the world, and dancers and choreographers came from Europe, Asia, and South America to learn it .at the source. Her company was one of the first multiracial dance companies, with black, white, and Asian dancers performing together; from its ranks came an entire genera¬tion of outstanding choreographers, including Hawkins and Cunningham. Throughout her career, during which she created more than 170 dances, Graham played for the highest stakes; dancing, she wrote, "had its origin in ritual," which she defined as "the for¬malized desire to achieve union with those beings who could bestow immor¬tality." She continued to tour and make dances up until her death in 1991. The angular, austere style of her most pro¬ductive years so dominated the public perception of modern dance that it became almost a cliche: the barefoot dancer in black expressing herself on¬stage while an audience of insiders tries
bravely to figure out what it all means. But her career established once and for all that dance could be a vehicle of personal expression-not just for the dancer but for the choreographer.

Ruth St. Denis

Ruth St. Denis in Legend of the Peacock (1914). (Photograph from the archives of Jacob's Pillow, Becket, Massachusetts.)
Ruth St. Denis

St. Denis was born Ruth Dennis on a New Jersey farm in the late 1870s. Her mother was an intellectually restless woman with a strong mystical bent. Young Ruth was a natural dancer
who taught herself splits and cartwheels in imitation of circus sideshows she had seen; she also took some lessons in ballet and ballroom dancing, and her mother instructed her in the rudiments of Delsarte's "expression." One of the happiest memories of her childhood was going with her mother to a lecture¬-demonstration by Genevieve Stebbins, the American popularizer of Delsartism. Before she was out of her teens, she was working as a show girl in vaudeville, doing what were known as "skirt dances," a free-form mix of clog danc¬ing, ballet steps, and acrobatic kicks performed in a flouncy skirt with just enough leg showing to keep the interest of male spectators. She attracted the eye of Stanford White, the New York architect who fancied himself a patron of the arts, and of David Belasco, the Broadway impresario, who saw in her a potential musical-comedy star.

In 1900, while touring Europe with a Belasco production, she visited the Paris Exposition and saw Lore Fuller dance; she also saw a theater troupe from Japan that Fuller was sponsoring. The star of this troupe, Sada Yacco, made a great impression on Western audiences in her role as the homicidal dancing girl in an adaptation of the kabuki classic The Dancing Maiden at Dojo Temple. Ruth Dennis stayed with Belasco for four more years, metamorphosing into Ruth St. Denis, a name which both her moth¬er and her producer thought more suited to her rather refined stage presence. Then one spring afternoon in Buffalo, New York, she experienced a spiritual awakening while sipping an ice-cream soda with a friend in a drugstore. Opposite her on the wall was an eye- catching poster advertising Egyptian Deities, a popular brand of cigarettes; the poster showed a bare-breasted woman, who was supposed to be the goddess Isis, seated in state amid pillars and lotus blossoms. Years later Ruth St. Denis described her reaction to the poster in terms appropriate to a religious conversion:
"Here was an external image which stirred into instant consciousness all that latent capacity for wonder, that still and meditative love of beauty which lay at the deepest center of my spirit.... I identified in a flash with the figure of Isis. She became the expression of all the somber mystery and beauty of Egypt, and I knew that my destiny as a dancer had sprung alive in that moment. I would become a rhythmic and imper¬sonal instrument of spiritual revelation rather than a personal actress of comedy or tragedy. I had never before known such an inward shock of rapture."

Trying to shape her vision into a dance suitable for the stage, she recast the Egyptian goddess as Radha, Indian milkmaid and consort of the Hindu deity Krishna. A loosely defined Orientalism was in fashion during the early years of the century, and St. Denis's creation had just the right blend of sensuality and spirituality to appeal to a broad audience. In 1906 she danced as Radha in a New York variety theater and in the same society salons that had welcomed Isadora Duncan six years earlier.

A beautiful, big-framed woman with an unusually supple upper torso, St. Denis appeared as Radha wearing a gauze skirt, a bejeweled jacket that exposed more flesh than it concealed, and some bracelets and anklets; her feet were bare. Her music was from Leo Delibes's opera Lakme. According to the program notes that St. Denis wrote to explain the symbolism of her dance, Radha manipulates a series of props¬ - ropes of flowers, a string of pearls, tinkling bells, a cup of wine-to demon¬strate to the temple priests the danger¬ous lure of the senses. After succumbing to a transport of sinuous body move¬ments, high kicks, and acrobatic back bends, she swoons, renounces the life of the senses, and returns to the meditative lotus position with which the dance began. Like Duncan, St. Denis had found a model for her personal approach to the dancing body in the tradition of a culture far removed from her own experience. "As I see it," she wrote later, "the deepest lack of Western cultures is any true workable system for teaching a process of integration between soul and body."

Americans had inherited from Western Europe a set of attitudes toward dance that distinguished between ballet as a serious art and other kinds of dance as popular art. This distinction was embedded in a two-tiered institutional structure: Ballet was appreciated by a relatively small group of connoisseurs and supported by a wealthy social elite, while popular dance lived or died at the box office. Convinced that what they were doing was serious art but unwilling to accept the package of cultural and aesthetic assumptions that came with ballet, modern dancers looked beyond Europe for justification and inspiration. They were hardly alone. The interna¬tional expositions and world's fairs that were so popular from the latter decades of the nineteenth through the early decades of the twentieth century fed a widespread curiosity about the cultures of non-European societies. Encounters with the art of Africa and the music of Southeast Asia helped painters like Picasso and composers like Debussy break free from the conventions of their own history. Encounters with Greece and India did the same for Duncan and St. Denis.

The fact that renunciation plays no part in the Hindu texts about the union of Radha and Krishna did not trouble St. Denis; she was not after ethnologi¬cal authenticity but a way of bringing together onstage the two sides of her own personality-the spiritual and the sensual. Whether such selective cultural borrowing is legitimate and to what extent artists should acknowledge the cross-cultural roots of their work are questions that did not arise until much later in this century. The reverence that St. Denis showed for her Indian sources was certainly genuine.

With the money she earned dancing Radha in New York, St. Denis followed in Duncan's footsteps and embarked on a three-year tour of Europe. She was well received in France and Germany, but unlike Duncan, she became home¬sick for the United States. She returned to great acclaim, touring the country in a grand spectacle called Egypta, and per¬forming "Radha" and other Oriental¬-flavored solos for smaller audiences. Her imagination was essentially pictorial. Among her earliest dances was one called "The Incense," in which she mimed the rippling rise of smoke with a graceful spiraling motion of one arm; in "The Cobras," her arms coiled around her neck and body like charmed serpents.

To expand her repertoire she decided in 1914 to join forces with a male part¬ner and form a small dance company. The partner was Ted Shawn, a former divinity student from Kansas City whom she married in 1915; the com¬pany grew into the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts in Los Angeles (with branches around the country), which became the center of the modern dance world for the next ten years.

Shawn, twelve years younger than St. Denis, had even more eclectic tastes and a keener commercial sense. The Denishawn School offered a uniquely varied curriculum; among the types of dance taught were ballet, Spanish, Oriental, Egyptian, Greek, American Indian, geisha, creative, Delsarte, primi¬tive, and folk. During the school's hey¬day Denishawn graduates danced to music by composers ranging from Bach and Brahms to Erik Satie and Vaughan Williams; toured the country perform¬ing everything from danced "myths" to the latest ballroom steps; and appeared in early silent movies and in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York. It was through its more commercial activities that Deni¬shawn supported the serious artistic endeavors of the founders and their students. The school also trained silent ¬movie actors to move expressively for directors like D.W Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, and staged colossal costume spectacles, like the 1916 Life and After¬life in Egypt, Greece, and India, which succeeded in looking exotic and whole¬some at the same time.

After fifteen years of a tempestuous, on-again-off-again relationship, Shawn and St. Denis went their separate ways in 1931. He put together an all-male dance company to embody his lifelong conviction that "dancing is a manly sport, more strenuous than golf or tennis, more exciting than boxing or wrestling and more beneficent than gymnastics"; later he founded the Jacob's Pillow dance festival in Massa¬chusetts. She was drawn more and more to the idea of dance as devotion, as liturgy, as "a living mantra"; she began performing in churches and founded the School of Spiritual Arts. Looking back on her career, she wrote: "I had to be an Indian-a Japanese-a statue-a some¬thing or somebody else-before the public would give me what I craved." Yet she never renounced the solos that had made her famous, continuing to dance a "Radha" well into her eighties.

Sergei Diaghilev

Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (Russian: Серге́й Па́влович Дя́гилев / Sergei Pavlovich Dyagilev), also referred to as Serge, (March 31, 1872 – August 19, 1929) was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes from which many famous dancers and choreographers would later arise.

Early life and career

Sergei Diaghilev was born to a wealthy family in Selischi (Novgorod gubernia), Russia toward the end of its age of empire. He finished Perm gymnasium in 1890 year. Sent to the capital to study law at St. Petersburg University, he ended up also taking classes at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music where he studied singing and music (a love of which he had picked up from his stepmother). After graduating in 1892 he abandoned his dreams of composition (his professor, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, told him he had no talent for music). He had already entered an influential circle of artists who called themselves the Pickwickians: Alexandre Benois, Walter Nouvel, Konstantin Somov, Dmitri Filosofov and Léon Bakst. Although not instantly received into the group, Benois aided Diaghilev by developing his knowledge of Russian and Western Art. In two years, he had voraciously absorbed this new obsession (even travelling abroad to further his studies) and came to be respected as one of the most learned of the group.
With financial backing from Savva Mamontov (the director of the Bolshoi) and Princess Maria Tenisheva, the group founded the journal Mir Iskusstva (World of Art)
In 1899, Diaghilev became special assistant to Prince Sergei Mikhailovitch Volkonsky, who had recently taken over directorship of all Imperial theaters. Diaghilev was soon responsible for the production of the Annual of the Imperial Theaters in 1900, and promptly offered assignments to his close friends: Léon Bakst would design costumes for the French play Le Coeur de la Marquise, while Benois was given the opportunity to produce Sergei Taneyev's opera Cupid's Revenge.
Having taken a recent interest in the world of Ballet, Diaghilev pushed for a revival of Léo Delibes' ballet Sylvia, a favorite of Benois'. The two collaborators concocted an elaborate production plan that startled the established personnel of the Imperial Theatres. After several increasingly antagonistic differences of opinion, Diaghilev was asked to resign in 1901 and left disgraced in the eyes of the nobility. It appears that already he was known to be homosexual,[citation needed] which made him unacceptable to many of the more influential people about the court.

Ballets Russes

Diaghilev's friends stayed true, following him and helping to put on exhibitions, mounted in the name of Mir Iskusstva. In 1905 he mounted a huge exhibition of Russian portrait painting in St Petersburg, having travelled widely through Russia for a year discovering many previously unknown masterpieces of Russian portrait art. In the following year he took a major exhibition of Russian art to the Petit Palais in Paris. It was the beginning of a long involvement with France. In 1907 he presented five concerts of Russian music in Paris, and in 1908 mounted a production of Boris Godunov, starring Fyodor Chaliapin, at the Paris Opera.
This led to an invitation to return the following year with ballet as well as opera, and thus to the launching of his famous Ballets Russes. The company included the best young Russian dancers, among them Anna Pavlova, Adolph Bolm, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Adolf Bolm and Vera Karalli, and their first night on 19 May 1909 was a sensation.
During these years Diaghilev's stagings included several compositions by the late Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, such as the operas The Maid of Pskov, May Night, and The Golden Cockerel. His balletic adaptation of the orchestral suite Schéhérazade, staged in 1910, drew the ire of the composer's widow, Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova, who protested in open letters to Diaghilev published in the periodical Reč'. Diaghilev commissioned ballet music from composers such as Nikolai Tcherepnin (Narcisse et Echo, 1911), Claude Debussy (Jeux, 1913), Maurice Ravel (Daphnis et Chloé, 1912), Erik Satie (Parade, 1917), Manuel de Falla(El sombrero de tres picos,1917), Richard Strauss (Josephs-Legende, 1914), Sergei Prokofiev (Ala and Lolly, rejected by Diaghilev and turned into the Scythian Suite, and Chout, 1915), Ottorino Respighi (La Boutique Fantasque, 1918), Francis Poulenc (Les Biches, 1923) and others. His choreographer Mikhail Fokine often adapted the music for ballet. Dhiagilev also worked with dancer and ballet master Leonid Myasin (aka Massine).
The artistic director for the Ballets Russes was Léon Bakst. Together they developed a more complicated form of ballet with show-elements intended to appeal to the general public, rather than solely the aristocracy. The exotic appeal of the Ballets Russes had an effect on Fauvist painters and the nascent Art Deco style.
Perhaps Diaghilev's most notable composer collaborator, however, was Igor Stravinsky. Diaghilev heard Stravinsky's early orchestral works Fireworks and Scherzo Fantastique, and was impressed enough to ask Stravinsky to arrange some pieces by Frédéric Chopin for the Ballets Russes. In 1910, he commissioned his first score from Stravinsky, The Firebird. Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913) followed shortly afterwards, and the two also worked together on Pulcinella (1920) and Les Noces (1923).
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Diaghilev stayed abroad. The new Soviet regime, once it became obvious that he could not be lured back, condemned him in perpetuity as an especially insidious example of bourgeois decadence. Soviet art historians wrote him out of the picture for more than 60 years.
Diaghilev staged Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty in London in 1921; it was a production of remarkable magnificence both in settings and costumes, but despite being well received by the public it was a financial disaster for Diaghilev and Oswald Stoll, the theatre-owner, who had backed it. The first cast included the legendary ballerina Olga Spessivtseva. Diaghilev insisted on calling the ballet The Sleeping Princess. When asked why, he quipped, "Because I have no beauties!" The later years of the Ballets Russes were often considered too "intellectual", too "stylish" and seldom had the unconditional success of the first few seasons, although younger choreographers like George Balanchine hit their stride with the Ballet Russes.
The end of the 19th century brought a development in the handling of tonality, harmony, rhythm and meter towards more freedom. Until that time, rigid harmonic schemes had forced rhythmic patterns to stay fairly uncomplicated. Around the turn of the century, however, harmonic and metric devices became either more rigid, or much more unpredictable, and each approach had a liberating effect on rhythm, which also affected ballet. Diaghilev was a pioneer in adapting these new musical styles to modern ballet. When Ravel used a 5/4 time in the final part of his ballet Daphnis and Chloé (1912), dancers of the Ballets Russes sang Ser-ge-dia-ghi-lev during rehearsals to keep the correct rhythm.
Members of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes later went on to found ballet traditions in the United States (George Balanchine) and England (Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert). Ballet master Serge Lifar went on to revive the Paris Opera.

Personal Life

Diaghilev engaged in a number of homosexual relationships over the course of his life. His first important affair was with Dima Filasofov, his cousin, when they were both little more than adolescents; his second with Nijinsky, who had already had a homosexual laiason with a wealthy aristocrat, partly in order to help support his mother, sister, and mentally disabled brother (his father had deserted the family). Later affairs of Diaghilev were with Boris Kochno, his secretary from 1921 until the end of his life, and at least three other dancers in his ballet company,Leonide Massine, Anton Dolin, and Serge Lifar. His last love affair, possibly unconsummated, was with a young composer, Igor Markevitch, who later became a distinguished conductor and married Nijinsky's daughter Kyra. Diaghilev had a close platonic relationship with two women, Misia Sert and the dancer Karsavina, to both of whom he said he would have liked to be married.[citation needed]
Diaghilev was known as a hard, demanding, even frightening taskmaster. Ninette de Valois, no shrinking violet, said she was too afraid to ever look at him in the face. George Balanchine said he carried around a cane during rehearsals, and banged it angrily when he was displeased. Other dancers said he would shoot them down with one look, or a cold comment. On the other hand he was capable of great kindness, and when stranded with his bankrupt company in Spain during the 1914-18 war gave his last cash to Lydia Sokolova to buy medical care for her daughter. Markova was very young when she joined the Ballet Russes and would later in life say that she called Diaghilev "Sergypops" and he would take care of her like a daughter.
Diaghilev dismissed Nijinsky summarily from the Ballets Russes after the dancer's marriage in 1913. Nijinsky appeared again with the company, but the old relationship between the men was never re-established; moreover, Nijinsky's magic as a dancer was much diminished by incipient madness. Their last meeting was after Nijinsky's mind had given way, and he appeared not to recognise his former lover. Dancers such as Alicia Markova, Tamara Karsavina, Serge Lifar, and Sokolova remembered Diaghilev fondly, as a stern but kind father-figure who put the needs of his dancers and company above his own. He lived from paycheck to paycheck to finance his company, and though he spent considerable amounts at the end of his life on a splendid collection of rare books, many people noticed that his impeccably cut suits had frayed cuffs and trouser-ends. The movie The Red Shoes is a thinly disguised dramatization of the Ballet Russes.
He died in Venice, Italy, on August 19, 1929, and is buried on the nearby island of San Michele.

Ballets Russes

Léonide Massine as the Peruvian in Gaîté Parisienne, with members of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, 1942.

Mikhail Fokine

In 1907 Mikhail Folkine, (1880-1942), started to push the rules of costume in the imperial theatre. He felt that the "open parasol" look that all of the ladies wore was getting boring and pornographic, so with his Greek style ballet, Eunice, he made it look like the dancers were in bare feet, (to have bare feet or legs was against the rules of the imperial theatre), by having toes painted on the dancers' shoes. He also chose to use serious music, rather than dance music.

Sergei Diaghilev and Ballets Russes

In 1909 Sergei, (or Serge), Diaghilev, (1872-1929), created the Ballets Russes. This dance company started with strong Russian Character works. However, Le Pavillon d'Armide was the first ballet to be shown and it had a strong French influence. One of the dancers who performed in Le Pavillon d'Armide in both St. Petersburg and Paris was Vaslav Nijinsky, (1889-1950), who is known as one of the better jumpers of all time. Also presented in Paris by the Ballets Russes was a ballet formerly known as Chopiniana, because all of its music was by Chopin, but rechristened Les Sylphides, (different from La Sylphide but given a similar name because the Paris audience had recently seen La Sylphide), for the French public. Over the next several years, the Ballets Russes performed many ballets that have since become famous including Scheherazade, (1910), Firebird, (1910), and Petroucha, (1911). 4
One of the performers in Petroucha, playing a pantomime part because he was far past his dancing prime, was Enrico Checchetti, (1850-1928). Checchetti had also been known for dancing the roles of the wicked fairy Carbosse and of the Bluebird in Petipa's 1890 The Sleeping Beauty and later became famous as the creator of the Cecchetti method of teaching ballet. In 1913, Nijinsky created a new ballet called Le Sacre du Printemps, or The Rite of Spring. This ballet, set to Stravinsky's score of the same name actually had the audience fighting it was so dark in its mood.
The last major production of the Ballets Russes in Paris was in 1921 and 1922, when Diaghilev restaged Petipa's 1890 version of The Sleeping Beauty. The four month run of the show did not recoup the financial outlay of the show, and as a result it was dubbed a failure. However, The Sleeping Beauty rekindled the European audience's interest in the evening-length ballet. One young dancer and choreographer with the Ballets Russes was Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze, (1904-1983), whose name was later Frenchified to George Balanchine. He choreographed several works for the Ballets Russes, the most famous of which being Apollon Musagète in 1928, which has become a classic of the neo-classical ballets. Apollon Musagète, which later became Apollo, is a one-act ballet with a Greek look to it. After Diaghilev died Balanchine left the Ballets Russes and set out on his own for a while before ending up directing the dance company Ballets 1933. When that company folded he was invited to come to America by Lincoln Kirstein, (1907-1995). Kirstein knew almost nothing about ballet, and Balanchine know almost nothing about America, (except that it produced women like Ginger Rogers), and decided to take the offer and establish ballet in America. At this time Kirstein started his wish list of ballets he wanted to see in America; leading the list was Pocahantas.
In 1934 Balanchine established the School of American Ballet, which gave its first performance, a new piece called Serenade that same year.

20 - 50's

After the Russian Revolution ballet was saved by Anatoli Lunacharsky, the first ever People's Commissar for Enlightenment when he stated that art "creates human types and situations, which we live on from century to century and which are real to millions of people." After Lunacharsky, the Commissars allowed ballet as long as it was light and uplifting.
During the 1930s in Leningrad a ballerina made artistic director of the former Imperial Ballet, Agrippina Vaganova, (1879-1951), started to make her mark. It was in 1935 that the ballet became the Kirov Ballet. During her time as artistic director Vaganova had to deal with state regulations and do such things as change the ending of Swan Lake from tragic to uplifting. By the time the Kirov Ballet began to tour the west, Vaganova had died, however, we know her methods through her book, Fundementals of the Classic Dance, and once it was translated into English it became a "bible" of dance. In 1951, five years after her death, the Soviet government named the Leningrad Choreographic Institute after her.

Rudolf Nureyev

In 1961 the world spotlight moved to Rudolf Nureyev, (1938-1993). After Nureyev graduated from the Kirov academy he danced with the Kirov ballet, and made news around the world as the "next Nijinsky." However, when the Kirov began to organize a Paris and London tour, his offstage disregard for Soviet ideals almost kept him from going on the tour. Then, when he was the government recalled him to the Soviet Union in the middle of the tour, he instead sought political asylum in France. After defecting, Nureyev danced with Margot Fonteyn as a partner with many companies around the world, including the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet, becoming known with Fonteyn as "Rudi and Margot." Unfortunately for Nureyev, his hoped for association with Balanchine never materialized.

After 50's

Beginning in 1956, Russian ballet companies such as Bolshoi and Kirv (now the Saint Petersburg Ballet)performend in the West for the first time after the Russian revlutin. The intense dramatic feeling and technical virtuosity of the Russians made a great impact. Russian influence on ballet continues today, both through visits frm Russian companies and the activities of defecting Soviet dancers such as Rudlf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Mikhail Barishnikov.

Isadora Duncan Dance History Open Book Quiz

Name: _______________________________________

Dance History Open Book Quiz

Use your notes from the video, lecture and information from your reading, summarize Isadora Duncan’s ideas about dance and the characteristics of her work. Be as comprehensive as possible and provide as much detail as you can. Consider these questions:

• Inspirations for her movement and dances
• Her choice of music, costume and method of presentation.
• What were her dances about?
• What are some of her major influences and innovations?