New York City Ballet’s Australian tour, 1958

A recent comment posted on this website spoke of the differences between the styles of three major ballet companies visiting Australia in the mid-decades of the twentieth century: de Basil’s Ballets Russes, Ballet Rambert and New York City Ballet. The comment went on to note that perhaps the most enthusiastic attendees at New York City Ballet performances when that company first visited Australia in 1958 were those interested in stage and film musicals. The full remark about the attendees can be read in the comments section at the end of the post at this link, and it prompted me to post the small picture gallery below.

Images top row: (left) Symphony in C, (right) Stars and Stripes
Bottom row: (left) Concerto Barocco, (right) Serenade

Most of the repertoire brought to Australia by New York City Ballet was by Balanchine although works by Jerome Robbins and Todd Bolender were also included. But even looking at the small number of  images in the gallery, it is clear that the range of works was diverse. The gallery includes images of some of Balanchine’s works that might be seen as redolent of musical theatre, along with others from some of his most glorious pared-back, abstract creations.

New York City Ballet did not receive the attention in Australia that it deserved and the company was disappointed with its reception, according to Valrene Tweedie. Tweedie was a close friend of several of the dancers as a result of her decade of dancing in the Americas. She believed that New York City Ballet’s repertoire and style of dancing were way ahead of Australian audiences’ expectations at the time. Tweedie also noted that there were financial issues that caused the dancers some unhappiness. She has remarked in an oral history interview that the dancers were not able to take their salary, paid to them in Australian dollars, out of the country but had to spend it in Australia. It was the reason, she maintains, that Andre Eglevsky came but stayed only a week or so. He had a family to support in America and could not afford to spend his money on frivolous items such as souvenirs.

All the images in the gallery were taken during performance by Walter Stringer, an enthusiastic amateur photographer based in Melbourne. His photographic record of almost every dance company that performed in Melbourne between about 1940 and 1980 is of inestimable documentary value, especially given that his archive is now in public hands and so available to all for research.

Further comments, including identification of dancers in the Stringer images, are welcome. All photos are reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Australia.

Michelle Potter, 17 December 2009

Featured image: New York City Ballet in Western Symphony. Melbourne, Australian tour, 1958

Amber Scott as Aurora

When Stanton Welch’s Sleeping Beauty premiered in 2005 Amber Scott was a relatively new member of the Australian Ballet, having joined in 2001. In 2009, as a senior artist with the company, she danced the leading role of Aurora in the Australian Ballet’s revival of Welch’s work. Her appearance in this demanding role was something to be celebrated.

While in my opinion the Welch Beauty is a flawed work, scenically in particular, it nevertheless requires, as does the original version choreographed by Marius Petipa, a dancer of exceptional classical technique to perform Aurora’s solos and the various pas de deux. Welch has in fact largely retained Petipa’s choreography for Aurora’s two key scenes, that in which she dances with four potential suitors at her sixteenth birthday celebration, and that in which she dances with her Prince as the ballet comes to an end.

Scott has a classically proportioned body. Her arms in particular are long and fluid and she has an eloquent neck, which she uses to maximum advantage, and beautifully arched feet. But she also understands the essential features of the classical technique. So, as Aurora, her execution of Petipa’s centred and pure movement was articulate and a joy to behold. Her Rose Adagio was outstanding and in fact at one stage she chose not to lower her hand to one of the cavaliers so secure was her balance. Radiant, she simply stood there in attitude as that particular cavalier retired, having been acknowledged but without having had the pleasure of Aurora’s hand on his! The audience began applauding well before the end and kept it up—something I haven’t seen for some time.

Equally, Scott’s execution of the variations in all scenes showed the same attention to cleanness of execution—such beautiful unfolding of the leg in développé or, in reverse, from à la seconde to retiré, delicate hops on pointe, gorgeous arabesque line, crisp turns. Just glorious really.

What is lacking now from Scott’s interpretation, at least of this role, is maturity. She is still in the last act very much the dewy and beautiful sixteen year old on the cusp of maturity. Her more experienced colleagues in companies around the world are able to differentiate between the beginning and the end of the ballet. But time is on her side and I look forward to seeing her grow into a luminous ballerina, which appears to be her destiny.

Daniel Gaudiello also continues to impress. His Bluebird was airborne and full of idiosyncratic flutters of the arms and hands (perhaps as befits the idiosyncratic costume, especially the racing helmet headdress?). Gaudiello is blessed with a powerful stage presence and an ability to make the most of whatever choreography comes his way. Duato or Petipa—and Welch also retained much of the earlier choreography for the Bluebird—Gaudiello immerses himself into it all in an individualistic manner, which makes engrossing watching for the audience.

Michelle Potter, 14 December 2009

‘Mim’. A personal memoir of Marie Rambert. Brigitte Kelly

‘Mim’. A personal memoir of Marie Rambert: Brigitte Kelly (Alton: Dance Books, 2009). Available in Australia from Footprint Books or any good bookseller.

Marie Rambert, or Mim as she was familiarly known, brought her company, Ballet Rambert, to Australia in 1947. The company stayed until early 1949 and appeared in Adelaide, Brisbane, Broken Hill, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney with a short tour to New Zealand in May 1948. Astonishingly, they gave over 500 performances during those fifteen or so months.

Australian newspapers of the time refer to Rambert as a dynamic and somewhat unusual woman and it is clear that she enjoyed playing to the press. One clipping in a scrapbook held in the National Library of Australia shows her in a balletic pose supported by the entrepreneur Benjamin Fuller. He, somewhat portly, looks a little embarrassed. She is in her element! So it is not surprising to read in Brigitte Kelly’s absorbing memoir, Mim, sentences such as ‘She was a loose canon likely to explode in any direction’.

Marie Rambert in Australia, 1948. Photo: The Courier Mail (Brisbane). Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Australia.

Kelly writes in an easy style. It is anecdotal but full of information and it offers opinions but is not opinionated. Perhaps what comes through most strikingly is the way Rambert’s personality, and that of her husband Ashley Dukes, affected the growth of Ballet Rambert. Kelly writes: ‘The strength and weakness of Mim and Ashley lay in the fact that they wanted complete autonomy over their enterprises, an understandable wish since they could then keep control over the artistic standards they set themselves’. There were serious and ongoing consequences especially of a financial nature according to Kelly.

A jolt to the Australian story is that the company left for Australia hoping to pay off large debts with profits made on tour. They returned from Australia bankrupt. Kelly writes: ‘[T]he manager, Dan O’Connor, had disappeared taking all the money and somewhere along the line lost the costumes and scenery’.

But the book also opens up the story of Rambert in an affectionate way offering many insights that only a dancer who was personally close to the company and its directors can offer. Rambert’s career with Diaghilev is touched upon as well as her ongoing connections with Diaghilev dancers. Her life in France before moving to England makes intriguing reading. And of course the trials and tribulations of the early company from the perspective of someone who performed in those early works of Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Andree Howard, Walter Gore and others of equal note is engrossing.

Mim is a beautifully personal book. A memoir. And well worth the read.

Michelle Potter, 10 December 2009

For more about Ballet Rambert in Australia see my article published in National Library of Australia News, December 2002.

Postscript:

The author of Mim, Brigitte Kelly, came to Australia with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet on its 1938-1939 tour dancing under the name Maria Sanina. She speaks about the photo below, taken by Melbourne-based photographer Spencer Shier, in part three of her memoir ‘Dancing for joy: a memoir’ published in Dance Chronicle, 22, Nos 1, 2 & 3 (1999) saying that it represents her decision to model herself on film star Hedi Lamar. She writes ‘There was a photo call for the souvenir program. I dressed myself in the nun’s costume from the second movement of Choreartium, and when I look at the photograph the “look-alike” effect is really quite good’. (p. 362).

Maria Sanina (Brigitte Kelly) in costume for Choreartium, Covent Garden Russian Ballet, Australian tour, 1938 or 1939. Photo: Spencer Shier. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Australia

Sydney friends of the Ballets Russes. Dr Ewan Murray-Will

Dr Ewan Murray-Will (1899-1970) was by profession a dermatologist with a practice in Macquarie Street, Sydney. He studied medicine at Sydney University graduating in 1923 and followed that initial study with further work in Vienna and London. He was honorary dermatologist to a number of Sydney hospitals including Sydney Hospital, St Vincent’s Hospital and the Coast Hospital (later Prince Henry Hospital). Murray-Will also served in World War II in the Middle East and later in North Queensland and was awarded an MBE at the conclusion of the War. He was also a passionate supporter of the arts and a friend and patron of the Ballets Russes dancers who visited Australia between 1936 and 1940.

His home movies documenting performances by, and weekend activities of the dancers of the visiting Ballets Russes companies have been known in Australian dance circles since the late 1990s when they were donated to the National Film and Sound Archive. Some of this remarkable footage was used in The Ballets Russes in Australia: an avalanche of dancing, produced in 1999 by the National Film and Sound Archive and the National Library of Australia. Some was also screened in a compilation of archival footage that accompanied the National Gallery of Australia’s 1999 exhibition of Ballets Russes costumes, From Russia with love.

Perhaps the most engaging of the footage is that shot on Bungan Beach, a beach north of Sydney that even today remains relatively isolated. It is hidden from the main road and accessible only by a walking track. It was at Bungan Beach that Murray-Will regularly rented out a beach house and also regularly invited a number of the dancers to visit on weekends. Much of the beach footage is filmed in slow motion and often shows the dancers demonstrating particular steps or lifts: Paul Petroff seemed to delight in performing grands jetés en tournant the length of the beach and Tamara Toumanova and Petroff enjoyed demonstrating the now well-known ‘presages lift’ from the slow movement of Massine’s Les presages. Other material shows the Ballets Russes dancers performing excerpts from their repertoire. A beautiful clip shows Nina Golovina in a scarlet swimming costume with her long dark hair falling over her shoulders dancing with Anton Vlassoff in an excerpt from the Bluebird pas de deux from Aurora’s Wedding. Some of Murray-Will’s footage, including the ‘Bungan Ballet’ a watery spoof created by four of the dancers, is available online from the National Film and Sound Archive’s australianscreen site:
http://aso.gov.au/titles/home-movies/ballets-russes-de-monte-carlo/

But Ewan Murray-Will also bought art and moved in those Sydney circles where contemporary art was promoted and where both developments in the visual arts and the activities of the Ballets Russes were seen as part of the same attitude to contemporary creative endeavour. Murray-Will was, for example, a friend of publisher and patron of the arts Sydney Ure Smith, as Ure Smith’s collection of letters in the Mitchell Library in Sydney indicates. He was also close to Ballets Russes dancer Hélène Kirsova, whose second husband was Peter Bellew, first secretary of the Sydney branch of the Contemporary Art Society and in part responsible for securing Sidney Nolan’s commission to design Icare for Australian performances by the Original Ballet Russe in 1940. Kirsova autographed to Murray-Will a photograph of her and Igor Youskevitch in Le Carnaval with the words: ‘To Doctor Murray-Will, With my appreciation of your interest in the arts I am devoted to, Helene Kirsova, 1937’.

Hélène Kirsova and Igor Youskevitch in Le Carnaval, 1937. Photographer unknown. National Library of Australia

Ewan Murray-Will’s contribution to our knowledge of the Ballets Russes aesthetic as it was understood in Australia also includes that he collected, and then bequeathed to major institutions, paintings and drawings with a connection to the Ballets Russes. At least two designs by Alexandre Benois for Petrouchka were bequeathed by Murray-Will to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. They are a costume design for ‘Un jeune artisan ivrogne’ (A drunken young workman), a character that perhaps never appeared on stage in productions of Petrouchka, and a set design for ‘La chambre du nègre’ (The Negro’s bedroom), which is a variation on the better-known set for that scene in the ballet.

But perhaps more pertinent in the context of the influence the Ballets Russes had on Australian artists are those items bequeathed to the National Gallery of Australia by Murray-Will that are currently on display in the exhibition Rupert Bunny: artist in Paris at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. They include three oils on canvas painted in Paris between 1913 and 1920: Peleus and Thetis, The prophetic nymphs and Poseidon and Amphitrite. Any Ballets Russes influence on Bunny, best described perhaps as an expatriate Australian, came of course from Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes rather than from the touring companies that Australians saw in the years following Diaghilev’s death in 1929. The colours of Bunny’s palette in all three paintings recall the juxtapositions for which Léon Bakst became famous with his costume and set designs for Diaghilev. And the swirl of Amphitrite’s hair in Poseidon and Amphitrite, which was owned at one stage by Edouard Borovansky, recalls the decorative elements of flowing scarves and other items that feature in Bakst’s costume designs.

The most interesting of the three paintings, however, is Peleus and Thetis and, while Bunny’s colour juxtapositions may be a result of the influence of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century European artists, including Paul Gaugin, rather than, or as well as Baskt, there are nevertheless clear references to the Ballets Russes in this painting. Bunny painted Peleus with her feet and knees turned to the side as if on a frieze. Her body, however, is facing the front although her head is in profile. Such a pose clearly recalls the choreography for the nymphs in Afternoon of a Faun (1912), Vaslav Njinsky’s groundbreaking work for Diaghilev. Moreover, the angular position of Peleus’ arms, especially the way her left elbow is bent into a triangular shape as she resists Thetis’ advances, is similar to the arm positions of Nijinsky and the leading nymph in Faun as the two engage with each other before the nymph drops her scarf and flees. Even the hairstyle of Peleus recalls the wigs worn by the nymphs in the ballet, which closely fitted the head like a skull cap but had long strands of curls emerging at the back from the nape of the neck.

Ewan Murray-Will is reported to have been a reserved man. He left, however, a legacy to the arts world whose significance is probably yet to be fully explored. That legacy is largely a result of his exploits as an amateur filmmaker. But his activities as a collector of paintings and drawings, especially as they elucidate further the activities and aesthetic of the Ballets Russes in Australia and on Australians, are also of significance.

Postscript: Rupert Bunny: artist in Paris is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 21 February 2010 and then travels to Melbourne and Adelaide.

© Michelle Potter, 27 November 2009

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • Australia Dancing. ‘Dr Ewan Murray-Will’ as archived at this link
  • Benois, Alexandre-Nikolayevich. ‘Jeune artisan ivrogne’, costume study for Petrouchka, 1936, watercolour, gouache and pen and ink over pencil sketch, 32.2 x 24.8 cm sheet (irreg), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Bequest of Dr Ewan Murray-Will 1971, 11.1971
  • Benois, Alexandre-Nikolayevich. ‘The Negro’s Bedroom’, set design for Petrouchka, 1931, drawing, gouache and pen and ink over pencil sketch, 25.3 x 36.2 cm image/sheet, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Bequest of Dr Ewan Murray-Will 1971, 12.1971
  • Edwards, Deborah. Rupert Bunny: artist in Paris (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2009).
  • Potter, Michelle. ‘Mutual fascination: the Ballets Russes in Australia 1936-1940’. Brolga 11 (December 1999), pp. 7-15.
  • Turnbull, Clive. The Art of Rupert Bunny (Sydney: Ure Smith, [1949?])

Por vos muero. The Australian Ballet

The Australian Ballet’s triple bill Concord is currently in its Sydney season. It’s at the Opera House until 30 November.

Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1929 is as startling as ever, although the cast I saw did not manage to achieve the same degree of technical precision and sense of purpose that made the opening night in Melbourne this past August such a brilliant occasion. Alexei Ratmansky’s Scuola di Ballo remains pantomime for those who like their ballet that way. As for Nacho Duato’s sublime Por vos muero, it continues to give and give of itself in a way that only the very best works of art can do.

Por vos in its Australian Ballet production goes back to the directorship of Ross Stretton who introduced it to Australian audiences in 2000. Who can forget the ravishing Felicia Palanca in the leading female role in that first season? Her passion for her role knew no bounds. But then who can forget Daniel Gaudiello on opening night in Melbourne this year with his capacity to show to advantage the intricacies of Duato’s choreography?

On the second matinee of the Sydney season no dancer really stood out, which allowed the opportunity to think more about the work itself, especially its seamless yet choreographically idiosyncratic duets, its use of humour and its delicious sensuousness. In fact it sent me back to the DVD to look more closely at how Duato had structured the work and at his use of props, especially the masks in his dance for six women and his decorative screens at the back of the stage space and the way they were used by the dancers to link each section.

But in addition I turned on the DVD’s subtitles and saw for the first time an English translation of the narrator’s Spanish words. The work stands brilliantly by itself—no translation of the words is necessary to feel that it is about love and passion in their many manifestations. Duato also explains on the DVD that everyone danced in fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain: dance was not thought of as an art but simply as a way of expressing oneself on pretty much any occasion. Such a desire to dance is also inherent in the choreography without our being told. Both the words of the narrator and Duato’s explanation simply confirm what we know. Por vos is an exceptional work.

But the words of the narrator are deeply affecting. As six dancers, clothed in stripped back skin-coloured costumes, move off and give up the stage for a final solo by the leading female dancer, whose consort appears in the closing moment to enfold her in his arms, we are told:

For thee I was born/Through thee I have life/For thee I must die/And for thee I die.

Por vos is an exceptional work.

Michelle Potter, 23 November 2009

Featured image: Dancers of the Australian Ballet in Por vos muero, 2009. Photo: © Jim McFarlane.

Robert Helpmann: a rare sense of the theatre. Kathrine Sorley Walker

Robert Helpmann: a rare sense of the theatre: Kathrine Sorley Walker (Alton: Dance Books, 2009). Available in Australia from Footprint Books or any good bookseller.

Robert Helpmann is a popular subject for biographical and other writing. Apart from the fact that he was clearly a showman both on and off stage making his exploits a source of fascination, he also was quite meticulous about documenting his career. He kept scrapbooks of his early stage and film appearances and, as he became more influential in the theatrical world, gave countless interviews and appeared in many documentaries. There is much material on which to base books, articles and feature pieces. The bibliography and notes to Anna Bemrose’s biography of Helpmann, published in 2008, give some insight into the amount of material that has already been written about Helpmann. Yet writers continue to be drawn to him and his exploits and undoubtedly this situation will persist. Kathrine Sorley Walker’s Robert Helpmann: a rare sense of the theatre is the latest in this line-up of published works.

The strength of Kathrine Sorley Walker’s book is that she was in the theatre for some of Helpmann’s most significant early productions and performances. Her best writing in this book lies, therefore, in her descriptions of Helpmann’s interpretation of roles whose performances she witnessed, especially when she describes the physical aspects of those interpretations. So, for example, she writes:

‘His Don Quixote, in fact, was an interpretation of dignity and power, a very noble portrait. Speaking for myself, I was awed by his controlled action, his vivid quality of stillness. As in Rake [The Rake’s Progress] and Miracle [Miracle in the Gorbals], he brought into play his ability to convey, without any sense of strain, a tremendous emotional effect. This was done by turns of the head, half-movements, the crook of a hand, a light in the eyes, a slight tremor in the muscles of the face. In contrast, a few swift moments of dancing, a wild beating at the bars of an imaginary cage, were immensely telling’.

This is wonderful observational writing.

Similarly, Sorley Walker reminds us of the qualities of Helpmann’s partnership with Margot Fonteyn. She writes:

‘The magnificent poetry and true Romantic understanding of the Fonteyn-Helpmann partnership in Giselle has been forgotten in the wake of the eulogies about the Fonteyn-Nureyev partnership. In Act II, the dream-like fluency of the dancing, the supernatural inevitability with which they allowed the drama to unfold were so absorbing that no one would have thought of disturbing the mood by applause until the final curtain. There were neither showpiece moments nor any sense of endeavour, merely an eloquent demonstration of skilfully unified music, dance and mime’.

Sorley Walker has also made use of material in her personal collection, as well as material in collections in the United Kingdom not usually quoted or referred to in other writing. So her extracts from an unpublished article by British dance critic A.V. Coton on Helpmann’s theatrical qualities and on his value to the Australian Ballet make interesting reading. So do her comments on an unrealised film production of The Sleeping Beauty largely based on treatment details housed, Sorley Walker records, in the Theatre Museum in London.

But the book also has its frustrating elements. Some relate to the way the book has been edited. It is not an enticing book to pick up randomly for a browse prior to a possible purchase. There are 27 chapters and three appendices but none has a distinguishing heading to it. Thus there is no way of knowing by looking at the list of chapters at the beginning of the book what is contained in the text. Would it appeal to someone without a particular interest in Helpmann? Maybe not.

Other frustrations relate to the way Sorley Walker has written her reminiscence of Helpmann. The book becomes at times an account of what happened next, which sometimes has the effect of encouraging the reader to skip past some sections looking for more of the informed analysis that is the most satisfying feature of the book. More than occasionally there is also a surfeit of quotations from others. In the space of just over a page of writing on The Merry Widow, for example, there are relatively lengthy quotations from four Australian critics – John Cargher, Jill Sykes (two), Leonard Radic and Neil Jillett (two). I would rather know in more depth what Kathrine Sorley Walker as the author of the book thought, or at least as well as what Cargher, Sykes, Radic and Jillett thought.

Robert Helpmann: a rare sense of the theatre deals not just with Helpmann’s dance career, which has provided all my examples in this review. In a slim volume of 162 pages of text it also covers his work as an actor on stage and in film and deals with his personal life as well. On this latter point Sorley Walker’s writing includes references to Helpmann’s long-terms relationship with his partner Michael Benthall, to his work and friendship with Katharine Hepburn and to his relations with his Australian family.

Dance books rarely make much money for their authors or publishers, although Mao’s last dancer may be a recent exception. The advocacy of Dance Books in persisting in publishing in a difficult field is more than admirable. And the gems that Sorley Walker presents at various intervals throughout Robert Helpmann: a rare sense of the theatre, gems coming from an informed standpoint as a result of having ‘been there’, make the book a worthwhile addition to the personal libraries of those interested in the arts.

Michelle Potter, 25 October 2009

Featured image: Book cover (detail). Robert Helpmann: a rare sense of the theatre.

Helpmann book cover

Note: A review of ‘Mim’: a personal memoir of Marie Rambert, also published recently by Dance Books, will appear on this website shortly.

Travelling with Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes

Early in 1940 an article appeared in the magazine Australia. National Journal entitled ‘Ballet Business’. It was commissioned by the magazine’s editor Sydney Ure Smith, a great patron of Colonel de Basil’s touring Ballets Russes companies, and was written by Olga Philipoff. Philipoff came to Australia on the Ballets Russes tours as secretary to her father, Alexander Philipoff, executive manager for de Basil. She also acted as a kind of publicity agent for the de Basil companies and her articles and features about the Australian tours appeared in a variety of Australian newspapers and magazines and in England in the Dancing Times.

In ‘Ballet Business’ Philipoff sets out to inform the Australian public of the mechanics of moving a large company of dancers and other personnel around the world. She discusses, for example, the various lists that needed to be presented to customs and immigration officials on arrival in a foreign country and the procedures that were necessary when leaving the country.

She describes the kind of containers used for different items and notes that the de Basil companies carried their own library of ‘several hundred volumes, mostly Russian classics’. She discusses finances, including salaries and advances, taxes, royalties and costs of productions. And she notes day to day expenses including the laundering and repair of costumes and the supply of shoes to the dancers:

‘The next important question concerns the ballet shoes. It is always a point of disagreement between the assistant regisseur, who distributes them, and the dancers. Ballet shoes are very expensive and very difficult to get. In a performance that includes two or three ballets on toes the leading dancers require two pairs per night, between 50 and 60 per month – and then they often claim for more. The spinning, the fouettes and tours especially are very severe on shoes.’

Reading the letters of dancers on the tours provides an interesting counterpoint to Philipoff’s business account. Most collections of letters that relate to the Australian tours by the Ballets Russes, and that survive in public collections, begin by talking of the weather, company gossip and shipboard activities and shore excursions on the long journey to Australia from the northern hemisphere. Elisabeth Souvorova, a corps de ballet dancer with the Monte Carlo Russian Ballet on its tour to Australia in 1936-1937, gives a graphic account in one letter to her mother of a dramatic falling out between two of the company’s principal dancers:

‘There has been a terrific to do,’ Souvorova writes from Adelaide in October 1936. ‘[Valentina] Blinova has finally left [Valentin] Froman – he tried to throw her into the sea from the boat, but Léon [Woizikowsky] stopped him. He then went to her cabin and threw all her clothes out of the porthole, silver foxes, jewels and all’.

Elisabeth Souvorova (right) and an unidentified dancer as Nursemaids in Petrouchka, Monte Carlo Russian Ballet, 1936 or 1937. Photo: Athol Shmith. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Australia

From Australia the dancers wrote home of their successes on stage, the trials of finding lodgings in the cities they visited, the local flora and fauna and the behaviour of Australians, which was often perceived to be alternately gauche and generous.

In another letter from Adelaide written in October 1936 Souvorova describes a picnic excursion:

‘Sunday we went on a picnic, about fifteen people in six cars, with various people I had never met! We went to the most lovely place in the mountains, and I have never seen so many fruit trees and wild flowers – and even paraqueets [sic] flying about. We had a marvellous lunch. They built fires and grilled chops and sausages, and [we] ate until we nearly died’.

She also recalls a business dispute over salaries and contracts, and suggests to her mother that the ‘management’ was attempting to underpay the dancers. She wrote a little later that ‘the financial question is finally settled – with the aid of Miss Deane we are to receive new contracts this afternoon [25 October 1936] with the correct amount (₤28.15.0 in Australian pounds) definitely stipulated’.

Letters from another dancer, Harcourt Algeranoff, cover similar topics. But Algeranoff also had his own distinctive interests and focus. He carried a typewriter and a gramophone (with a collection of vinyl recordings) with him as he set off for Australia in August 1938 for the tour by the Covent Garden Russian Ballet. He used the typewriter for many of his letters home, but he no doubt also used it for many of the articles and broadcasts on dance he was constantly preparing. Algeranoff regularly sent money to his mother in London and was always looking for extra work teaching, writing and broadcasting to supplement his salary as a dancer.

Algeranoff also used his typewriter to further his interests in Japanese and Indian dance forms. In another letter written from on board the ship to Australia he writes to his mother: ‘I’ve got all my notes typed out from the Indian Myth and Legend – an awful job – and so that book will now be able to be returned to it’s [sic] owner (the first inroad on the cardboard box)’.

Algeranoff in costume for a Japanese dance, ca. 1940. Unknown photographer. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Australia.

As for his gramophone, he writes:

‘Please tell Julia the gramophone is a great blessing. Had I not had it with me I should probably [have] forgotten completely the Japanese dance Ūguré which I learnt the year before last. I’m also doing some improvization to the other records, although there’s not much space in my cabin.’

Even Algeranoff’s accounts of shore visits often relate to his intensive focus on dance matters. While he writes of the colour and bustle of bazaars, the need to fend off pedlars and guides, the heat of the Red Sea and so on, on many of his shore visits he particularly notes local dance activities. While on an excursion to Kandy from Colombo where the ship was docked in September 1938 he writes:

‘Further on on our journey we met the most lovely procession, elephants in coloured trappings and gold, musicians, and dancers who thrilled me more than anything I’ve seen since Elektra. I don’t know how I managed to restrain myself from dancing with them…I remember some of the steps so shall be able to show you when I come home.’

Olga Philipoff’s article paints a straightforward picture of company life beyond what she describes as the ‘harmony and beauty’ of the performance. Souvorova and Algeranoff remind us of the individual personalities behind the ‘harmony and beauty.’

© Michelle Potter, 13 October 2009

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • Olga Philipoff,  ‘Ballet Business’. Australia National Journal, Autumn issue, No 4 (March-May, 1940), pp. 40-46; 94.
  • Maroussia Richardson Collection, National Library of Australia, MS 9915, Series 1, Items 31-33. http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms9915
  • Papers of Harcourt Algeranoff, National Library of Australia, MS 2376, Series 1.1, Folder 15, Items 564, 568, 572. http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms2376

Peggy! The Australian Ballet in 2010

When the Australian Ballet announced its 2010 season in September 2009, one of the most appealing aspects of the year long program was the prospect of a tribute season called Peggy! The ‘Peggy’ of the title is of course the Australian Ballet’s inaugural artistic director, Dame Peggy van Praagh. The program features works with which she is closely associated in some way and is also a centenary celebration of her birth in 1910. Peggy! will be seen only in Melbourne in eleven performances between 25 June and 5 July 2010.

Perhaps the most interesting of the works on the program is a pas de deux choreographed by Dame Peggy in 1973, which she made to be inserted into Act I of her 1965 production of Giselle. The pas de deux is not well known. Recent Australian Ballet audiences are probably more familiar with Maina Gielgud’s production of Giselle, which she first staged for the Australian Ballet in 1986. Van Praagh’s  pas de deux does not appear in this production. The Gielgud production remained a mainstay of company repertoire throughout Gielgud’s reign as artistic director and beyond. After leaving the company at the end of 1996, Gielgud returned ten years later in 2006 to stage it once more for the Australian Ballet. The van Praagh production of Giselle, with its distinctive pas de deux, was revived briefly by Ross Stretton for the Australian Ballet in 2001, but has not been staged since.

In a program note for the 1973 season, the company’s then musical director, John Lanchbery, wrote: ‘As a novelty there is a new pas de deux for Giselle and Albrecht in Act I which I have orchestrated and adapted from Soviet sources’. The pas de deux is rather more than the ‘novelty’ of Lanchbery’s note, unless one considers that Lanchbery was using the term in its less popular sense of ‘something new’. It is certainly not a ‘decorative trinket’, to use the word in its more popular sense. Choreographically, its Cecchetti-inspired use of epaulement and its light as a feather jumps are a delight, as is its denouement into its final, charming pose. Dramatically, it serves to establish early on, and in more depth than is usual in other productions, the relationship between Giselle and Albrecht. It also anticipates their Act II pas de deux and, as a result, the dramatic tension of the work is heightened when the Act II pas de deux is performed.

Marilyn Jones and Johnathon Kelly in the van Praagh pas de deux from Giselle. The Australian Ballet, 1973. Photograph reproduced by courtesy of  the Australian Ballet

Van Praagh’s biographer notes that, while she could probably not be considered a choreographer in her own right, she was adept at ‘imitating a choreographic style in the mode of either Petipa, Bournonville or Cecchetti’. This is probably true, but it is sad in many ways to be seeing the van Praagh Giselle pas de deux out of context. Its charm, however, makes it worth seeing, even as a kind of divertissement.

The Peggy! program also includes a staging of Antony Tudor’s 1938 ballet Gala Performance, in which Van Praagh created the role of the Russian ballerina. She also staged the work on various companies and her choreographic notes from her staging for the Royal Swedish Ballet in 1957 exist in her collection of papers at the National Library of Australia. They can be seen online at this link.

Peggy! also includes the Garland Dance from van Praagh’s 1973 production of The Sleeping Beauty, made in conjunction with Robert Helpmann, the pas de deux from Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella and Mark Annear’s work from 2004, Birthday Celebration.

© Michelle Potter, 29 September 2009

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

  • Christopher Sexton, Peggy van Praagh: a life of dance (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985)

Michel Fokine’s Paganini. Bernard Smith’s unique interpretation

Michel Fokine choreographed and rehearsed his ballet Paganini in Australasia during the 1938-1939 tour by the Covent Garden Russian Ballet. He did not succumb to the suggestion, however, that the ballet be performed in practice clothes so that its world premiere could occur in Australia. He set this decision out in a letter to his friend Sergei Rachmaninoff, to whose music Paganini is set. The letter is reproduced, in part and undated, in Memoirs of a Ballet Master:

‘The ballet was completely choreographed and very well performed in Australia. There was such a demonstration of interest that the management evolved the mad idea of presenting the ballet without costumes and scenery!

Knowing that very often the scenery, and especially the costumes, hamper the dancers, that much that goes well at rehearsals, in practice costumes, gets lost when presented on the stage, I would have welcomed the idea. But in this particular ballet, many dances, if given without the necessary masks and props, without the lighting effects, without the platform, and so on, could not possibly be understood. Therefore I declined this suggestion …’

Paganini was eventually given its Australian premiere in Sydney on 30 December 1939 on the opening night of the third Ballets Russes tour, that by the Original Ballet Russe. This was just six months after the work’s world premiere in London on 30 June 1939. Australian performances of Paganini were foreshadowed by Arnold Haskell writing in 1939 in the Sydney Ure Smith publication Australia. National Journal. Haskell noted that the company was ‘at home’, that is in London, but awaiting a return to Australia. He updated Australian readers on additions to the company and on particular successes achieved during the London season. He reported that Paganini had been ‘the greatest popular success for many years’ but went on to comment that he, personally, was not impressed. He wrote:

‘Its craftsmanship is certain, in one dance set for Riabouchinska, it is vintage Fokine, but the rest seems to have come out of the stockpot of romantic paraphernalia, banished by Fokine himself in “Les Sylphides”. There is the same theme as in Symphonie Fantastique, the battle between good and evil, but it compares to that Ballet as a print from a Victorian Keepsake does to a painting by Jerome Bosch. Soudeikine’s decor greatly detracts. It is at times of a chocolate box sweetness, and the costumes are still worse. Tactful lighting greatly helped here. It is, at any rate, a pleasant spectacle, but somehow I expect more from the Russians.’

Dimitri Rostoff as Paganini with artists of the Original Ballet Russe in Paganini, Australian season, 1940 (detail). Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Australia

Paganini was, nevertheless, also an enormously popular ballet in Australia. It was given 55 performances during seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. In terms of numbers of performances it was outperformed only by Aurora‘s Wedding (56 performances), Swan Lake Act II (58 performances), and Graduation Ball and Les Sylphides (69 performances each). The initial critical response in Australia was, however, a little lukewarm. The anonymous critic for The Sydney Morning Herald also noted the similarities with Massine’s Symphonie fantastique, and commented that the Massine work was ‘the greater masterpiece by reason of its more elemental, almost seismic release of emotion’. The critic also commented on the orchestral playing noting in particular the impact of the short rehearsal time that had been available to the musicians. But while he (or she) noted that Paganini ‘as a spectacle … provides half an hour of daring, thunderous beauty’ he was unhappy with ‘the obviousness, and at times extravagance, of the symbolism that is employed’.

But perhaps the most interesting interpretation by an Australian came from Bernard Smith. Smith was 23 when he saw Paganini in 1940 and was at the beginning of a long and distinguished career as an art historian and teacher. His interest in the ballet may have been sparked by his interest at the time in surrealism and what he called ‘all the various modernisms’ that were being debated in Sydney art circles. And the Ballets Russes performances certainly offered those interested in these ‘various modernisms’ the opportunity to see first hand examples in the company’s sets and costumes. The repertoire of the Original Ballet Russe as presented in Australia included works with designs by Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miro, André Masson and Natalia Goncharova, all then at the forefront of one ‘ism’ or another.

Smith was also a friend of Sydney Ure Smith, whose patronage of the Ballets Russes through his various publications is well known, and Peter Bellew, the second husband of Ballets Russes dancer Hélène Kirsova. At the time he was also reading widely from a range of Marxist and other left wing texts and by his own admission was ‘a very active young member of the Communist Party’. Given his artistic and political leanings, then, the tenor of his discussion of Paganini in an unpublished, typescript entitled ‘ “Paganini”, notes after attending the Monte Carlo Diaghilev Ballet in Sydney 1940’ is perhaps predictable. It is, nevertheless, somewhat startling and certainly unique in its point of view. It reads in part:

‘The ballet “Paganini” is one of those works of art which are created to satisfy the “soul-hunger” of the creator or as in this case of the creators. It satisfies a double wish-fulfillment; the desire of the creators, Fokine and Rachmaninoff to hearken back to a Golden Age when there were no class differences and the completely contradictory desire to captivate the hearts (and money) of the bourgeoisie as Paganini did.

The second scene is a feudalist-bourgeois conception of the people, of lovers in an ideal pastoral world, where there are no class barriers … The “people” of the second scene are not the mass of the people at all, they are only the idealised conception of what the bourgeois would look like if they could forget that their own freedom depended upon the slavery of others’.

Smith’s use of the word ‘Diaghilev’ in the name of the company he saw is, of course, erroneous, but his unpublished critique of Paganini offers further evidence that the Ballets Russes visits to Australia inspired a wide range of people working across the arts, and also that they prompted a wide range of responses.

© Michelle Potter, 24 September 2009

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

  • Arnold Haskell, ‘The Covent Garden Russian Ballet’. Australia. National Journal, No. 2, 1939, p. 4.
  • “Paganini”, notes after attending the Monte Carlo Diaghilev Ballet in Sydney 1940, unpublished typescript. Papers of Bernard Smith, National Library of Australia, MS 8680 Box 1, Folder 5, Item 5.
  • Michel Fokine, Memoirs of a Ballet Master. Trans. Vitale Fokine. Ed. Anatole Chujoy (London: Constable, 1961).
  • Oral history interview with Bernard Smith recorded by Hazel de Berg, 20 November 1975. National Library of Australia, TRC 1/888-889.
  • ‘Summer: Exhibit A: Bernard Smith—changing the way we see’. Julie Copeland in conversation with Terry Smith and Peter Beilharz. Sunday Morning, Radio National, 22 January 2006. Transcript, accessed 23 January 2009.

The Oracle. Meryl Tankard

19 september 2009, The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Spring Dance

The Oracle, Meryl Tankard’s work set to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, is a triumph. A solo work for Paul White, who dances with astonishing physicality and intensity, it is an example of how affecting a work can be when the creative team has a strongly shared vision and works single-mindedly to bring that vision into being. The Oracle was visually and choreographically focused and articulate. It moved from section to section as relentlessly as the music until it reached its dramatic conclusion.

Paul White in The Oracle. Photo: © Régis Lansac, 2009

Tankard’s choreography, with shared credit to White on the program, moved between small and intricate movements of the hands and fingers and even of the tongue, which required sensitivity of the smallest body part, and movements that demanded that White fling himself through the air, while always maintaining absolute control of the whole body as it hurtled through space. Introverted movements, sometimes executed with the dancer’s back to the audience or with his head shrouded in a chocolate-coloured length of velvety cloth, contrasted with steps of exceptional virtuosity, exuberance and extroversion. Some sections were acrobatic — at one stage White walked on his hands — others had a strong classical feel. This choreography required an extraordinarily versatile performer and White’s performance was quite simply a tour de force.

Tankard assembled The Oracle following the structure of the Stravinsky score but, in her hallmark manner, it was built on multiple layers of meaning and allusion. There were emotive links to Nijinsky, who first gave choreographic expression to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913. They were noticeable in some of the choreographic phrases, which seemed to refer back to Nijinsky’s movement phrases created for his own Rite of Spring. They were also noticeable in those moments when White seemed to be lost in a surreal world, which recalled Nijinsky’s descent into mental illness in the later years of his life. There were allusions to Martha Graham’s well known work, Letter to the World, in which she used her long skirt to give extra shape and form to her choreography. White used that long, chocolate-coloured swathe of velvet not this time to cover his head but as a skirt tied to his waist. He made it swirl through the air as he cart-wheeled and jumped and manipulated it across the floor as he slithered and twisted. The work drew on other sources of inspiration from the work of Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum to Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. But The Oracle is absolutely Tankard’s own. One of her great strengths as a choreographer is to make references while maintaining an individual integrity.

Regis Lansac, working again with Tankard as he has done over many years on set and video design, created an opening video sequence to a soundscape of whistling and other mechanical sounds and a recording of Magnificat by the Portuguese composer of the baroque period, João Rodrigues Esteves. This sequence picked up on aspects of the choreography and on images of White and manipulated both to explore a different view of the human body. It seemed also to set up a dance of its own that moved from the figurative to the abstract and back again melding and confusing the two ideas. At times throughout the piece Lansac’s projections and video sequences provided an evocative background. At other times they became essential to the unfolding of the dance, especially in those moments when White encountered his image on the backcloth and needed to contend with what he saw.

The Oracle was lit by Damien Cooper and Matt Cox. Highlights included the Rembrandt-esque lighting of White’s face, arms and legs in the opening moments; the expanding and contracting circle of light around whose circumference White made a slow and tentative progression; and the breathtaking closing moment as White, centre stage, jumped high into the air as a shaft of brilliant light closed down upon him.

Paul White in The Oracle. Photo: © Régis Lansac, 2009

The Oracle shows the collaborative work of Tankard and Lansac at its best. It is an awesome piece of dance and theatre and was received with well deserved shouts of bravo and a standing ovation at both performances I attended.

Michelle Potter, 21 September 2009