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.

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

Further material relating to Nina Verchinina’s marriage

In a letter written on 11 May 1934 to his mother, Alice Essex, in London the dancer Harcourt Algeranoff wrote:

‘Nina Verchinina is engaged to an American. I believe a rich one.’

The letter was written from Barcelona where Algeranoff was performing with Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.

Read the full letter

All posts on Verchinina

Michelle Potter, 12 September 2009

Dandré-Levitoff Russian Ballet. Perth, Australia, 1935

The visit to Australia by the Dandré-Levitoff Russian Ballet between 1934 and 1935 has largely been overlooked by Australian dance writers. Coming after the second visit by Anna Pavlova in 1929 and before the momentous Monte Carlo Russian Ballet visit of 1936 –1937, it was much shorter than either of those two tours. It lasted just three and a half months. Led by Victor Dandré, Anna Pavlova’s manager and common law husband, and the international impresario Alexander Levitoff, the company performed in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.

It is the Perth season that is particularly interesting because the well known historian of early Australian ballet, Edward Pask, makes no mention of Perth. In his book, Enter the Colonies, Dancing, he writes that the company’s farewell performance in Australia was in Melbourne on 31 December 1934 and that on the following day the dancers sailed for London on the Strathnaver. So, a photograph acquired by the National Library of Australia in 2006 as part of the archive of photographer Axel Poignant raises more than one question. The photograph came with the curious title on acquisition of ‘Final curtain of Boris Godunov Ballet performed at the Perth theatre, Dandré’s company, 19 January 1935’.

Perth did indeed see the Dandré-Levitoff company. The Strathnaver left Melbourne for London on 1 January 1935 and sailed via Adelaide and Fremantle. There is no doubt the dancers were on board — on 2 January Algeranoff, a dancer with the company, wrote to his mother in London from on board the Strathnaver. That letter survives. But, when the ship docked in Fremantle early on the morning of 7 January, the dancers disembarked. Only Levitoff did not arrive in Western Australia by sea: he travelled by train taking the Great Western Express. He passed through Kalgoorlie on 3 January when it was reported that he was travelling ahead in order ‘to make arrangements for a large orchestra and prepare the stage for the ballet’s appearance in Perth’. The West Australian noted the arrival of the company at the theatre when ‘Halstead’ wrote on 8 January of ‘a large van discharging suit-cases, cabin trunks and immense wooden boxes’ in King Street, Perth.

Advertisements, articles and reviews that appeared in The West Australian during the first few weeks of January 1935 make it clear that the company performed for eleven nights and gave four matinee shows. It presented three separate programs beginning on 8 January and finishing on 19 January. There were program changes on 14 and 17 January. The ‘Perth theatre’ given in the title of the National Libary’s image was His Majesty’s, still in existence in King Street, and the home now of West Australian Ballet. The name of the company as it appeared on programs for the Perth season was the Russian Classical Ballet and the company was presented in Perth by entrepreneur Benjamin Fuller.

However, there was never a ballet in the Dandré-Levitoff repertoire entitled ‘Boris Godunov’ and looking closely at the National Library’s image it is clearly Michel Fokine’s Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. The company had already successfully staged this work in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and in Perth it was part of the second program which opened on 14 January and finished on 16 January. The West Australian critic, ‘Fidelio’, wrote of the Perth staging that it was ‘exciting and vital’. His review included the following:

‘…a camp of a savage Tartar tribe (the Polovstzians) in olden-time Russia, with tents, the red glow of a fire, and, in the distance, smoke smudging an angry evening sky … Men leap and twirl, fling their bows into the air and catch them as they fall. The gyrating lines of figures interlace [and] recede as though a human tide, to surge forward at the end in a final wild triumph of physical, rhythmic energy, arms uplifted.’

The National Library image is accompanied by a slip of paper with the handwritten inscription ‘January 19 1935, Mr Axel Poignant in remembrance of his very successful work for the Russian Ballet Company’ and is signed by Dandré and company members. The date 19 January is the last night of the Perth season when the company appears to have made a presentation to Poignant. As the inscription is on a separate slip of paper, it is not absolutely clear if the presentation was of the image from Polovtsian Dances, or even what the relationship is between the image and the slip of paper. Would the company be presenting Poignant’s own image back to him? And what was his very successful work for the Russian Ballet company? Is there an as yet undiscovered archive of Poignant images from the Dandré-Levitoff season in Perth? Questions remain.

Open the link to see the Axel Poignant image

(Note – 16 September 2009: The title of this image in the National Library’s catalogue has now been changed to reflect more accurately what is represented).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Russian ballet. Revival of classicism’. The West Australian, 4 January 1935, p. 18.
‘Halstead’, ‘Stars of the Russian ballet. Famous dancers of many lands’. The West Australian, 8 January 1935, p. 3.
‘Fidelio’, ‘Russian ballet. Vivid contrasts. The classic and the barbaric’. The West Australian, 15 January 1935, p. 14.
‘Letters to Alice Essex’. Papers of Harcourt Algeranoff, National Library of Australia, MS 2376, Series 1, Item 456.
Programs, ‘Russian Ballet Company’, National Library of Australia, PROMPT Collection.
Edward H. Pask, Enter the Colonies, Dancing (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979).