Tatiana Stepanova (1924-2009)

Tatiana Stepanova, who arrived in Australia in December 1939 with the third of Colonel de Basil’s touring Ballets Russes companies—the Original Ballet Russe—died late last year in Florida. The company’s Australian debut was in Sydney on 30 December 1939 and on that night Stepanova danced in Les Sylphides and was partnered by Serge Lifar. Her performance was noted as an ‘astonishing debut’ by ‘a sixteen-year old girl, who had never before had a leading part’. One reviewer applauded her ‘floating serenity’ and ‘technical fearlessness’.

But even before she had set foot onstage in Australia, news of a potential star was being reported by the Australian press. The Orcades, on which a large contingent of company members had travelled from London, docked first in Fremantle, Western Australia, and The Argus newspaper reported from there that Stepanova was said ‘to show promise of surpassing Pavlova’. De Basil was recorded as saying ‘She is the kind of dancer one finds once in 50 years. She has created a sensation in Europe’.

Stepanova also appeared in early performances of David Lichine’s Graduation Ball, which had its world premiere in Sydney on 1 March 1940. She danced the Sylphide in the divertissement ‘The Sylphide and the Scotsman’ partnered by Michael Panaieff. She did not created this role—opening night was given to Natasha Sobinova and Paul Petroff, but cast sheets indicate that Stepanova danced it at least as early as 5 March. A number of photographs of her as the Sylphide were shot by Melbourne-based photographer Hugh P. Hall and many show the expressiveness of her upper body and her long and exquisite line.

Hugh P. Hall, Tatiana Stepanova and Michael Panaieff in ‘The Sylphide and the Scotsman’, *Graduation Ball*, Original Ballet Russe, Melbourne. National Library of Australia.

An obituary of Stepanova appeared earlier this month on the ballet.co.uk site. It was written by Renee Renouf Hall who had also been working with Stepanova on her memoirs.

UPDATE: Unfortunately the link to this obituary is no longer available

© Michelle Potter, 28 January 2010

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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

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)

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

Merce Cunningham (1919-2009)

Merce Cunningham’s death on 26 July 2009 in Manhattan brings to a close an astonishing life in dance. Cunningham once said, ‘I didn’t become a dancer, I have always been dancing.’ His remarkable career is a testament to a man who has not only always been dancing, but who has always been pushing the boundaries of dancing, including the boundaries of how it is perceived, fashioned and presented.

In 2007 I was in the exceptionally fortunate position of being co-curator of an exhibition, ‘INVENTION: Merce Cunningham and collaborators’, for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. I was able to work with David Vaughan, revered archivist of the Cunningham company, to liaise with others in the company over selection of items, media activities and the creation of a new work to be performed as part of the exhibition. I also participated with Cunningham, Vaughan and the third curator, Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, in the media call, presenting to the audience on the key concepts behind the exhibition.

The following images are from INVENTION. They indicate in just a small way the extent of Cunningham’s engagement with artists from across a wide creative spectrum as he went about his daily activity of dancing.

Michelle Potter, 29 July 2009

Photos: Neville Potter, 2007

Jan Fabre—beyond choreography

The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp has one room devoted to sculptures that mostly allude to the past, in many cases to classical antiquity. At first glance the room appears to be simply that—a place where smooth, white marble pieces speak of a period long past. But, suspended in one corner of the room is Bruges 3003 by Jan Fabre and when one’s eyes alight upon it one is quickly jolted out of one’s comfort zone.

Photo: Attilio Maranzano. © Angelos. Reproduced with permission.

Bruges 3003 was made in 2002, and its title thus anticipates a millennium (plus a bit more). It has an alternative title—’Monk with bones’—and is made from metal wire, human bones and animal bones. One commentator has indicated that Fabre explained these monks’ robes (and there are others in addition to the one hanging now in Antwerp) as ‘representative of a spiritual body, a kind of exoskeleton’. With their use of human remains they also pursue Fabre’s long standing and ongoing interest in the body in all possible forms.

Photo: Muriel Aussens. © Angelos. Reproduced with permission.

Fabre has installed his work in a fashion similar to the Antwerp hang on previous occasions, notably in an exhibition in the Louvre in Paris in 2008 when various of his art works were hung alongside works by artists from the Flemish and Dutch schools, including Rembrandt and Rubens. Such hangs have not always drawn positive comments, with the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro commenting of this 2008 show ‘…. why this mania to bring this farce into classical museums, and in particular the Louvre?’

But with his juxtapositions Fabre, who is widely known to the Australian dance community as a choreographer—perhaps more so than as a visual artist, sets up a dialogue between the old and the new, between past, present and future. The room in Antwerp becomes something of a moveable and certainly a theatrical experience. It allows the mind to jump between time periods in a spontaneous way. A viewing is a singular joy, as are the thoughts that arise from a viewing, even down to the movement back and forth contained in the numerical palindrome of the title Bruges 3003.

Michelle Potter, 24 July 2009

Fred and Ginger in Prague

Fred and Ginger building, Jiraskuv bridge, central Prague, designed and built between 1992 and 1996 Architects: Frank Gehry with Vlado Miluni

Familiarly called Fred and Ginger after that acclaimed dancing couple Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or the Dancing House and sometimes the Drunken House, officially the Rasin building (Nationale-Nederlanden building, Rašínovo nábreží 80, 120 00 Praha 2).

Images: (l-r, top row) Fred and Ginger by day; Mainly Ginger; Mainly Fred;
(l–r, bottom row) Fred’s dome—close-up; Ginger’s legs; Fred and Ginger by night. All photos by Michelle Potter

Michelle Potter, 22 June 2009

Featured image: Looking at Ginger from Fred

Royal Cambodian Ballet

In early 2008 the Royal Cambodian Ballet was scheduled to tour Holland, France and Slovenia. This picture gallery briefly documents a ceremony held on 20 March 2008 in an open theatre space close to the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh at which offerings were made and blessings sought prior to this tour.

All photos by Michelle Potter, March 2008.

Michelle Potter, 18 June 2009

Khmer Dance Project

In March 2008 I was generously funded to travel to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to help set up a project to record the stories of older Cambodian classical dancers who had had major careers with the Royal Cambodian Ballet in the decades before the infamous regime of Pol Pot. They had survived that regime, and were now passing on their knowledge to younger dancers.

The photos published here were taken during that week in Phnom Penh. They record the process of filming an interview with one of those dancers, Em Theay, a vibrant and dynamic woman in her seventies. Em Theay was interviewed by Hun Pen in the early morning of 22 March 2008 outside the National Museum. Em Theay’s generosity in sharing her knowledge and her passion for her art form shine through every photograph.