Behind the Scenes at the Ballets Russes

Stories from a Silver Age

Michael Meylac, Rosanna Kelly

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781780768595
• eBook ISBN: 9781786722058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: History

The Ballets Russes was perhaps the most iconic, yet at the same time mysterious, ballet company of the twentieth century. Inspired by the unique vision of their founder Sergei Diaghilev, the company gained a large international following. In the mid-twentieth century – during the tumultuous years of World War II and the Cold War – the Ballets Russes companies kept the spirit and traditions of Russian ballet alive in the West, touring extensively in America, Europe and Australia. This important new book uncovers previously-unseen interviews and provides insights into the lives of the great figures of the age – from the dancers Anna Pavlova and Alicia Markova to the choreographers Leonide Massine, George Balanchine and Anton Dolin. The dancers' own words reveal what life was really like for the stars of the Ballets Russes and provide fascinating new insights into one of the most vibrant and creative groups of artists of the modern age.

PART I

THE BALLETS RUSSES

An Introduction

Not so long ago, Countess de Ségur, who was related to the Russian princely Rostopchin family, was alive and well in Paris, and she recounted to me how in her childhood she used to be taken to the ‘Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghileff ’ matinees. In my own childhood I had the opportunity to see Serge Lifar and, in my youth, George Balanchine. As an adult I held conversations with Alexandra Danilova and Tamara Geva (Zheverzheieva), both of whom, accompanied by Balanchine, fled Soviet Russia and joined Diaghilev in 1924. In London in 2004, six months before her death, I met the last living Diaghilev ballerina, Dame Alicia Markova, who had started dancing for him as a 13-year-old. Nearly 100, she had kept her charm and elegance and that somewhat capricious smile, like the one described by Proust in his portrayal of the actress La Berma (Sarah Bernhardt). I made several tape recordings with her, but it proved impossible to put them into the narrative; in answer to any question she really began ab ovo – from the first childhood recollections about how every Sunday her father would carry her on his shoulders to watch a football match in the London borough where they lived. However, I remember her words, ‘Though we were paid so little, I thought how privileged I was to be working with such remarkable people.’

In his splendid book Speaking of Diaghilev, John Drummond included his talks with the remaining Sergei Diaghilev dancers and associates who were still alive in the 1960s. In the 1990s, without yet knowing his book, I happened to do something similar with the next, post-Diaghilev generation, although I also had the good fortune to interview Diaghilev’s prima ballerina Danilova, as well as Tamara Geva, and to have Rachel Cameron’s unique memoir of her relationship with Tamara Karsavina.

Three years after Diaghilev’s death, the Ballets Russes were reborn, with many of the same artists, including the younger choreographers Balanchine and Léonide Massine, and Mikhail Fokine – the veteran who, as well as Diaghilev’s irreplaceable régisseur Serge Grigoriev, remained with the company for another 20 years. The older Diaghilev dancers would gradually be replaced by younger ones, prepared by the Russian ex-stars of the Imperial Ballet, who, in exile, opened schools in the European capitals.

Many of those remarkable people had been half-forgotten when, in 2000, UNESCO organised a conference in New Orleans to which they invited 70 Ballets Russes dancers (many of whom were over 80 years old). They came together from Brazil and Venezuela, from Europe, Australia and the USA. Several moments from this reunion, followed by master classes for young dancers, were captured in the richly documented, two-hour film Ballets Russes, which came out in December 2005 and is available on DVD.

I myself had entered the Ballets Russes world years earlier and through a back door. Ballet is ephemeral in its very essence and the Ballets Russes, having faded into the past so long ago, seemed to me somehow all the more impenetrable and unreachable. But once, on a visit to London in 1989, one of my friends introduced me to Irina Baronova, by whom I was enchanted and who advised me to meet Tamara Tchinarova, her onetime ballet companion. With no special aim, I recorded my conversations with the two venerable dancers.

This led to meetings with their former colleagues scattered around the world and destined to find a place in this book, where they come together again. Thus, new ties sprang up. I began my personal research, immersing myself deeply in their era. This book is a record of conversations I was able to have with the last living dancers of the post-Diaghilev Ballets Russes, whose voyages around the globe had influenced and shaped so much of the world’s ballet.

The majority of veterans willingly shared their reminiscences with me. More reserved was Marjorie Tallchief. The only taciturn interviewee was Vladimir Dokoudovsky, nicknamed Duke in the Ballets Russes, who later became a lionised ballet teacher. When I visited him at his studio in New York I found a very tired, chain-smoking old gentleman, almost mechanically giving commands to a few shapeless housewives, evidently striving to become ballerinas. Obviously it was doing neither him nor them any good. Still, I had other, more rewarding encounters in America, such as seeing Tatiana Leskova in San Francisco the day after the premiere of her revival of Massine’s Présages. Alas, I never met the choreographer and répétiteur John Taras; nor Nicholas Beriozoff and Sasha Kalioujny, danseurs nobles; nor the founders of the Dutch and Canadian Ballets Ludmila Chiriaeff and Sonia Gaskell; nor Irène Lidova, the patroness of all of the Russian ballet dancers in Paris; nor the friend of the Paris avant-gardistes, Princess Natasha Kirsta, who in later years directed the Australian Ballet; nor the famous ‘ballet mother’ Mamma Toumanova – they had all passed away.

In 1929, Sergei Diaghilev died; his ashes repose in the San Michele cemetery in Venice and his tomb bears its epitaph in Russian – Venice, eternal inspirer of our propitiations. These are the words inscribed by Diaghilev himself on the first page of an exercise book, which he gave to Serge Lifar in 1926 for recording Enrico Cecchetti’s lessons. In a way, these words reflect the cosmopolitan outlook that drove Diaghilev’s enterprise and determined its consequences.

From 1909, Diaghilev’s Saisons Russes in Paris impressively exposed Russian art to the West. The Ballets Russes acquainted both continents with the achievements of the Russian ballet tradition; Diaghilev’s sensitivity in responding to new ideas in art and attracting the best artists for his stage productions, his aspiration for a synthesis of the arts – music, dance and painting – constituted the very essence of his theatrical enterprise. The company first performed in Monte Carlo in 1911 and would return there after periods of wandering. In 1926, the Diaghilev company was renamed Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and this new name would become indelibly associated with its later offshoots for the next three decades.

The link between Diaghilev’s company and Russia had been broken forever by World War I and the Revolution. After the latter, a whole constellation of dancers of the middle generation, the magnificently trained artists who had already made striking careers in the ballets of the Mariinsky and Bolshoi Theatres, found itself in the West. Several of them joined the ranks of Diaghilev’s company, but they also performed in other European ballet theatres, founded their own troupes (like those of Mordkin or Boris Romanov), or, most importantly, opened the schools described on the following pages. First and foremost these were the Parisian schools, started by the former stars of the Mariinsky Theatre: Egorova, Kshessinska and Preobrajenska; Volinine, a Muscovite, also gave lessons in Paris, as did the younger teachers Gsovsky and Kniaseff. Karsavina and Nicholas Sergeyev settled in London, where Nicholas Legat and Lydia Kyasht were already established; in Berlin reigned Eugenia Eduardova and Tatiana Gsovsky. It was to these schools that the Russian émigrés willingly handed over their children and these very schools prepared the next generation, which enabled first Diaghilev, and then his successors and any other ballet company, to benefit for 40 more years from the stream of younger dancers trained in the best Russian ballet tradition.

After Diaghilev’s death, his troupe dispersed, but it was never likely that such an array of artistic talent would fail to produce a legacy. The company came to life again three years later, in 1932, on the initiative of René Blum, the director of the Opera Theatre of Monte Carlo, which had already given a home to Diaghilev’s company, and the Russian émigré Colonel de Basil, a Paris impresario for Russian dance and opera. Diaghilev’s three great choreographers George Balanchine, Léonide Massine and Bronislava Nijinska were successively involved and, over the course of the next few years, the best pupils from the aforementioned Russian ballet schools, including the three ‘baby ballerinas’, joined the troupe.

Balanchine’s innovations did not impress the classically minded de Basil: within a year he was unceremoniously replaced by the more theatrical Massine and he soon left for America, where a great future awaited him. In 1936, de Basil parted from Blum and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo split into two companies: the Ballets Russes de Colonel de Basil (from 1939, the Original Ballet Russe), and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, initially run by Blum. Each manager believed he was the true vessel for Diaghilev’s legacy and each enviously poached the other’s dancers, choreographers and repertoire. When Massine broke away with Blum, Fokine and Nijinska moved between the two. In 1938, the troupes’ rivalry came to a head in London, where both performed simultaneously. By then, Blum’s place had been taken by Serge Denham (Sergei Dokuchaev), a banker of Russian origin.

The touring activity of both ballet companies was dictated, to a large extent, by World War II, driving them from Europe to the furthest ends of the globe and fortuitously seeding an even wider legacy than Diaghilev could have foreseen. They both performed Diaghilev ballets and classical works, as well as commissioning his major choreographers, Fokine, Massine, Balanchine and Nijinska. De Basil’s troupe travelled widely, touring Australia and the countries of North and South America. In 1941 in Cuba, 18 dancers announced a strike over non-payment of salaries and left the company. After the war, the company toured in the United States and had a season in London in 1947, but in November of 1948, at the end of a tour of Spain and North Africa, it faded away. After de Basil’s death in Paris on 27 July 1951, Serge Grigoriev, who had been the company’s régisseur since the early Diaghilev days, with his wife Lubov Tchernicheva, briefly revived the company for the last time during the winter of 1951–2. Curiously enough, the first part of Grigoriev’s memoirs, The Diaghilev Ballet 1909–1929, was published in translation from Russian into English in his lifetime (1953, paperback 2009) and was retranslated back into Russian 40 years later. Quite unexpectedly, by the efforts of Valery Voskressensky (Colonel de Basil’s grandson) and the St Petersburg Museum of Theatrical and Musical Art, the authentic Russian manuscript of the second part, Original Ballet Russe, 1932–1952 (Library of Congress, Washington), covering our period, has just been published in St Petersburg, marked by an event at the 7th Festival of Arts, ‘Diaghilev. P. S.’, in December 2016.

After the split, the pivotal creator Massine stayed at first with de Basil, but then quarrelled with him and switched to Blum’s Monte Carlo-based company, joined by several stars, including Toumanova and Danilova. He also kept the rights to several of his ballets and choreographed important new ones, such as Gaîté parisienne and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Once again, however, Massine quarrelled, this time with Blum’s successor, Serge Denham. In 1939, as war gathered in Europe, he moved to the US, and so did key stars such as Markova, Dolin and Youskevitch. After Balanchine had managed to return its bygone glamour to the Ballet Russe, in the postwar years the company faced vigorous competition. Massine, Markova and others spearheaded the new Ballet Theatre in New York, in parallel with the rising success of Balanchine in his new enterprise, soon to become the New York City Ballet (Balanchine had primarily been based in the US from the early 1930s. In 1946 he founded The Ballet Society, which in 1948 became the NYCB at City Centre). Despite the Ballet Russe’s nationwide American tours, these developments were drawing the creative talent away from the company: its name was no longer a byword for creativity. Denham founded the Ballet Russe School in New York in 1954, but by then the company’s tours were tired, though it could still call on stars from time to time, such as Maria Tallchief (who had moved by then to the New York City Ballet with Balanchine), Alicia Alonso, Nina Vyroubova and even Yvette Chauviré. In 1962, the company, by then almost entirely made up of American dancers, folded. It is a little-known fact that Denham made one last attempt to revive it in 1967; the troupe danced for a whole season at its native home of Monte Carlo. The lesser-known history of the Ballets Russes’s American period is elucidated in this book from conversations with some of its dancers, first and foremost with Frederic Franklin.

The stories of the artists – the dancers and choreographers who brought glory to the Ballets Russes – will be told on the following pages. Meanwhile, I would like to say a few words about those impresarios who, surmounting innumerable difficulties, kept the Ballets Russes afloat. Some evidence relating to the pre-history, both of de Basil and his new company, only became known recently. He served in the White Army in the Caucasus and in 1919 emigrated to Paris, where he married Nina Leonidova, a ballerina for whom, with several professional dancers, he created his first dance company in 1923. In 1925, de Basil joined up with Ignaty Zon, a well-known theatre impresario, and Prince Wassily Tsereteli, to start the theatre agency Zerbazon. Together they created a permanent émigré Russian Opera company with an element of ballet from de Basil’s former dancers. It was this company that, just a few years after Diaghilev’s death, would be the root of the reborn Ballets Russes, under the aegis of de Basil (who deserted his former companions) and René Blum, the refined director of the Monte Carlo Theatre.

Of course, the revival of the Ballets Russes was made possible thanks to the authority of Blum, a trusted Diaghilev aide, and to the aforementioned return of the older Diaghilev artists, counter-balanced by the influx of very young people trained by the Russian ballet teachers in Paris. It was said that Blum invited de Basil to join in the reconstruction of the Ballets Russes because he was amazed by his energy: a poster hanging in his office read ‘We overcome the impossible instantly, we work miracles progressively’. But, before long, he started to call him his Colonel-gangster; one can imagine how different they were, our down-to-earth Colonel and René Blum, the French Prime Minister’s brother, who had worked with Diaghilev, had promoted from the beginning the publication of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (with, incidentally, some enthusiastic pages devoted to the Ballets Russes) and who knew a great number of scores by heart. In 1936, the good-natured Blum, squeezed between de Basil on one side and Massine and Denham on the other, lost the battle for possession of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes heritage. He was arrested by the Germans in Paris in 1941 and perished in Auschwitz. All of his papers, including a rumoured manuscript of his memoirs, were lost.

For all their differences, Serge Denham, who came from a cultured family from Samara, a provincial city in Central Russia, was as much an enthusiast as Blum and de Basil were. His father, a banker, died young. The family moved to Moscow, where Serge (then named Dokuchaev) graduated from the Commercial Academy and married a rich merchant’s daughter. But his interests were concentrated on art. He played the piano well and maintained that Scriabin, whom his mother knew well, had overseen his musical education. During the Revolution he left with his family for the Far East, from whence he emigrated to America. On the steamship out of Shanghai he got to know a ballet patron who took him into his circle later on. These contacts served him well afterwards. Denham himself quickly entered the New York bankers’ milieu and soon was appointed vice president of the Bankers Trust – a fund with interests in European capitals whither Denham was often sent. In Paris he met Diaghilev, who inspired him with the idea that America would become the centre of world ballet some time in the future.

Some years after Diaghilev’s death, Denham became interested in de Basil and Blum’s Ballets Russes. Taking advantage of Blum’s financial difficulties, and of the rift between the two directors, he bought Blum’s company together with all its props and started managing it; the company kept the name Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In 1938, Denham, helped by the same ballet patrons, created World Art Inc., later to become the Universal Art Corporation, to which the Ballet Russe transferred whilst he became its vice president. Thanks to his energy and contacts, the Ballet Russe could continue to exist for almost two more decades.

There were yet more players in the post-Diaghilev Ballets Russes story. In 1944 when, fleeing the war, the de Basil troupe was travelling around South America and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was touring the United States, a new ballet company appeared. It was the Nouveau Ballet de Monte Carlo, based once again in Monaco. The company was created and headed by Diaghilev’s star dancer, Serge Lifar, who had been accused of being a collaborator with the Nazis (having been chosen, not without reason – but there were so many of them! – as a scapegoat by the Left). He had to seek refuge in Monte Carlo until 1947, when he left the Nouveau Ballet to return to his position of ballet director at the Paris Opera. That same year, the Nouveau Ballet de Monte Carlo merged with the Ballet International du Marquis de Cuevas, forming the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas. It can be seen that the general name of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo embraces a number of ballet companies, sharing origins, traditions, repertoire, choreographers and dancers, who migrated from one company to another. For legal and sometimes financial reasons, Colonel de Basil’s one troupe changed its name 16 times over 20 years, but still the words Ballets Russes and his name were omnipresent.

The Ballets Russes, in its wanderings, brought worldwide fame to the Russian ballet tradition, enriching it with innovations by remarkable choreographers and inspiration by notable performers. The Paris Opera Ballet was given a new lease of life by Serge Lifar, who directed it for a quarter of a century. Having created his New York City Ballet, Balanchine defined the style of American (and not only American) ballet for a long time, whilst Mikhail Mordkin founded the second major ballet theatre of the USA, which would become American Ballet Theatre. Dancers and ballet masters who had belonged to Diaghilev’s entourage founded ballet theatres in different countries. The British Ballet and its school were established by Marie Rambert, Ninette de Valois and Alicia Markova, all Diaghilev performers, with the formative influence of Nijinska, Karsavina and the ballet master Serge Grigoriev. Fokine, Boris Romanov and his wife Elena Smirnova contributed significantly to the development of classical ballet in Argentina. Before and after World War II, some of the Ballets Russes dancers stayed behind after tours of the exotic continents (around which Anna Pavlova had travelled long before that). The dancers of the Ballets Russes who had settled in Australia after touring there were directly involved in the formation of ballet in that country, and Tatiana Leskova and Nina Verchinina (but also Igor Shvetsov) were also directly involved in the formation of Brazilian ballet. It is not surprising that the school founded in 1940 in Sydney by Elena Kirsova bore the name The Diaghilev Ballet School. Chaboukiani’s student Vadim Sulima and his wife created Chile’s first classical ballet company. After having worked in Belgium, Léonide Kachurovsky established his ballet troupe in Guatemala. In the 1960s, Nina Novak initiated a classical ballet school and company in Venezuela; before the war Tamara Grigorieva started one in Uruguay, whilst Yurek Shabelevsky, the character dancer from de Basil’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, ended his career as ballet master in New Zealand.

In Yugoslavia, Russian émigrés such as Margarita Froman of the Bolshoi Theatre and Elena Polyakova of the Mariinsky raised the standards of ballet to a high level and, in the years before the Baltic countries were seized by the Soviets, other dancers from the old Russia had laid the foundations of classical ballet in Latvia and Lithuania. Mikhail Fokine’s daughter-in-law Alexandra Fedorova, as well as Ludmila Schollar and Anatole Vilzak, worked in Riga, whilst after Diaghilev’s death Nemchinova, Zvereff and Oboukhoff found shelter in Kaunas as dancers and ballet masters, and so did the young Nicholas Beriozoff. Lithuanian-born Sonia Gaskell, who had studied in Paris with Egorova and Leo Staats, was the key figure in the development of Dutch ballet. Ludmila Chiriaeff, a Fokine follower, created the Montreal Ballet, and the Canadian National Ballet emerged from the school and ballet trou...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Ismene Brown
• Author’s Preface to the English Edition: The West in Russia and Russia in the West – a Permeable Membrane
• Lineage of the Ballets Russes Companies
• PART I: THE BALLETS RUSSES
• An Introduction
• IN THE SHADOW OF DIAGHILEV
• Rachel Cameron on Tamara Karsavina
• Tamara Geva
• Alexandra (Choura) Danilova
• REMEMBERING COLONEL DE BASIL’S BALLETS RUSSES: THE ‘BABY BALLERINAS’
• Irina Baronova
• Tamara Toumanova
• Tatiana Riabouchinska
• REMEMBERING COLONEL DE BASIL’S BALLETS RUSSES: DANCERS
• Marika Besobrasova
• Tatiana Leskova
• George Zoritch
• Tamara Tchinarova (Finch)
• Anna Volkova
• Miguel Terekhov
• Marjorie Tallchief
• Anatoly Joukowsky
• Tatiana Stepanova and her mother
• Alexandra Stepanova
• Tatiana Stepanova
• THE BALLETS RUSSES IN AUSTRALIA
• Rachel Cameron
• Tamara Tchinarova (Finch)
• THE BALLET RUSSE DE MONTE CARLO IN AMERICA
• Frederic Franklin
• Nini Theilade
• Hélène Traïline
• Nina Novak
• PART II: THE MARQUIS DE CUEVAS AND OTHERS
• Maria Kirillova (de Fredericks)
• Ethéry Pagava
• Milorad Miskovitch
• Hélène Sadowska
• Vladimir Oukhtomsky
• Vladimir Skouratoff
• Boris Traïline
• Nicholas Polajenko
• Jean Babilée
• Maina Gielgud
• AFTERWORD
• John Neumeier, Nijinsky and the Diaghilev Tradition
• John Neumeier
• Dramatis Personae
• Illustrations