Ballerina

by Deirdre Kelly

  Emma was gone and so, it could be said, was the French Romantic ballet. After Livry, the Paris Opéra grew increasingly stagnant, hobbled by an unwillingness to let go of tradition. By this time, many of the top French practitioners had already started to move to Russia in search of greater opportunity, and there were more of them on their way. They included Marius Petipa (brother of Lucien), the French-born ballet master and choreographer who would soon transform the Russian ballet, making it the best in the world. Ballerinas performing his works would rise to the occasion of his dynamic ballets, becoming dazzling virtuosos in their own right. Among them was Pierina Legnani (1863–1930), born the same year that Livry died. Out of the ashes of one ballerina comes another to take her place. An Italian virtuoso, Legnani would help take ballet in a new direction as a prima ballerina in Russia, where she originated the dual role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake (1895), today the world’s best-loved ballet, and the female lead in Raymonda (1898). These important works foreshadowed the rise of the Classical era in ballet, initiated by La Bayadère (1877) and epitomized by The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Petipa choreographed all of these ballets and more, crafting them as showcases for the singular talents of the epoch’s other leading ballerinas: the Russian-born Ekaterina Vazem (1848–1937), the first Nikiya, and the Italian-born Carlotta Brianza (1867–1930), the first Aurora, among them.

  France had ruled the art of ballet for two hundred years. And yet the established French practices of ballet would not soon be forgotten, not least of all the practice of concubinage, which would flourish in the land of the tsar before being replaced by a more novel—or modern—type of sexual control over the ballerina.

  4. Striving and Starving for Attention

  The changing role of the ballerina in the Twentieth Century

  Nobody better cultivated the image of the modern ballerina as a waifish workhorse than the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine. Born in St. Petersburg in the early part of the twentieth century, he arrived on the scene at a time when ballerinas were athletic superstars who outshone the choreographers laboring behind the scenes. But Balanchine would change that, shifting the audience’s attention away from the ballerina and toward ballet itself. Until he stole their crown, ballerinas had ruled in Russia for close to two hundred years.

  The Russian ballet flourished with the help of French dancers, ballet masters, and choreographers, who had been coming to Russia since the early eighteenth century. Russia offered higher salaries to foreigners representing the latest European artistic movements and fashions; Russian rulers personally invited ballet practitioners from Paris as part of a larger cultural shift that saw French introduced as the lingua franca at court. Russia in the eighteenth century consisted largely of landowners and serfs; the ruling elites wanted to bring the country out of the rural past and toward a sparkling cosmopolitan future: imitating Paris, and all that the city had to offer by way of culture and manners, was seen as a viable way forward. Ballet was one of the ways Russia would push itself into a new era of European-influenced sophistication. As ballet historian Jennifer Homans observes, ballet first came to Russia as etiquette, not art: “This mattered: ballet was not initially a theatrical ‘show’ but a standard of physical comportment to be emulated and internalized—an idealized way of behaving.”1

  Among the first French ballet masters to come to Russia was Jean-Baptiste Landé, invited from Paris to teach etiquette and poise to young cadets at the military academy. After presenting a ballet performance in 1735, Landé became a favorite of Empress Anna (1693–1740), helping her to establish Russia’s first ballet academy in St. Petersburg in 1738. The Imperial Ballet School, later known as the Mariinsky, would help Russia establish a reputation as a world leader in ballet. Although Landé taught ballet to members of the ruling class—one of his students was Catherine the Great, whom he tutored soon after she arrived in Russia in 1744—dancers within the academy generally came from the lowest segments of society. They were serfs or the children of serfs, a carryover from the popular practice of serf theater that flourished within the extravagant settings of Russia’s private country estates. In 1778, a second ballet academy was established in an orphanage in Moscow, where ballet evolved as a combination of imported European high culture with Russian folk art. From the outset, Russian ballet was rooted in the culture of the disenfranchised—people who had nothing to lose but much to gain by striving for excellence through dance.

  These early dancers were regarded as private property or as wards of the state and could be arbitrarily imprisoned, abused, sexually exploited, and sold off.2 And yet, within the confines of the ballet, a certain freedom could be found for those dancers with talent and other salable charms. As among the poor of Paris during the reign of Louis XIV, many were able to rise to prominence within society via dance. Among them was one of Russia’s earliest ballerinas, Avdotia Istomina (1799–1848), an orphan who became one of the greatest ballerinas of her country as well as among the best paid; within fifteen years of launching her dancing career, she was drawing a salary of 15,000 rubles, a small ransom. Istomina was celebrated for her speed and for the number of pirouettes she could execute in succession. She was taught by her countrywoman, Evgenia Kolosova (1780–1869), known for her nuanced interpretations of peasant dances, and by the French ballet master Charles-Louis Didelot (1767–1837), who had been invited by the tsar to become director of the Imperial Ballet. The first Russian ballerina to dance on pointe, Istomina made her debut in 1815 and caused such a sensation that several men died in duels fighting for the privilege of being her lover; she was reputed to have been a grand courtesan. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), enamored of her dancing genius, immortalized the ballerina in his verse-novel, Eugene Onegin: “Istomina stands: she,/while touching with one foot the floor,/gyrates the other slowly,/and suddenly a leap, and suddenly she flies,/she flies like fluff from Eol’s lips/now twines and untwines her waist/and beats one swift small foot against the other.”3

  Istomina’s command of Russian society was tragically brief: in 1848 she died of cholera. She had been the first of the Russian ballerinas to embody the Romantic tradition of ballet then sweeping Europe, and in her wake came a series of high-ranking ballerinas from Paris who kept the passion for ethereal dancing alive in the East. Among them was Marie Taglioni, who came to St. Petersburg in 1837 to perform her signature ballet, La Sylphide, a work that would leave a lasting impression on the development of Russian ballet. Taglioni’s rival, Fanny Elssler, came to St. Petersburg in 1848 on the personal invitation of Tsar Nicholas, a fervent admirer of the ballerina’s talents. Elssler ended up spending three seasons in Russia, dancing in Moscow and St. Petersburg in French-flavored ballets like Giselle, La Esmeralda, and La Fille mal gardée, among others.

  Several Parisian-bred male dancers also left their mark on the Russian ballet, including Jules Perrot (1810–1892) and Arthur Saint-Léon (1815–1870), both of whom served as ballet masters and choreographers when in Russia—to mixed reviews, leading Saint-Léon once to challenge a critic to a duel. By far the most successful French choreographer on Russian soil was Marius Petipa (1818–1910), who at once signaled the end of the Romantic ballet and the advent of the classical ballet with feature-length works that combined dance, mime, and symphonic music. Petipa’s intricately crafted dance ensembles presented a kaleidoscopic display of shifting shapes, patterns, and rhythms that raised ballet to the level of opulent spectacle. Dominating the St. Petersburg stage from the 1860s through the 1890s, Petipa’s grand-scale choreography was based on a strict adherence to the classical tenets of dance as developed in the court of the French kings. During his long career in Russia, Petipa staged approximately seventy-five ballets for the Imperial theaters, including two of his most famous: The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, the latter created in collaboration with the Russian-born choreographer Lev Ivanov (1834–1901), both set to commissioned scores by frequent Petipa collaborator Pyotr Tchaikovsky
(1840–1893). The influence of The Sleeping Beauty on Russian ballet cannot be overestimated; it inspired the next generation of Russian ballet greats, among them Sergei Diaghilev whose Ballets Russes in 1921 restaged Petipa’s 1890 version of the ballet, renaming it The Sleeping Princess, a homage to the French influence on Russian ballet.

  Petipa’s genius was evident too in his working relationships with ballerinas; in his ballets, he placed the ballerina front and center, using her pointe work as a focal point (a practice that would flourish into the twentieth century when adopted by the world’s next pre-eminent choreographer, an Imperial Ballet alumnus steeped in the Petipa tradition, who would bend the classical ballerina-centric ballet his way—but more on that later). Petipa celebrated virtuosity and created dance passages where ballerinas could dazzle with their technique. But eventually, his style was seen as formulaic; by the dawning of the twentieth century, when academic classicism began to be pushed aside by a growing desire for expressiveness and naturalism in ballet, Petipa fell out of favor. His defenders, not surprisingly, were those ballerinas whom he had made into stars: Pierina Legnani but also Virginia Zucchi (1849–1930), another Italian-born powerhouse for whom Petipa had created an entire solo on pointe. Zucchi was eventually banned by the tsar from the Imperial stage, allegedly as a result of an affair with an aristocrat gone wrong. The world of the concubine was one Petipa knew about but did not indulge in. His first wife (he was married twice) was a Russian ballerina to whom he devoted his talents, as he wrote in his memoirs: “I had aided greatly in the success of my first wife. I had done everything that I could to help her attain the highest position on the ballet stage, but in our domestic life we were unable to live long in peace and harmony.”4 A family man, Petipa’s interest in his leading ballerinas was mainly professional. He left it to his royal patrons to ignite the offstage fireworks for which some of his ballerinas became celebrated, chief among them being Mathilde Kschessinska (1872–1971), the last of the ballerina-courtesans linked to the tsar.

  Kschessinska was a poor but gifted student of Russia’s Imperial Ballet School, the daughter of popular Polish character dancer Felix Kschessinsky, who early on groomed her, as well as a son, for a dancing career. Being a theater man himself, he was well aware that young dancers under the protection of the tsar would want for nothing. The state-sponsored school provided them with clothing, food, and shelter, in addition to superlative instruction in dance, etiquette, and academics. Students had their own servants who tended to their every need. Driven to the Imperial Theater in horse-drawn carriages manned by attendants in immaculate uniforms, they frequently were presented to members of the royal family for whom they would do a performance and later be rewarded with a gift given personally by the tsar, the tsarina, their children, or other members of their entourage. It is how, when still a young student, Kschessinska first caught the eye of the tsar. How could he not notice her? Kschessinska was a pirouetting virtuoso, with a vivacious and ebullient stage presence, who believed in communicating meaning through dance. Audiences adored her. “I was not one of those who dance themselves silly and think of nothing but details of execution, of turning out their knees, who are hypnotized by technique at the expense of acting,” she said in her published memoirs, Dancing in St. Petersburg. “Where there is no mime, technique must obviously be followed; but in scenes of powerful drama, where everything rests on the emotion, one can safely forget one’s knees!”5

  But the ballerina nicknamed the Mighty Mathilda also gained fame of another sort—as mistress of the Russian nation. She was what might be called a looker: blessed with a pretty face, flashing eyes, and an ample bosom. As a child during a year-end recital at the Imperial Ballet School, she attracted the attention of the tsar, who later actively encouraged a backstage meeting with his son, Russia’s next monarch. While barely out of her teens, Kschessinska became the mistress of Nicholas II, the last tsar. She simultaneously conducted an affair with his cousin, Grand Duke André, whom she ultimately succeeded in marrying after the tsar, and other members of his immediate family, were executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries in July 1918.

  Kschessinska often performed on stage wearing the jewels her aristocratic lovers showered upon her for being their shared courtesan: dog collars of diamonds, tiaras encrusted with cabochon sapphires, and ropes of pearls mixed with chains studded with precious stones that hung down to her knees—the state’s treasures.6 Up-and-coming Russian choreographer Mikhail Fokine (1880–1942) had tried to curtail this ostentatious habit, ordering her to dance unadorned in the new, stripped-down modernist ballets he was creating when he became the new ballet master of the Mariinsky following Petipa’s forced retirement in 1903. She apparently never forgave him, even though later in life she conceded the jewels sometimes got in the way of the show: “My diamonds and other precious jewels were so valuable that they raised delicate problems,” she wrote, describing the behind-the-scenes drama that had accompanied her 1911 performance in London of a pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty. “On the advice of Agathon Fabergé, the famous jeweler’s son, who was also one of my great friends, I had entrusted the dispatch of my jewels to his firm, the London branch looking after them until my arrival. Two catalogues were made and each piece of jewelry was numbered: I had only to know the numbers of the jewels I needed every evening, without giving further details. At the appointed hour an official of the firm, who was also a detective, brought them to me in my dressing-room and prevented any unauthorized person from entering; when the performance was over, he took the jewels away again.”7

  Kschessinska received as payment for her sexual services not only gemstones and jewelry but also a sumptuously decorated palace in the most fashionable neighborhood of St. Petersburg, a gift from the tsar. One of her lovers also gave her a son said to be of noble blood, though his father remains unknown; in her memoirs, Kschessinska proudly refers to her illegitimate child as tsarevich, or son of a tsar.

  But admiration, and also tolerance, for Kschessinska waned as the new century, with its novel ways of presenting ballet, made ballerina-courtesans seem as outmoded as the convoluted pantomime, or mimika, then being inserted into ballets of the Imperial Theater. An alternative to all that Petipa-inspired gaudiness had recently appeared in the form of Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), the Russian-born leader and impresario of Les Ballets Russes, a company mainly composed of Imperial Theater ballet stars, who welcomed the opportunity to moonlight in an enterprise that was thoroughly avant-garde. Diaghilev urged his motley crew of artists to astonish him with new creations, and they eagerly obeyed. The former Imperial dancer Vaslav Nijinsky produced groundbreaking choreography in the form of Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), inspired by the original dissonant score of the same name by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and featuring equally revolutionary set and costume designs, consisting of folkloric tunics and boots, by the Russian mystic and artist Nicholas Roerich. Le Sacre du printemps represented a turning point in the history of ballet: in it Nijinsky eschewed the expressive pointe work and graceful lifts that had characterized ballet at the Imperial Theater. His modernist ballet was grotesquely flat-footed and emotionally raw in depicting a savage pagan ritual of human sacrifice meant to ensure a season of new growth. Le Sacre du printemps was itself something of a victim, being booed off the stage by the outraged audience that had attended the much-hyped premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on the night of May 29, 1913. The angry crowd threw rotten vegetables at the dancers, who could not hear the music for the volume of yelling erupting in the auditorium; Nijinsky had to shout their counts to them from the wings. When it was over, Le Sacre du printemps had ushered in a new era of ballet experimentation that would continue through the rest of the century, driven by the accomplishments of Les Ballets Russes.

  There was method in this ballet madness. Once a premiere entertainment, ballet in the early years of the twentieth century found itself having to compete with new mass-media forms of c
ulture, like the relatively recent invention of the cinema, creating a demand for novelty. Ballet became more visually opulent and sensational (as seen in the Diaghilev troupe) at the same time as it was becoming more strictly a business enterprise, unsubsidized by state largesse. Ballerinas at this time had to develop a new set of skills, enabling them to dance the nineteenth-century classics as well as the experimental extravaganzas of Les Ballets Russes. Part of being modern was preserving past works but revitalizing them with new sensations: original music, visually arresting set and costume design, unconventional choreography, and energized dancing. In reviving classicism (the leading minds of Les Ballets Russes all professed a deep and undying love for Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty), Diaghilev encouraged an Orientalist approach (they were Russians, after all), which appeared to audiences (who lapped it up) as both decadent and fresh. The troupe as a whole, abetted in no small way by Léon Bakst’s pseudo-Oriental costumes and exotic set designs, came to embody a palpable eroticism that only served to fuel the popularity of Les Ballets Russes. Several of its star dancers emerged as sex symbols, among them Nijinsky, who was Diaghilev’s lover and the company’s resident mad genius; stirred by his pantherine presence on the stage, groupies—both men and women—would gather at the stage door to grab at Nijinsky’s clothes, wanting a piece of him.