Nijinsky in his prime

In mid-May 1910 the dancers left for Berlin, where they had their first performance on 20 May. Nijinky had turned twenty in March, and he continued to grow as a dancer. His sister Bronislava, who was a year younger and a talented ballerina in her own right, joined them for this tour, and in her memoirs she described her brother's progress, with an eye for detail that one would find only in a fellow dancer:

While Vaslav, apart from the others, practised his dance exercises alone, I observed him from a distance. He executed all his exercises at an accelerated tempo, and for never more than forty-five to fifty minutes; that would be his total practice time. But during that time he expended the strength and energy equivalent in other dancers to three hours of assiduous exercises . . . Vaslav seemed more intent on improving the energy of the muscular drive, strength, and speed than on observing the five positions . . . He worked on the elasticity of the whole body in the execution of his own movements. Even when holding a pose, Vaslav's body never stopped dancing. In his adagio exercises, in the developpe front, he could not raise his leg higher than ninety degrees; the build of his leg, his overdeveloped thigh muscles, as solid as a rock, did not permit him to attain the angle possible for an average dancer.

In the allegro pas he did not come down completely on the balls of his feet, but barely touched the floor with the tips of his toes and not the customary preparation with both feet firmly on the floor, taking the force from a deep plie. Nijinsky's toes were unusually strong and enabled him to take this short preparation so quickly as to be imperceptible, creating the impression that he remained at all times suspended in the air.

Diaghilev: A Life by Sjeng Scheijen. 2009. Page 200.

Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes in 1916

H. T. Parker claimed that the Russians looked like a different company. In this judgement he included Lydia [Lopokova], observing how the ‘white sparks’ of Nijinsky’s dancing were kindling her to still greater brilliance. Nevertheless, Lydia’s own assessment of their partnership remained doubtful. With Massine in Europe she was dancing even more regularly with Nijinsky, to Sylphides, Spectre and Carnaval, and her performances were affected not only by their uncertain stage chemistry, but by her partner’s tendency to take extreme, unscheduled risks. Many dancers use the adrenalin of a live performance to push themselves to new levels of technique or expression, but Nijinsky went further than most in abandoning timings that had been set in rehearsal, and forcing lifts and balances to unstable limits.* While thrilling for an audience, these unpremeditated variations could be disconcerting for his ballerina, and most disturbing to Lydia may have been her suspicion that Nijinsky was deliberately contriving to undermine her. Several journalists noticed that an ungallant spirit of rivalry galvanised Nijinsky when he partnered her, and complaints were printed about his ill-mannered treatment of her during curtain calls.


After the Ballets Russes left New York, winding its way down the eastern coast to Houston and up through the Midwest, Lydia's colleagues also had reason to feel renewed concern. Nijinsky's mood began to fluctuate so that while he was sometimes clumsily eager to ingratiate himself with the other dancers, playing schoolboy pranks and offering them puppyish endearments, at other times he withdrew completely, his slanted gaze unreadable, his behaviour a baffling blank. On one occasion he seemed almost mad. The company were advertised to dance Sylphides, for which the dancers, probably including Lydia, were all dressed in their appropriate costumes, but shortly before the curtain was due to rise, Nijinsky suddenly announced that he would prefer to dance Carnaval. A panicking Randolfo locked Nijinsky in his dressing room with only his wig and costume for Sylphides, and when the star finally emerged, wearing the correct costume he simply went on stage to dance the advertised ballet as if nothing had happened.


It may have been the pressure of his new duties that was making Nijinsky act so erratically, or, as some dancers would later suspect, he was exhibiting early symptoms of the mental illness that would incapacitate him in 1919.



*Sokolova was also partnered by Nijinsky and recalled that his habit of taking his supporting hand away in the middle of an arabesque or throwing her unexpectedly in a lift was ‘very frightening’.


Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova by Judith Mackrell. 2008. Pages 113-4.

Lifts

A boy, when starting to learn how to lift, will often not realize that it is the placing of his partner on the floor after holding her aloft that is the most difficult and important part. He will use all his strength to push his girl into the air, hold her there as long as possible, and then be too exhausted to control her coming down. It is, after all, the gentle descent and soundlessness of the ballerina, which gives an illusion of ease. This also requires the most strength from both dancers. For the girl it can be most distressing to be held in the air too long, and results in several faults, two of which are as follows. If the girl's supporting foot does not reach the ground before the rhythmic beat dividing the springs, the girl will have no time to plie and the lifts will become unmusical and without co-ordination. Secondly,, many lifts, such as a simple grand jete en avant, have a definite parabolic shape; if this is interrupted by the boy sustaining his partner too long in one position, the girl will lose her curve through the air and start to 'hang'. This can be minimized, but not indefinitely, if the girl uses her stomach and back muscles with the correct tension, but it is more often the boy's error. It is of course easier for him to support the girl when his arms are fully stretched beneath her, but postponing the strenuous descent is a sign of weakness.

Ballet Studio: an inside view by Anne Woolliams. 1978. Pages 133, 136.

Lopokova on Cecchetti

In my young days in the Imperial School, I was taught by his [Cecchetti] second in command, who used to come to the lesson with a piece of cheese in his hand, as if we were mice. But once a week, Cecchetti himself would visit our class with the look of a Mother Superior, with his baton and a fierce expression. The only accompaniment he allowed was his inimitable whistle and the tap of the baton on the floor. But a great deal of the fierce expression was probably put on to produce a Mussolini effect on the little ballerinas. Afterwards, those with promise would be taken completely into his hands, and since he followed the Diaghilev Ballet from Russia, all the principal dancers of what England knows as the Russian Ballet were brought up in the Cecchetti School. To Cecchetti, men were just men, but women flowers, and in the Imperial School of St Petersburg he only taught the girls. The pupils who had talents he loved and upbraided. His abuse was terrible. All of us he would reduce to tears. But it was a bad sign not to be abused, for that would show that one had no gifts, no possibilities.

Lydia Lopokova edited by Milo Keynes. 1983. Page 46.

Professional Actors in Russia - Late 18C

Confronted with the plight of serf actors, one might think, if only they had been free their lives would have been different, so much easier and less degrading. In fact, the lives of all actors, serf and free alike, were remarkably similar. Most professional actors in Russia during this period started out as orphans in foundling homes, where, from around the middle of the eighteenth century, they were given acting lessons and then farmed out for more training (often for a price) either directly to the imperial theaters or to a theater school. All of them were at the mercy of the authorities--first, the men in charge of the foundling homes, then the masters at the theater schools, and finally the theater directors themselves--who controlled every aspect of their personal and professional lives. Actresses could not marry without their permission, nor could thye quit the stage unless they first purchased their retirement for an exorbitant sum (that is, paid their own ransom), which few actresses could ever afford. Performers who disobeyed were beaten with rods or, in extreme cases, sent off to the army for a life sentence. In 1816, a female dancer in the Imperial Theater was arrested simply for refusing to perform in an opera. Punishments like these were common well into the 1840s, after serf theater had largely disappeared.

The Pearl: A true Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia by Douglas Smith. 2008. Page 107-8.

The Sheremetev Serf Theatre and Ballet - 1785

This period saw an intensive effort to expand the troupe's dance repertoire and improve its corps de ballet. Previously ballets had figured solely as divertissements between opera acts. Although this continued, Nicholas [Sheremetev], as part of his effort to mimic as accurately as possible the practices of the Parisian theater, pushed the creation of full balletic works. Nicholas knew ballet, having danced as a child at court and being acquainted with the work of the great choreographic innovator Jean-Georges Noverre. In 1786, Charles Le Picq, a student of Noverre, arrived in Russia, and Nicholas sent Tatiana Shlykova and Yelena Kazakova to St. Petersburg to study under him. Two years later he hired the respected Italian Giuseppe Salomoni, another follower of Noverre, as his troupe's ballet master.

* * * *

By 1790, Nicholas's ballet was among the finest in Russia. His dancers introduced the latest balletic works from France and surpassed in this genre the ballets of both the court in St. Petersburg and Moscow's Petrovsky Theater. Such supremacy would continue throughout the next decade, during which Nicholas's corps de ballet would play a central role in bringing to Russia the latest developments in choreography and particularly the new school of Noverre, staging pathbreaking pieces such as his tragic ballet d'action Medea ten years before the Petrovsky Theater, and encouraging Diderot's notions of dance as an independent art form.

The Pearl: A true Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia by Douglas Smith. 2008. Page 68-9.

The pleasure of Pushkin's class

The active participation of arm, torso, and head movements gave Pushkin's assigned adagios the appearance of dance miniatures.

This last point is significant. "Pushkin," recalled Mikhail Mikhailov, "preferred to assign learning combinations that contained an element of theater and thus helped his students fall in love with dance, feel an emotional uplift that led to artistry. In sum, besides the colossal practical benefit, these combinations gave the students great aesthetic pleasure."

Alexander Pushkin: Master Teacher of Dance by Gennady Albert. 2001. Page 132.

Alexander Pushkin speaking about arms

Pushkin brought many valuable things to a combination other than achieving its main goal, which was determined by its basic movement--in this case, the battement fondu. Thus, while working on turning in large poses, he added work on the arms during the transition from one pose to another; throughout the exercises Pushkin devoted a great deal of attention to the arms, seeing them as the key to dance achievement. "The arms must sing during a movement," he often said in class.

Alexander Pushkin: Master Teacher of Dance by Gennady Albert. 2001. Page 117.

Alexander Pushkin's thoughts about work

When Pushkin first grew terribly ill and the doctors told him to stop teaching in order to preserve his health, he replied with his usual shrug: "Better to die in the classroom than to live in bed." He could not imagine himself without his beloved work. And so things continued in the orderly way of so many years: the soloists' class at the theater, the class at the school, rehearsals with students. He could be seen every day slowly walking along Architect Rossi Street with a radiantly joyful look of anticipation on his face. Pushkin was on his way to his students.

* * * *

He died of a heart attack on the street, on the way home from the ballet school.

Alexander Pushkin: Master Teacher of Dance by Gennady Albert. 2001. Page 96, 107.

Alexander Pushkin and class

Pushkin was a real professional, and it was his profound professionalism that became the foundation of his teaching career.

Later, Pushkin the teacher often told his students: "If you can't last the class, you won't be able to last the performance." This was his golden rule during his performing years as well. "Self-preparation, responsibility--these were the qualities that distinguished Pushkin always," continued Yurgenson. "As he prepared, he was always working toward the stage image."

Alexander Pushkin: Master Teacher of Dance by Gennady Albert. 2001. Page 28.