American responses to Pavlova and Nijinsky

From 1910 to 1925 Anna Pavlova criss-crossed America, as she did much of the rest of the world, on what was virtually a one-woman crusade to take the beauty of the ballet to the masses, and her effect on the emergence of a "ballet consciousness" in America can scarcely be overestimated. Pavlova was our first mass-media ballet star: she endorsed face-creams, soaps, created fashions in hair, hats, clothing, visited dancing schools, opened schools of her own, had even social dances named for her. She was also foreign, of an undeniably foreign temperament, and forsook normal family life "for her art," as was pointed out in interview after interview and publicity story after publicity story. Her romantic and melancholy image was suddenly given immense staying power by her untimely death, in 1931, in Europe; the legend rapidly circulated that she had died asking for her swan costume.

Male ballet dancing had suffered under the cult of the ballerina, and it was Vaslav Nijinsky who publicized the male dancer as Pavlova had the ballerina, but the image he presented was problematic. Stories about Nijinsky's peculiar relationship with homosexual mentor and impresario Serge Diaghilev had been reaching America from Europe since the Ballets Russes began performing there in 1909, and by the time Nijinsky performed here in 1916 and 1917, critics were in the habit of calling male dancers effeminate. Had more been able to see Nijinsky at the height of his powers, more might truly have believed what the publicity stories only mentioned: that dancing, Nijinsky was a supreme artist, a wonder, beyond scandal. But Nijinsky's descent into insanity only months after the completion of his last American tour was not ignored by the American press, and added to the notion that ballet dancing was something that normal American males would never, and should never, want to do.

The Image of the Ballet Artist in Popular Films by Adrienne L. McLean. Journal of Popular Culture, 25:1 (1991: Summer).