Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Irina Baronova.on Learning Swan Lake - 1933

Halfway through our season, Danilova became sick. The morning she informed Colonel de Basil she would have to take a few days off, he came in towards the end of our class and I observed him in earnest discussion with Papa Grigoriev by the side of the stage. The class over, they asked David Lichine and me to join them. Colonel de Basil told us that Danilova was indisposed, that the program was set for that week and could not be changed, and that he was asking me to help out and dance Swan Lake the next night.

'You must know it pretty well,' said Papa Grigoriev. 'You've watched every rehearsal and every performance.'

'Yes, but I've never rehearsed it.'

'David will rehearse with you all day today and tomorrow. So, will you do it?'

What a challenge! By now my mother had joined us, to discover what this little conference was about. Lichine stood in silence all this time, looking at the floor, but then all hell suddenly broke loose! David started screaming that he would not dance Swan Lake with someone only 'three inches higher than a chamber pot' (a Russian expression used to slap down a cocky youngster). I was only fourteen, but his comment was unfair. I burst into tears, Mama started screaming at Lichine, Colonel de Basil tried to pacify everyone, and Papa Grigoriev offered me his hanky.

At that moment Anton Dolin appeared -- at what must have looked and sounded like a Turkish bazaar. He approached us and asked what the matter was, so Colonel de Basil explained the situation. Dolin, looking Lichine up and down, exclaimed, 'I never heard such nonsense! I'll dance with Irina myself.'

Everyone looked happy except Lichine. I was overflowing with gratitude for Dolin's generosity, After his vote of confidence, I could not refuse the challenge. It was settled -- I was to dance Swan Lake the next night.

Dolin took me to his studio, having phoned ahead to ask his pianist to meet us there. We rehearsed all day. His partnering was a wonderful new experience -- he made it all so easy and let me into the 'secrets of the trade', as he laughingly called them. I was learning far more than just Swan Lake.

Irina by Irina Baronova. 2005. Pages 108-9.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Mukhamedov's audition at the Bolshoi -- 1970

And so to the final and most crucial test: an assessment of his musicality and his basic potential to be a dancer.

Yet again, ten o'clock in the foyer and another hour's wait, then follow the clipboard up two flights of stairs and change into trunks and singlet with nine young colleagues. Out of the changing-room, along the passage and back into the brightly lit ballet studio to face Golovkina. This time the boys all knew their fates would be sealed before they bowed farewell to her.

Golovkina's secretary asked each one what they would dance, and which piece of music they would require the pianist to play. Irek had prepared a solo, 'Chapaevtsi', to a traditional tune and confidently told the secretary so. He could scarcely believe his ears when he was informed that the pianist could not play it. 'Can you manage without music?' he was asked. 'No,' he mumbled in reply. 'Then you will have to dance to one of the tunes we are going to play,' they said.

Irek sat and waited his turn in a sweat of fear. He knew he could do 'Chapaevtsi', and do it well; everyone had told him so. He had never improvised, certainly not in public, since his five-year-old capers in hospital. What would he do? What would happen when they called his name?

One by one the boys were called to the piano to clap, run and jump in time to different rhythms, then to dance their solos. Luckily for Irek, they nearly all chose to dance to the same piece of music, a folk tune adapted by the composer Gliere from his ballet Red Poppy, called 'Yablochko, the sailor's dance.

Now it came to Irek, still in a state of shock. For him keeping time to changing rhythms was instinctive, achieved through feeling, not thought. The solo, though, was another matter. The music started, so he had to do something. The panic-stricken boy somehow managed to string together the steps he had watched the other boys do, improvising sequences he had desperately memorised as he waited his turn.

He sat down white and shaking. His first and most crucial audition, he felt, had been a fiasco. Rasheda, when he finally made it back downstairs to tell her the news, agreed. What a disaster!

They hardly considered it worth returning the next day to study the list of successful entrants, but they did. Which was just as well, because Irek Mukhamedov had won one of the eighty places on offer and was therefore accepted as a pupil of the Moscow Ballet School and would start his studies in September.

Anatoly Yelagin, Irek's first teacher at the school, was a member of the auditioning commission, and picked him out almost at once. 'He was a little boy, not very tall. When he came into the audition, he sat quietly on the chair and almost against my will I found myself looking at him. He made a very clear visual impression on me. He was a quiet and very balanced little boy.

'It's not possible to say that he had very good feet, and his build was slightly stocky, but when we asked him to dance something, they played the music and he improvised, and he danced so well that we said, "Yes, he must study with us."'

Irek Mukhamedov by Jeffery Taylor. 1994. Pages 16-17.

The Tsar and Sleeping Beauty

Modelled, albeit loosely, on French courtly entertainments of the seventeenth century, Sleeping Beauty may be interpreted as an apostrophe to the reigning monarch, expressed through the analogy of Florestan/Louis XIV. There are hints of magnanimity in the King's forgiving the misdeeds of his subjects, and he weathers the tribulations of destiny to emerge at the end having fulfilled his original task. One presumes that some such objective motivated Vsevolozhsky, the experienced courtier, in the choice of time and setting. And the ballet is filled with glorifications of the King, though if the Director truly sought to reproduce in some way the theatre of Louis XIV, there is surely something amiss in this portrayal: Lully and his collaborators forbade the inclusion of anything not flattering to Louis XIV. Vsevolozhsky's Florestan has an incompetent Master of Ceremonies and cannot even make sure that the laws of his kindgom are obeyed -- extraordinary breaches of etiquette if such a parallel were intended (especially considering how much of Russia was under martial law during Alexander Ill's reign). The Tsar, who reacted coolly to the new work, may well have thought that if Sleeping Beauty were somehow an allegory of his realm it was uncomplimentary, if not wholly undeserved.


Tchaikovsky's Ballets by Roland John Wiley. 1991. Page 149.