Nijinsky Read Online Free PDF Page B

1904. The Russian balletworld turned out to greet her: she dined with an assortment of creative grandees-in-training, including the then artists Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst and the then curator and editor, Sergey Diaghilev, watched Anna Pavlova’s daily practice with Marius Petipa (reflecting with relief, when she saw the sparse lunch Pavlova permitted herself after three hours’ training, that she was not a classical ballet dancer), and observed the classes at the Imperial Ballet School which she thought seemed a ‘torture chamber’ . Even Kshesinskaya invited her to come and see her perform.
    Her own performances at the Mariinsky had an immediate impact. Duncan’s style could not have been further from the traditions the Imperial Theatres held so dear; it was, in fact, an explicit reproach to them. She danced alone, barefoot, wearing what she described as a ‘tunic of cobweb’ (and almost nothing in the way of underwear, at a time when Russian ballerinas still danced in boned corsets), in front of a plain blue velvet curtain, to music that was not considered ‘ballet music’. She was self-taught and relied on not technical virtuosity but feeling and emotion, often improvised, to communicate with her audience. ‘Like eager springtime’ , this pink-cheeked girl ‘distilled joy and vividness’.
    Despite her lack of training, she was by all accounts an extraordinarily powerful performer. As Mikhail Fokine, a Mariinsky dancer who was just beginning his choreographic career when he saw Duncan perform, would write, she ‘reminded us :
Do not forget that beauty and expressiveness are of the greatest importance
.’ Although he went on to qualify his praise – ‘the new Russian ballet answered:
Do not forget that a rich technique will create natural grace and expressiveness, through the really great art form
’ – everything he would compose in the future would be touched by Isadora’s influence.
    Radical politics were an important and, given that ballet had always been associated with royal courts, highly unusual element of Duncan’s work. She was a socialist (despite her fondness for champagne) and she was appalled by the misery she saw on St Petersburg’s streets in contrast to the wealth in which the audiences at the Mariinsky luxuriated. Her sense of drama blurred her memory; she claimed in her memoirsto have arrived in Russia later than she actually did, in January 1905, ‘remembering’ driving to her hotel through a deserted city past a procession of coffins – the coffins of the protestors shot on Bloody Sunday at the Winter Palace by the Tsar’s troops. When she danced in St Petersburg (and this may well have been true, though she would already have been there for a few weeks by the time Bloody Sunday happened) her ‘soul wept with righteous anger, thinking of the martyrs of that funeral procession of the dawn’.
    The Mariinsky’s younger dancers – Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Valsav’s adored teacher Sergey Legat and others – were as appalled as Duncan by the massacre of unarmed, peaceful demonstrators in front of the Winter Palace; Mikhail Fokine in particular had well-established connections with émigré dissidents and was influenced by anarchist writers like Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin. But they also had their own issues about which to protest. The Imperial Theatres were intimate, interbred places where former lovers worked together for years after their relationships had ended, members of the same family taught and danced alongside one another, and throughout their careers artists were constantly working in direct competition with their peers. Getting out of the Imperial Theatres was almost as hard as getting into them because the artists had essentially handed their careers over to the Tsar in return for their training. In the autumn of 1905 they led a strike against