The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  When Diaghilev produced The Rite of Spring (1913) with Stravinsky’s music, he had already shocked the Paris audience by the realistic eroticism of his production in 1912 of L’Après-midi d’un Faune, also choreographed by Nijinsky. Now he aimed to re-create a primitive Russian folk ritual, with its adoration of the earth, selection of a sacrificial victim, and finally the sacrifice itself. At the first performance on May 29, 1913, the audience rebelled against the dissonance of hammered discords and rhythmic repetition in Stravinsky’s music, accentuated by the frenetic twists and jerks of Nijinsky’s dance. Screams and catcalls from the outraged audience drowned out the music. “Listen first!” Diaghilev shouted, “Whistle afterward!” Critics the next day called it Le Massacre du Printemps. The audience proved that something shockingly new had been created. “But we must wait a long time,” Stravinsky prophesied, “before the public grows accustomed to our language. Of the value of what we have accomplished I am convinced, and this gives me strength for future work.”

  After the London season that year, Diaghilev’s company, which Fokine had left, went on tour to South America. Plagued by obsessive fear of the ocean, Diaghilev did not accompany them. When Diaghilev heard that Nijinsky had married a dancer in the corps de ballet he dismissed him and ended their intimacy. To replace Nijinsky, he boldly chose the eighteen-year-old Léonide Massine (1895–1979). While drawing on the post-1917 nostalgia for the aristocratic splendor of czarist Russia, Diaghilev had a wonderful catalytic power to find the latent talent in young artists. His expatriate Russian renaissance of the ballet spread the gospel of ballet across the Atlantic. His famous exhortation to Cocteau, with whom he was collaborating on Parade in the very year of the Russian Revolution, expressed his evocative powers, “Etonne-moi!” The lavish spectacles of the Russia of the czars took on a new life.

  With a succession of choreographers—Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, and George Balanchine—Diaghilev re-created classical ballet. For composers he drew on Ravel, Richard Strauss, Prokofieff, Debussy, Milhaud, and for set design and costumes he enlisted Derain, Picasso, Roualt, and Chirico among others. Disciples like Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) formed their own companies and carried the Ephemeral Art to spectators around the world.

  After Diaghilev’s death in 1929, Lincoln Kirstein invited his most brilliant disciple, George Balanchine (1904–1983), to New York. There Balanchine founded the School of American Ballet (1934), and after 1948 was artistic director of the New York City Ballet. He created new freer dance movements, sometimes geometric, sometimes drawn from ice-dancing and gymnastics, and choreographed several hundred ballets to the music of a wide variety of composers. Emphasizing abstraction, he was innovative in bodily movements and in extracting movement from the music. Balanchine ballet was American in more than name. It was a far cry from the czar’s Imperial Theater when he drew boldly on American subjects, choreographing Who Cares? to music by Gershwin and Stars and Stripes to Sousa. And he popularized ballet by incorporating it into musical comedy. His choreography for On Your Toes, I Married an Angel, Babes in Arms, and Louisiana Purchase helped make these into Broadway hits, and happily blurred the distinctions between the dance, drama, and music. He also helped make the art less ephemeral by staging dances for motion pictures, including The Goldwyn Follies, On Your Toes, and I Was an Adventuress.

  While Balanchine was adeptly mixing dance with drama in his choreography for American musical comedy, American pioneers of modern dance were declaring independence from the ballet. Their prophet was Isadora Duncan (1878–1927). Born in San Francisco the fourth child of a reckless businessman who abandoned the family, she led a vagrant childhood as her mother tried to avoid unpaid landlords. Her strong mother supported the children by giving piano lessons, and instilled a love of drama and music by playing for them the works of the great composers and by reading poetry aloud. As a child Isadora began dancing by herself—for the family at home and out on the beach. At six, when seen teaching neighborhood children how to wave their arms gracefully, she explained to her mother that this was her own dancing school.

  Reading widely, Isadora came under the influence of the writings and disciples of François Delsarte (1811–1871), the French inventor of a system of calisthenics to increase coordination and grace. Delsarte’s nine laws of gestures were designed for freedom of expression and relaxation of all parts of the body. Ruth St. Denis (1877–1968), another American pioneer, was also influenced by Delsarte’s ideas. In New York Isadora became “the pet of society,” dancing at private occasions for wealthy ladies to recitations of the Rubaiyat, and to the music of Strauss and Mendelssohn. Voluble about her philosophy of the dance, she boasted at nineteen that she had had ten years’ experience teaching and innovating. Like Ruth St. Denis, she had already conceived a dislike for the stilted ballet when her mother shepherded the family to London in 1900. There she began as an actress-dancer, but soon focused on the dance. Reading Winckelmann’s Journey to Athens, she studied the Greek vases and sculptures in museums for the figures of ancient dancers and developed her own ideal of Greek dance.

  Pursuing this Greek ideal, Isadora shocked society audiences in London and Paris by her bare feet and legs, her clinging and revealing costume, and her free movements. “Toe walking deforms the feet,” she declared, “corsets deform the body; nothing is left to be deformed but the brain.…” In Paris she supported herself by teaching dance to the children of the rich. Working for hours by herself in her studio she arrived at her own simple dance formula, which made “solar plexus” a familiar phrase among those who could not locate it. “For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my breasts, covering the solar plexus.… I was seeking and finally discovered the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversities of movement are born, the mirror of vision for the creation of the dance—it was from this discovery that was born the theory on which I founded my school.” As apostle of the “free dance,” she performed in European capitals, and visited Russia in 1905. Diaghilev, who had not yet made his mark, recalled that then “Isadora gave an irreparable jolt to the classic ballet of Imperial Russia.” But the patron of the ballet, Prince Peter Lieven, saw in Isadora “the beginning of the new outlook … the first to bring out in her dancing the meaning of the music; she was the first to dance the music and not dance to the music.”

  Isadora returned for tours to America, where again she shocked audiences by her scanty costume, especially now when obviously she was pregnant. She already had borne her first child to the English stage designer Gordon Craig, and now carried the child of Paris Singer, the sewing-machine heir. But in France she was a celebrated success. The new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées immortalized her in a bas-relief on the theater’s façade and in a mural within. Still, it was a time of tragedy. In 1913 her two children were drowned with their nurse when their automobile ran into the Seine. Three years passed before she could recover enough from her anguish to resume dancing. In 1921, she was invited by the Soviets to set up her own school of the dance. Exhilarated by this call “to meet my destiny,” she was soon frustrated by the Soviets’ delays in providing a place to meet her pupils and then their refusal to support the school. She still did her best to find some way to teach dance to Soviet children.

  Then she multiplied her problems in 1922 by a passionate love affair with a half-mad young Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin. To take him to the United States with her, he would have to be her husband, so she overcame her scruples against marriage and brought him along. A tempestuous tour followed in which hostility to her as a “Bolshevik agent” was complicated by Yesenin’s riotous behavior as he ranted nude through hotel corridors smashing bottles and furniture. Since the Soviets still would not release the children of her school for her American tour, all her performances were solo—and a spectacular well-publicized failure. Her frustrated impresario Sol Hurok used all his efforts to keep her dancing instead of lecturing to hostile audiences, and
to prevent the drunken Yesenin from beating his wife in hotels. Isadora repeatedly claimed that she was not a “Bolshevik” but only a “revolutionist,” which was too fine a distinction for American audiences. In 1923, the couple went back to Europe. She performed in Paris; Yesenin returned to Russia and committed suicide.

  Isadora made a last tour of Russia and Germany. But she was getting old for a dancer, drinking heavily, and gaining weight. She created two dances for Lenin’s funeral in 1924. Increasingly suspect as a Bolshevik propagandist, she lost bookings in France and Germany. Needing money, she pretended to be starving to death, and when friends rushed to her rescue she persuaded them to replenish her wine cellar. She signed a contract to write her memoirs, but before the book was written she had used up the advance. Friends planned benefit concerts to repurchase her house, which had been sold to meet her extravagant debts. After farewell performances in Paris, she moved to Nice, depressed and still looking for her ideal lover.

  Pursuing her luxurious tastes and pretending, although she was penniless, that she wanted to buy a flashy Bugatti sports car, she had it delivered to her for a test ride with the handsome driver. Wearing a long red scarf wrapped around her neck, she climbed into the car announcing “Adieu, mes amis, je vais à la gloire” (Farewell, my friends, I go to glory). As the car lurched forward her scarf caught in the spokes of a wheel and she was instantly strangled.

  Isadora’s legacy was not so much in her often-repeated theory of dance as in her insistence on the freedom to dance, and her unforgettable demonstration of what that meant. “Don’t be merely graceful,” she declared. “Unless your dancing springs from an inner emotion and expresses an idea, it will be meaningless.” She insisted, too, that “the real American type can never be a ballet dancer.” “I shall not teach the children to imitate my movements—I shall help them develop those movements natural to them.” She preached the liberation of the dance less effectively in her words than in herself. The English choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, who saw her in London when he was a schoolboy, never forgot. “She was a little heavy by that time in her career, but it didn’t matter.… Anyone of any age could duplicate what she did but not how she did it. When she raised her arms, it was an incredible experience. She could also stand still—and often did—but it was an alive stillness and it was dancing.”

  Meanwhile Ruth St. Denis (1878–1968), whose career paralleled Isadora’s, was finding her own way to give new life to the dance. She too sought to give outward expression to the “inward impulse,” with exotic themes from Mexico, China, Japan, and elsewhere.

  Martha Graham (1894–1991), Isadora’s successor, came closer to creating a modern dance as a distinctive form with a recognizable style, which aimed to free the dancer from a stilted vocabulary. And her dance would be distinctively American. She was born to the family of a physician of old New England stock in a small town in Pennsylvania. “My people were strict religionists,” she recalled, “who felt dancing was a sin. They frowned on all worldly pleasures.… My upbringing led me to fear it myself. But luckily we moved to Santa Barbara, California.… No child can develop as a real Puritan in a semitropical climate. California swung me in the direction of paganism, though years were to pass before I was fully emancipated.” After high school she persuaded her family to send her to the Denishawn School of Dance in Los Angeles. Within three years after entering she was given the leading feminine role in Ted Shawn’s Aztec ballet, Xochitl. Then she was hired for the Greenwich Village Follies and danced successfully with them for the next two years. Her opportunity to develop her own style came when she was engaged to teach dance at the new Eastman School, which also marked her break from the romantic strain of the Denishawn company. Now she saw herself no longer as a mere entertainer but as a committed artist in the dance.

  By 1927 she had begun to create her own dance vocabulary. She was building her dance on contemporary American subjects, as in Revolt and Immigrant, and Poems of 1917, which excited the ridicule of Fanny Brice in a sketch for the Ziegfeld Follies. It is not surprising that her spectators were astonished, for Martha Graham had created a modern dance, a shocking kind of anti-ballet. This novelty was recognized in 1927, when The New York Times appointed its first dance critic, John Martin, who would become the theorist and philosopher of the new movement. The modern dance needed such a sympathetic critic and interpreter, for it was as different from the spectacular beauties of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes as Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon had been from the sentimental idols of the Academy. And, much as Picasso defied the conventions of “beauty” and of perspective, Martha Graham would defy the conventions of ballet. The classical ballet had refurbished the forms and traditions of court ballet, and the Romantic ballet was the freer elaboration of those forms by Fokine and others.

  Like the Romantic ballet, modern dance was a kind of liberation but was still more radical. Its possibilities had been suggested by Isadora Duncan’s “Greek” dance, and Ruth St. Denis’s themes of “Oriental” dance. But Martha Graham would go further, to become the celebrated symbol and dominant influence in creating a new art of dance. The grand movement, as John Martin explained, was from spectacular dance (or ballet) to expressional dance (or modern dance). This was a simplifying revolution, which had few if any counterparts in the other arts. The extravagant productions of Diaghilev, bringing dancers together with the most celebrated musicians, painters, and dramatists, cried out for an art of simplification, which became the modern dance. And which returned to the basic movements of the human body.

  The pioneers of the anti-ballet—Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham—both had their theories of the physiological basis of the dance. Martha Graham, however, sought her source not in the solar plexus but in the rhythm of breathing, inhaling and exhaling, contraction and response, “percussive” motion. What they both accomplished, however, was not the embodiment of a theory but a personalizing of the dance to express every dancer’s self. They both had set themselves an individualist American ideal.

  If there had been no ballet—spectacular, grandiose, formalized—modern dance might not have seemed radical. Ballet had made a spectacle of defying gravity, and depended on the dancer’s ability to employ elegantly the canonical “positions,” but Martha Graham’s modern dance hugged the earth in bare feet. While ballet was the very model of prettiness, Martha Graham’s modern dance was stark and angular. While the ballet dancers on their toes pointed the elongated feet to provide a graceful line of the leg, Martha Graham kept her bare feet at right angles to the leg. And while the ballet’s “turn-out” tested the dancer’s ability to turn out the knees farther than in everyday life to show the legs in profile even when the dancer faced forward, the modern dancer kept feet in their normal parallel.

  Modern dance claimed its special creation to be an art of movement. By contrast, what had formerly been crucial in ballet was the positions, the attitudes and poses, and their combinations. “Movement,” John Martin explained, “is the most elementary physical experience of human life … found in the expression of all emotional experiences; and it is here that its value lies for the dancer. The body is the mirror of thought. When we are startled, the body moves in a quick, short, intense manner.…” Martha Graham’s language of dance was a new vocabulary of movement. And it was her aggressive, unpretty but expressive movements that irritated the seasoned ballet audience.

  Martha Graham’s creation also was a distinctively American revolution in dance. While the ballet was for and about kings and princes, she would dance the common experience. With her own company, the Dance Group, in 1929 she turned from the exotic themes of Denishawn to simpler more familiar subjects, heralded by her Adolescence. And she developed American themes. For Frontier in 1935, her set was designed by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who used a simple section of a fence post at the rear of the stage and ropes overhead forming a broad V to suggest the boundless plains as she danced the American conquest of space. In Primitive Mysteries (1931), she tried to
give American Indian religious rituals a universal significance. And she climaxed her Americana with her most celebrated work, Appalachian Spring, to Aaron Copland’s music. In the spirit of all frontiers, her high kick expressed the desire to reach out. And her Letter to the World (1940), which danced the two spirits—the conformist and the rebel—in Emily Dickinson, expressed a similar conflict within everyone.

  Finally Martha Graham made her own marriage of the arts, dancing theatrical themes of universal significance. Deaths and Entrances (1943) revealed the experiences of the Brontë sisters. She choreographed numerous works from Greek sources—Cave of the Heart (1946) on Medea, Errand into the Maze (1947) on the Minotaur legend, Night Journey (1947) on Oedipus, Clytemnestra (1958), and many on biblical themes, such as The Legend of Judith (1962) and Acrobats of God (1960). So Martha Graham finally proved able to transform myths, legends, and tradition into dances revealing “the inner man.” With astonishing energy and versatility, while leading the revolution that liberated dance from the ballet, she created more than 150 of her own dances. And at last she ceased to be imprisoned in the stark simplicity of her early work. She was willing to use sets by Noguchi and other sculptors, costumes designed by the best painters, and to draw on the music of a widening variety of composers—Samuel Barber, Carlos Chavez, Gian-Carlo Menotti, and William Schuman. The style of her dance company became richly eclectic, combining avant-garde gymnastics with the themes of primitive ritual and folk dance, with some Japanese mime, some theater of the absurd, and surrealism, and even with the familiar ballet positions. Having sought ways to express emotion “directly” in movement, Martha Graham found that modern dance in America, like the nation itself, had to draw on myths and hopes from everywhere.