Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  What about Italy? There the problem was historical. As we have seen, Italian ballet had been hijacked in the late nineteenth century by Excelsior and Manzotti’s neobaroque bombast, which in turn fed into Mussolini’s fascist aesthetic: mass spectacles of marching girls, kick lines, and elaborately costumed processions. In 1925, however, a faint sign of hope appeared. That year Arturo Toscanini, musical director of La Scala, invited Enrico Cecchetti to return from London to his native Italy to reform the languishing ballet school at La Scala. Cecchetti came and did his best, but he found the situation bleak and was in any case too old and plagued with illness to meet the challenge. In 1928, the year of his death, he complained bitterly to Cia Fornaroli (his protégée and Toscanini’s future daughter-in-law) that the administrative director of La Scala had taken angry exception to the artistic values Cecchetti was working so hard to instill in his students: “He says: what do I care if they know how to dance or not, I do not need ballerinas, I want disciplined performers who know how to keep in line.” Fornaroli succeeded Cecchetti but met with no more success than her master; in 1932 she was abruptly replaced by Jia Ruskaia (a pseudonym that meant “I am Russian”), an exotic “free” dancer well connected in Roman fascist circles. Fornaroli and her husband Walter Toscanini left Italy to settle in New York. Arturo Toscanini, who had been harassed and attacked by fascist hooligans, was already there.4

  Ballet in Italy turned instead in an altogether different direction: away from classicism and toward German and central European expressionist dance. In 1938 the Hungarian dancer and choreographer Aurel Milloss (1906–1988) took up a position as ballet master in Rome. He would become the most important figure in Italian dance after the Second World War, working in the capital city but also in Milan and Naples and in Vienna and Germany (on the old Austro-Hungarian circuit). Milloss was cultivated and widely read, with a strong grounding in classical ballet acquired from an old Italian ballet master working in Budapest, but his life had been racked by war and exile: his family was displaced during the First World War and lived uneasily between Bucharest and Belgrade, where Milloss nonetheless continued his ballet training. After the war, he studied ballet in Paris and Milan (with Cecchetti) and lived and worked in Weimar and Nazi Germany and in fascist Hungary before finally settling in Mussolini’s relatively benign Rome.

  For Milloss, however, ballet was not enough. He was also drawn to ideas taking hold in the emerging German expressionist movement in dance and especially to the work of the choreographer Rudolf Laban. Laban (1879–1958) had been an early advocate of Körperkultur (physical culture) and had spent summers before and during the First World War at Monte Verità, a cooperative health colony in Switzerland, where he created dances such as Song of the Sun, a two-day outdoor communal ritual. In the 1920s, working again in Germany and concerned at the breakdown (as he saw it) of communities in an exhausted and war-ravaged society, Laban set out to establish “movement choirs”—masses of people moving in unison—and taught frei tanz (free dance) to encourage spiritual renewal and the spontaneous expression of emotions in movement. His ideas touched a cultural chord: dance schools modeled on his teaching sprang up across the country. Milloss worked with Laban in Berlin and immersed himself in the debates taking place among German dancers eager to forge new dance forms.

  When he arrived in Italy, however, Milloss did something quite unexpected: he returned to classical ballet and made a genuine effort to pick up the threads of nineteenth-century Italian dance. He studied the life and art of the dancer and choreographer Salvatore Viganò and scoured libraries for clues to his long-lost works; he would rechoreograph Viganò’s signature Le Creature di Prometeo several times. But this renewed interest in ballet was just a glimmer, a small hope of beauty in an imagination otherwise taken up with violent imagery and an urgent need to grapple artistically with the wars, disruption, and dislocation that had shaped his life. Milloss’s dances were mostly dark and anguished, marked by physical distortions and the grotesque: he made ballets about evil and the devil, death and fear, with bent limbs, twisted lines, and bodies hunched and cowering. Chorus of the Dead (1942), for example, set to a haunting madrigal by the Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi, featured fifteen masked dancers trapped in a hallucinatory nightmare.

  His best-known work, Miraculous Mandarin (1935), had been created in Budapest in collaboration with Béla Bartók. Admiral Horthy’s fascist government had refused to allow its performance there, but it became a staple in Italian theaters. A difficult and disturbing work, it was described thus by the painter Toti Scialoja, who designed the 1945 staging in which Milloss himself danced:

  Milloss, a tiny wretched Chinese, springs out on the stage like a sewer rat. There he is, a malignant spider, motionless, just in the center of the stage. A shiver runs through his body when he starts drawing out the thread from his bowels. Faster and faster he is tangling it all around himself and now there he is, trapped in his own slimy web … everything around him becomes tentacle, filament. The thread is rotting and falling in tatters like a vegetal pulp mined by a bad germ. More and more the circle tightens, but through groping, he is knotting and tearing it. He ends by getting hanged on a dripping lace, a haunted gesture coming from a cramp, a strain. To die, he drags himself into a dark mysterious corner, where he is eventually in peace.5

  Although Milloss produced dozens of ballets in Italy, almost none survived and his work on Italian ballet, so strong and vital during and after the war, left barely a trace. He was an émigré and cosmopolitan, too restless to build his own school or legacy—an outsider who brought central European dance into Italy. Indeed, in his later years Milloss returned more and more to Germany and Austria, where his art and life had deeper roots. Italians had welcomed him but were unable to use his art to revive their own languishing traditions. The training and the theaters existed, but the chaos and disruption of fascism and war had taken a heavy toll; the periodic and ever-popular revivals of Excelsior continued. The artistic topsoil, moreover, was too thin to hold or nourish what little talent did emerge. The ballerina Carla Fracci, for example, no sooner made her name at La Scala in the 1950s than she embarked on her own international career. Thus although Milan, Rome, and Naples remained coveted stops on the international tour circuit, that is all they were. Italy had become a stop rather than a source of classical ballet.

  Denmark could not have been more different. Bournonville’s long reign had established ballet at the center of Danish public life, and after his death in 1879 Danish dancers worked hard to preserve his legacy. In the 1890s, as we have seen, his students wrote down some of his steps and exercises, which in modified forms were passed along and eventually organized into six classes, one for each day of the working week, set to tuneful, comic-opera-style music. Known as the Bournonville school, these classes constituted the training at the Royal Danish Ballet school until the early 1950s, when more modern exercises were added. Continuity, however, was maintained: the classes were never dropped, and they remain an integral part of the curriculum to this day. They are the source of the celebrated Danish style, with its measured restraint and joyful, unencumbered movement.

  If Bournonville’s steps were the dancers’ training, his ballets became, far more problematically, their culture. Indeed, as the twentieth century unfolded Bournonville’s ballets (like Hans Christian Andersen’s stories) attained mythic stature and came to stand for an idealized golden era in Danish history, their simple moral certainties and virtuous, upstanding characters the embodiment of “Danishness.” The dancers, eager to maintain this legacy and worried by slippage in the choreography caused by time and faulty memories, began to write his ballets down. In the 1930s, for example, the dancer Valborg Borchsenius scribbled all she knew on scraps of paper which she stored, Madame Defarge–like, in her sewing basket. These bits and pieces were eventually transcribed into notebooks, hundreds of pages laboriously copied in longhand with sketches and patterns etched in the margins. The classes were similarly documented an
d formalized.

  As the “Bournonville tradition” thus took shape, the old master’s dances were pinned down and defined in ways they never had been in his lifetime. His legacy became more secure but also more rigid and, like all orthodoxies, fiercely resistant to change. When Harald Lander, who directed the company from 1932 to 1951, rechoreographed Bournonville’s Valkyries, for example, one critic bitterly complained that the dances were no longer Nordic: “they come from the world.” Nor were the Danes known to welcome artistic innovation from other quarters. Their response to Fokine when he visited in 1925 was lukewarm, and when Balanchine came in the early 1930s he despaired at the company’s unwillingness to let him stage new work. During the Second World War, Danish ballet—which continued through the occupation—became more isolated and conservative still, its dancers understandably clinging to every last detail of their art.6

  After the war the company’s long isolation ended: Danish dancers began to tour abroad, and critics from Europe and America also visited Denmark. This opening did not necessarily broaden Danish minds. When the dancer Erik Bruhn returned to Copenhagen in the 1950s after dancing in Europe and America, one prominent ballet master stormed from the theater raging at the foreign influences that had vulgarized Bruhn’s pure Danish style. To the rest of Europe and America, however, seeing the company for the first time, Bournonville was a revelation: here, it seemed, was a real and unbroken ballet tradition, a direct line to the Romantic era. Jerome Robbins, visiting in 1956, was amazed to find such old-world training: “The children themselves look like a roomful of trolls and elves. They all wear the uniform of royal blue wool tights and sweaters, most a little baggy at the knees. They are beautifully behaved and dance already quite well.”7

  Bournonville thus became a source of international prestige for Danes, and efforts to preserve his legacy intensified. All the more so in the 1960s and ’70s, when younger artists rebelled against tradition with flimsy but fashionable ballets such as The Triumph of Death, featuring rock music, nudity, and spray paint. In 1979, the Royal Danish Ballet set down a marker: they staged a festival in Copenhagen to celebrate one hundred years since Bournonville’s death, in which all of his known works were polished and performed. It was a major event and attracted international media attention. It was repeated in 1992 and again in 2005, with plans to celebrate every decade or so into the future.

  The Danes thus faced a paradox. Outside of Soviet Russia, they alone in Europe had managed to maintain a viable living nineteenth-century classical tradition—but it was a tradition preserved in cultural aspic. They had the training and the school, but Denmark’s finest dancers often found the artistic climate in Copenhagen limited and stultifying. A distinction even arose in the company between those who stayed and those who “got out.” And indeed, like Bruhn, many of Denmark’s greatest dancers went abroad and made their careers in England or, especially, America.

  “Bournonville,” a sympathetic critic once lamented, “is a mighty and, as time goes on, a somewhat unmanageable monument.…The horrible thing about Bournonville … is that he really was, and still is, extremely good. But one just cannot stand him.” It was true: the dancers were excellent and many of the divertissements in Bournonville’s ballets were at least as inventive and technically challenging as new work being done elsewhere in the twentieth century, but the ballets themselves were hopelessly trite and moralizing, remnants of another time and place. Even the Danes eventually removed most of the old ballets featured at the Bournonville Festivals from their regular repertory, and today they are “heritage”: as much tourist attraction as art. But this too was part of the Danish tradition. Bournonville himself had made an art of glorifying French Romanticism long after the French themselves had abandoned it; now his successors focused their own art on preserving his Danish world, as it slipped from view. But if Bournonville had made French ballet Danish, his successors settled for a lesser claim: they made Danish ballet an heirloom. To glimpse the past, it was (and is) enough to visit Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Theatre. The future, however, lay elsewhere.8

  At the turn of the twentieth century, classical ballet in Britain belonged to the music hall. It was a popular entertainment, and along with spectator sports, holiday resorts, gambling, and horse racing, owed much to the fin de siècle explosion of leisure activities. Music hall itself had its origins in local pubs, where owners sponsored “sing-songs” and hired entertainers to keep their patrons happy—and drinking. By the early 1890s it had become a vast, commercially organized form of mass entertainment, attended by tens of thousands of people nightly. London alone had more than thirty-five music halls, many of them huge: the Alhambra in Leicester Square, for example, seated three thousand, and the Coliseum held twenty-five hundred and boasted a revolving stage.

  Music hall was virtually unregulated: its dances and acts fell outside the purview of the Lord Chamberlain, formally responsible for censoring serious theater since the early eighteenth century. With this anything-goes license, the music halls flirted with political satire and sex in ways that other theaters did not dare. Ballets were one of several acts in an evening’s entertainment, and dancers performed sandwiched between comedians, singers, and stuntmen. The dances tended to be lavish, kitschy affairs: scantily clad “eccentric dancers” or novelty acts (such as male high kickers), aerial ballets with pigeons trained to fly about and perch on the dancers’ arms. If music halls were freer with their entertainments than other establishments, however, this did not mean that their activities went unmonitored. “Social purity” activists, horrified by the “full-rigged whores” who arrayed themselves on the promenades and by the obscene jokes and innuendos that peppered performances, called them “music hells” and expended impressive moral energy trying to reform them. Most eventually fell more or less into line: eager to expand their audiences, they gradually cleaned up their acts and by the early twentieth century were offering family entertainment for the respectable working and middling classes. Many were socially mixed and even catered to the aristocracy—King Edward VII was a regular patron.9

  When the “invasion” of Russian dancers began in 1909, it too began in the music hall. The Maryinsky ballerina Tamara Karsavina played the Coliseum and her colleague Olga Preobrazhenskaya staged (and starred in) an abridged Swan Lake at the Hippodrome; Anna Pavlova performed at the Palace Theater—where she shared billing with a Bioscope film of the Punchestown Races and would also play alongside popular music hall stars such as Harry Lauder. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, however, was different. In June 1911 the company arrived for its first London season with Karsavina, Nijinsky, and Fokine, performing the sensational Russian ballets that had already made them the talk of le tout Paris. They did not play the music halls, at least initially, but appeared instead at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on the eve of George V’s coronation; five days later, the company danced at the coronation gala itself for the king and queen in a theater adorned with roses and an audience in full formal dress, glittering with gold and diamonds.

  The difference was not only that Diaghilev had managed to secure a plum engagement. He had always seen ballet as a sister art to opera, and in London (as in Paris) he worked hard to bring Russian ballet to the public through opera: at Covent Garden in 1911 the Ballets Russes alternated with performances of Wagner’s Ring. Diaghilev shrewdly linked his enterprise to that of the English impresario Sir Thomas Beecham, who had his own ambitious plans to promote opera in Britain, and later seasons featured Russian ballet and opera. For Beecham, the Ballets Russes represented a welcome opportunity: chic and fashionable, it was also substantive—it really was different from the candy-coated dances on offer at London’s music halls, and no one doubted the discipline and deep tradition that stood behind the Russian dancers.

  But the real key to the success of the Ballets Russes was the striking effect it had on London’s cultural elite, and especially the artists and intellectuals in and around the Bloomsbury circle. Leonard Woolf, a charter member,
later recalled, “I have never seen anything more perfect, nor more exciting on any stage,” and Hugh Walpole recorded his own astonishment in his diary: “The Russian Ballet has moved me more than anything I’ve ever seen in my life.” The poet Rupert Brooke wrote excitedly to a friend: “They, if anything, can redeem our civilization.” The Times summed up the impact of the Ballets Russes season in glowing prose: “The summer of 1911 has brought more than an aesthetic revolution with it: in bringing the Russian Ballet to Covent Garden it has brought a positively new art, it has extended the realm of beauty for us, discovered a new continent.”10

  None of the Russian ballet’s many admirers, however, would be more central to the future of British ballet than John Maynard Keynes. Keynes is usually remembered as the preeminent economist of the twentieth century, but he was also deeply involved with classical dance and a key player in creating a thriving British ballet. Born in 1883, Keynes never forgot the idyllic, gentlemanly life of his early years in late Victorian and Edwardian England, devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and art. Educated at Eton, he went on to a brilliant career at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was inducted into the vaunted Apostles, a close-knit, all-male secret society of intellectuals—many of whom, like Keynes, became Bloomsbury’s leading lights. These were England’s best and brightest (Keynes once wrote to Lytton Strachey, “Is it monomania—this colossal moral superiority that we feel? I get the feeling that most of the rest never see anything at all—too stupid or wicked”); they were serious about knowledge, but also about their own cleverness. Meetings of the Apostles, which helped set the tone for Bloomsbury, mixed sharp wit, inside jokes, and sexual allusions with rigorously disciplined discussions of philosophy and art—Keynes presented papers on subjects such as “beauty.”11