Anna Pavlova, global missionary for ballet classicism: Women’s History Month in Dance, 2021

Women’s History Month in Dance 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94. For many people across the Western world, ballet in the years 1909-30 was something Russian, exemplified by either Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909-1929) or Anna Pavlova (1881-1931). That’s quite an either/or. There were other Russian dancers, some of them as great (Vera Trefilova, whose classicism branded the critic Arnold Haskell as a supreme revelation, presented independent seasons in the 1920s) - and yet the ballet scene in general was dominated by these two dissimilar ventures: Diaghilev’s exceptional enterprise, with its constant supply of top-level artistic novelty and by Anna Pavlova, whose productions tended to be less marvellously lit and designed, with often less distinguished music, but which nonetheless contained some vital flame of the pure ballet she had learnt from Marius Petipa and his colleagues in St Petersburg. Petipa, at the end of her career, coached as Giselle and as Nikiya in “La Bayadère”; although her teacher Pavel Gerdt counselled her not to distort her style with the notorious thirty-two fouettés, she danced a wide range of the Maryinsky repertory, reviving extensive excerpts in her long career in the West.

Haskell recalled that she would ask visitors “Are you on my side or Diaghilev’s?” In the first years of the Diaghilev company, she sometimes appeared with it. In general, Diaghilev’s view of ballet promoted modernist music (which seemed to her anti-classical), modernist design, and the male dancer (Vaslav Nijinsky, Adolf Bolm, Leonide Massine, Serge Lifar); her priorities were the romantic-classical beauties of ballet, the Petipa-based Platonic structure of pure form, the hierarchical glorification of ballerinadom.

She had a missionary zeal: whereas Diaghilev toured Europe and (to a far lesser extent) the Americas, Pavlova also took on Asia, Africa, Australia, and parts of the Americas unknown to Diaghilev, ardently showing ballet to audiences with no experience of ballet. When children were brought to her after the performance, she would take their hands in hers, look into their eyes, and say “What do you want to do when you grow up?” As the dancer-teacher Bonnie Bird recalled over fifty years later, “What choice did I have?” (Bird’s career led her to dance for Martha Graham and to teach generations of dancers from Merce Cunningham to Matthew-Bourne. Would Pavlova would have been proud?)

Her effect was profound. The history of the Indian classical form Bharatanatyam was revised because Rukmini Devi Arundale was inspired by Pavlova to adapt its devadasi tradition into something new. Most ballet people know how she converted the early-teenage Frederick Ashton in a performance she gave in Peru: “She injected me with her poison,” he liked to say, “and there was an end of me.” In 1970, Robert Helpmann (another Pavlova concert) observed that all Ashton’s ballets could have been made for Pavlova; Ashton agreed, saying he was always thinking of her. (In the 1960s, he asked Bronislava Nijinska “Who was the greatest ballerina of them all?” Nijinska replied immediately “Pavlova.” Ashton asked “What about Karsavina?” Nijinska replied “Belle femme; belle femme.”) Soon after his arrival in America, George Balanchine was approached to choreograph a film about Pavlova’s life: it didn’t happen then, but it was revealing that her decades of travelling the globe for ballet had already become biopic material then.

Two months before his eightieth birthday, Ashton needed to tell me, even show me, how she had done certain steps: he particularly singled out how, when she hopped backward in arabesque voyagée, her raised leg never wobbled but stayed ardently firm. It’s famous that he put a phrase she danced in the “Gavotte Pavlova” into the majority of the dances he made, reaccentuated so that it’s even reversed but invariably disguised; though his dancers all came to know it as “the Fred step”, he insisted that for him it belonged to her and that was he said that he inserted it as a “talisman”. But there are many others Pavlova-isms in Ashton choreography: such as a way she had of wreathing her arms around her head (87) before opening them wide; and a rapturous piquée arabesque followed by a tour jeté arriving seated on the floor with a grand port de bras (seen in her film of “La Nuit”). Probably she had not invented these, but she made their effect indelible.

Diaghilev presented “Giselle” in the years 1910-1914, sometimes with her in the role, but she went on presenting it with her own company: Karsavina, Diaghilev’s main Giselle, writes in “Theatre Street” with awe of Pavlova’s rightness for the role. In 1916, she revived “The Sleeping Beauty” in designs by Léon Bakst, five years before Diaghilev did the same on a far larger scale. Years before Nicholas Sergueyev revived the complete “Nutcracker” at Sadler’s Wells in 1934, Pavlova had presented parts of it. As Ninette de Valois later observed, it was only in retrospect that she and many Western dancers understood how much of the essence of Petipa and the Maryinsky heritage they had first imbibed from Pavlova.

Pavlova, also inspired by Isadora Duncan, often presented numbers that took her far from the Russian classical tradition; but she left no doubt that these for her were tributaries to the great river of ballet. Her legend was irrevocably associated with the solo “The Swan” or “The Dying Swan”, choreographed by Mikhail Fokine to the Swan cello music from Saint-Saëns’s “Carnival of the Animals”. She danced it everywhere. (Her student Cleo Nordi taught that the solo was less about the death of a bird than about the liberation of a soul.) Her famous last words were “Bring me my swan costume”; the next performance she would have danced went ahead with the spotlight showing the course she would have danced in her Swan solo while the Saint-Saëns music played.

Her devotion to classicism had a longterm effect by way of members of her company. Winifred Edwards (“Vera Fredova” onstage, later longterm teacher at the Royal Ballet School), Cleo Nordi, Muriel Stuart (revered teacher at the School of American Ballet) were among the influential teachers permanently shaped by their years with Pavlova, passing on the classical tradition to the students for over four decades after her death.

Thursday 25 March