$4.50

S. HUROK PRESENTS

A MEMOIR OF THE DANCE WORLD
BY S. HUROK

In these exciting memoirs, S. Hurok, Impresario Extraordinary, reveals the incredible inside story of the glamorous and temperamental world of the dance, a story only he is qualified to tell. From the golden times of the immortal Anna Pavlova to the fabulous Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Hurok has stood in the storm-center as brilliant companies and extravagant personalities fought for the center of the stage.

Famous as “the man who brought ballet to America and America to the ballet,” the Impresario writes with intimate knowledge of the dancers who have enchanted millions and whose names have lighted up the marquees of the world. Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Lydia Lopokova, Escudero, the Fokines, Adolph Bolm, Argentinita, Massine, Alicia Markova, Anton Dolin, Robert Helpmann, Shan-Kar, Martha Graham, Moira Shearer, Margot Fonteyn, Ninette de Valois, and Frederick Ashton are only a few of the celebrities

(cont’d on back flap)

(cont’d from front flap)

who shine and smoulder through these pages.

The fantastic financial and amorous intrigues that have split ballet companies asunder come in for examination, as do the complicated dealings of the strange “Col.” de Basil and his various Ballet Russe enterprises; Lucia Chase and her Ballet Theatre; and the phenomenal tours of the Sadler’s Wells companies.

Although the Impresario’s pen is sometimes cutting, it is also blessed by an unfailing sense of humor and by his deep understanding that a great artist seldom exists without a flamboyant temperament to match.

There are many beautiful illustrations—32 pages.

8 West 13 Street
New York, N. Y.
S. HUROK PRESENTS

S. HUROK
Presents

A MEMOIR OF THE DANCE WORLD

By S. Hurok

HERMITAGE HOUSE / NEW YORK 1953

COPYRIGHT, 1953, BY S. HUROK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published simultaneously in Canada by Geo. J. McLeod, Toronto
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 53-11291
MANUFACTURED IN THE U.S.A.
AMERICAN BOOK-STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK

To
The United States of America:
Whose freedom I found as a youth;
Which I cherish;
And without which nothing that has
been accomplished in a lifetime
of endeavour could have come to pass

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
[Added by the etext transcriber as it does not appear in the book.]

S. HUROK PRESENTS

[1.] Prelude: How It All Began

In the mid-forties, after the publication of my first book, a number of people approached me with the idea of my doing another book dealing with the dance and ballet organizations I had managed.

I did not feel the time was ripe for such a book. Moreover, had I written it then, it would have been a different book, and would have carried quite another burden. If it had been done at that time, it would have been called To Hell With Ballet!

In the intervening period a good deal has happened in the world of ballet. The pessimism that prompted the former title has given way on my part to a more optimistic note. The reasons for this change of heart and attitude will be apparent to the reader.

At any rate, this book had to be written. In the volume of memoirs that appeared some seven years ago I made an unequivocal statement to that effect, when I wrote: “There’s no doubt about it. Ballet is different. Some day I am going to write a book about it.”

Here it is. It is a very personal account, dealing with dance and ballet as I have seen it and known it. For thirty-four years I have not only watched ballet, but have had a wide, first-hand experience of and contact with most of the leading dance and ballet organizations of the world. This book is written out of that experience.

Ballet on this continent has come a long way along the road since the night I bowed silently over the expressive hand of Anna Pavlova as she stood among the elephants in Charles B. Dillingham’s Hippodrome. I like to think, with what I hope is a pardonable pride, that I have helped it on its journey. It has given me greater pleasure than any of the multifarious other activities of my managerial career. On that side of the ledger lies the balance. It has also given me a generous share of heartaches and headaches. But, if I had it all to do over again, there is little I would have ordered otherwise.

Because of these things, I believe my point of view is wider than that of the scholar, the critic, or the enthusiast. Ballet is glamourous. It is technical and complex; an exacting science. It is also highly emotional, on the stage, behind the scenes, and often away from the theatre. Temperament is by no means confined to the dancing artists.

During the course of these close contacts with the dance, a mass of material has accumulated; far too much for a single book. Therefore, I am going to attempt to give a panorama of the high spots (and some of the low spots, as well) of three-and-one-half decades of managing dance attractions, together with impressions of those organizations and personalities that have, individually and collectively, contributed to make ballet what it is today.

With a book of this kind a good resolution is to set down nothing one has not seen or heard for oneself. For the most part I shall try to stick to that resolution. Whenever it becomes necessary to depart from it, appropriate credit will be accorded. Without question there are times when silence is the wiser part of narration, and undoubtedly there will be times when, in these pages, silence may be regarded, I hope, as an indication of wisdom. However, there are not likely to be many such instances, since a devotion to candid avowal will compel the dropping of the curtain for a few blank moments and raising it again at a more satisfactory stage only to spare the feelings of others rather than myself.

One of the questions I have asked myself is where and how did this passionate interest in dance arise. I was, as almost every one knows, born in Russia. Dance and music are a part of the Russian. Russia was the home of a ballet that reached the highest perfection of its time: an organization whose influence is felt wherever and whenever a ballet slipper is donned. Yet, as a country lad, springing from an obscure provincial town, brought up in my father’s village hardware business and on his tobacco plantation, I am unable to boast of having been bowled over, smitten, marked for life by being taken at a tender age to see the Imperial Ballet. No such heaven-sent dispensation was mine. I was a long-time American citizen before I saw ballet in Russia.

Nevertheless, I believe that the fact I was born in Russia not only shaped my ends, but provided that divinity that changed a common-or-garden-variety little boy into what I eventually became. Consciously or unconsciously the Russian adores the artist, denies the artist nothing. As a normal, healthy, small-town lad, in Pogar, deep in the Ukraine, I sensed these things rather than understood them. For it was in Pogar and Staradrube and Gomel, places of no importance, that I not only came into contact with the Russian “adoration” of the artist; but, something much more important, I drank in that love of music and dance that has motivated the entire course of my life.

The Imperial Ballet was not a touring organization; and Pogar, Staradrube and Gomel were far too unimportant and inconspicuous even to be visited by vacationing stars on a holiday jaunt or barnstorming trip. But the people of Pogar, Staradrube and Gomel sang and danced.

The people of Pogar (at most there might have been five thousand of them) were a hard-working folk but they were a happy people, a fun-loving people, when days work was done. Above all else they were a hospitable people. Their chief source of livelihood was flax and tobacco, a flourishing business in the surrounding countryside, which served to provide the villagers with their means for life, since Pogar was composed in the main of tradesmen and little supply houses which, in turn, served the necessaries to the surrounding countryside.

Still fresh in my mind is the wonder of the changing seasons in Pogar, always sharply contrasted, each with its joys, each having its tincture of trouble. The joys remain, however; the troubles recede and vanish. Winter and its long nights, with the long hauls through the snow to the nearest railway station, forty frigid miles away: a two-day journey with the sleighs; the bivouacked nights to rest the horses. I remember how bitterly cold it was, as I lay in the sleigh or alternately sat beside the driver, wrapped in heavy clothes and muffled to my eyes; how, in the driving snow, horses and drivers would sometimes lose the road entirely, and the time spent in retracing tracks until the posts and pine trees marking what once had been the edges of the road were found. Then how, with horses nearly exhausted and our spirits low, we would glimpse the flickering of a light in the far distance, and, heading towards it, would find a cluster of little peasant huts. Once arrived, we would arouse these poor, simple people, sometimes from their beds, and would be welcomed, not as strangers, but rather as old friends. I remember how, in the dead of night, still full of sleep, they would prepare warm food and hot tea; how they would insist on our taking their best and warmest beds, those on the stove itself, while they would curl up in a corner on the floor. Then, in the morning, after more hot tea and a piping breakfast, horses fed and refreshed, they would send us on our way with their blessing, stubbornly refusing to accept anything in the way of payment for the night’s lodging.

This warm, human, generous hospitality of the Russian peasant has not changed through devastation by war and pestilence. Neither Tsardom nor Bolshevism could alter the basic humanity of the Russian people, who are among the kindest and most hospitable on earth.

The winter nights in Pogar, when the snow ceased falling and the moon shone on the tinselly scene, were filled with a magic and unforgettable beauty. The Christmas feasting and festivities will remain with me always. But the sharpest of all memories is the picture of the Easter fun and frolic, preceded by the Carnival of Butter-Week. Spring had come. It mattered little that Pogar’s unpaved roads were knee-deep in mud; the sun was climbing to a greater warmth: that we knew. We knew the days were drawing out. It was then that music and dance were greater, keener pleasures than ever. Every one sang. All danced. Even the lame and the halt tried to do a step or two.

We made the Karavod: dancing in a circle, singing the old, time-honored songs. And there was an old resident, who lived along the main roadway in a shabby little house set back from the lane itself, a man who might have been any age at all—for he seemed ageless—who was a Skazatel of folk songs and stories. He narrated tales and sang stories of the distant, remote past.

The village orchestra, come Easter time, tuned up out of doors. There was always a violin and an accordion. That was basic; but if additional musicians were free from their work, sometimes the orchestra was augmented by a balalaika or two, a guitar or a zither—a wonderful combination—particularly when the contrabass player was at liberty. They played, and we all sang, above all, we sang folk song after folk song. Then we danced: polkas without end, and the Crakoviak; and the hoppy, jumpy Maiufess, while the wonderful little band proceeded to outdo itself with heartrending vibratos, tremulous tremolos, and glissandos that rushed up and down all the octaves.

Spring merged into summer. The lilacs and the violets faded; but the summer evenings were long and the change from day to night was slow and imperceptible. It took the sun many hours to make up its mind to disappear behind the horizon, and even then, after the edge of the burning disk had been swallowed up by the edge of the Ukranian plain, its scarlet, orange and pink memories still lingered fondly on the sky, and on the surface of our little lake, as if it were reluctant to leave our quiet land.

It was then the music rose again; the balalaikas strummed, and I, as poor a balalaika player as ever there was, added tenuous chords to the melodies. From the near distance came the sound of a boy singing to the accompaniment of a wooden flute; and, as he momentarily ceased, from an even greater distance came the thin wail of a shepherd’s pipe.

There was music at night, there was music in the morning. The people sang and danced. The village lake, over which the setting sun loved to linger, gave onto a little stream, hardly more than a brook. The tiny brook sang on its journey, and the rivulets danced on to the Desna; from there into the Sozh on its way to Gomel, down the Dnieper past the ancient city of Kiev, en route to the Black Sea. And in all the towns and villages it passed, I knew the people were singing and dancing.

This was something I sensed rather than knew. It was this background of music and dance that was uppermost in my thoughts as I left Russia to make my way, confused and uncertain as to ambition and direction. Despite the impact of the sumptuousness of the bright new world that greeted me on my arrival in America, I found a people who neither sang nor danced. (I am not referring to the melodies of Tin-Pan Alley or the turkey-trot.) I could not understand it. I was dismayed by it. I was filled with a determination to help bring music and dance into their lives; to make these things an important part of their very existence.

The story of the transition to America has been told. The transition was motivated primarily by an overwhelming desire for freedom. In 1904 I heard Maxim Gorky speak. Although it was six months later before I knew who Maxim Gorky was, I have never forgotten what he said. Yet, moved as I was by Gorky’s flaming utterance, it was Benjamin Franklin who became my ideal.

It was some time during Russia’s fateful year of 1905 that, somehow, a translation of Poor Richard’s Almanack fell into my hands. Franklin’s ideas of freedom to me symbolized America. There, I knew, was a freedom, a liberty of spirit that could not be equalled.

Although I arrived at Castle Garden, New York, after a twenty-three day voyage, in May, 1906, it was the fact that Philadelphia was the home of Benjamin Franklin that drew me to that city to make it my first American abiding place.

The evidence of these boyhood dreams of America has been proved by my own experience.

My dream has become a reality.

[2.] The Swan

IT was The Swan who determined my career in dance and ballet management. Whatever my confused aspirations on arriving in America, the music and dance I had imbibed at the folk fonts of Pogar remained with me.

I have told the story of the gradual clarification of those aspirations in the tale of the march forward from Brooklyn’s Brownsville. The story of Music for the Masses has become a part of the musical history of America. I had two obsessions: music and dance. Music for the Masses had become a reality. “The Hurok Audience,” as The Morning Telegraph frequently called it, was the public to which, two decades later, The New York Times paid homage by asserting I had done more for music than the phonograph.

Through the interesting and exciting days of presenting Chaliapine, Schumann-Heink, Eugene Ysaye, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, Tetrazzini, Tito Ruffo, the question of the dance, my other obsession, and how to do for it what I had succeeded in doing for music, was always in my mind.

It was then I met The Swan.

Anna Pavlova is a symbol of ballet in America; nay, throughout the world. I knew that here in America were a people who loved the dance, if they could but know it. The only way for them to know it, I felt, was to expose them to it in the finest form of theatre dance: the ballet.

The position that ballet holds today in the affections of the American public is the result of that exposure, coupled with a strongly increasing enthusiasm that not only holds its devotees, but brings to it a constantly growing new audience. But it was not always thus. Prior to the advent to these shores of Anna Pavlova there was no continuous development. America, to be sure, had had theatrical dancing sporadically since the repeal of the anti-theatre act in 1789. But all of it, imported from Europe, for the most part, had been by fits and starts. From the time of the famous Fanny Ellsler’s triumphs in La Tarantule and La Cracovienne, in 1840-1842, until the arrival of Anna Pavlova, in 1910, there was a long balletic drought, relieved only by occasional showers.

America was not reluctant in its balletic demonstrations in the Fanny Ellsler period, when the opportunities for appreciation were provided. The American tour of the passionately dramatic Fanny Ellsler was made in a delirium of enthusiasm. She was the guest of President Van Buren at the White House, and during her Washington engagement, Congress suspended its sittings on the days she danced. She was pelted with flowers, and red carpets were unrolled and spread for her feet to pass over. Even the water in which she washed her hands was preserved in bottles, so it is said, and venerated as a sacred relic. Her delirious Cachucha caused forthright Americans to perform the European balletomaniac rite of toasting her health in champagne drunk from her own ballet shoes.

It is necessary now and then, I feel, to mark a time and place for purposes of guidance. Therefore, I believe that the first appearance of Anna Pavlova at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on 28th February, 1910 is a date to remember, since it may be said to mark the beginning of the ballet era in our country.

That first visit was made possible by the generosity of a very great American Maecenas, the late Otto H. Kahn, to whom the art world of America owes an incalculable debt. The arrangement was for a season of four weeks. Her success was instantaneous. Her like never had been seen. The success was the more remarkable considering the circumstances of the performance, facts not, perhaps, generally remembered. Giulio Gatti-Cazzaza, the Italian director of the Metropolitan Opera House, was not what might be called exactly sympathetic to Otto Kahn’s determination to establish the Opera House on a better rounded scheme than the then prevalent over-exploitation of Enrico Caruso. As an Italian opera director, Gatti-Cazzaza was even less sympathetic to the dance, and was, moreover, extremely dubious that Metropolitan audiences would accept ballet, other than as an inconsequential divertissement during the course of an opera. So opposed to dance was he, as a matter of fact, that, although he eventually married Rosina Galli, the prima ballerina of the Metropolitan, he made her fight for ballet every inch of the way and, on general operatic principle, opposed everything she attempted to do for the dance.

Because of his “anti-dance” attitude, and in order to “play safe,” Gatti ordained that Pavlova’s American debut be scheduled to follow a performance of Massenet’s opera Werther. The Massenet opera being a fairly long three-act work, its final curtain did not fall until past eleven o’clock. By the time the stage was ready for the first American appearance of Pavlova, it was close to eleven-thirty. The audience that had remained largely out of curiosity rather than from any sense of expectation left reluctantly at the end. The dancing they had seen was like nothing ever shown before in the reasonably long history of the Metropolitan. For her début Pavlova had chosen Delibes’ human-doll ballet, Coppélia, giving her in the role of Swanilda a part in which she excelled. The triumph was almost entirely Pavlova’s. The role of Frantz allowed her partner, Mikhail Mordkin, little opportunity for virtuoso display, the corps de ballet seems to have been undistinguished, and the Metropolitan conductor, Podesti, most certainly was not a conductor for ballet, whatever else he might have been.

Altogether, in this first season, there were four performances of Coppélia, and two of Hungary, a ballet composed by Alexandre Glazounow. Additional works during a short tour that followed, and which included Boston and Baltimore, were the Bacchanale from Glazounow’s The Seasons, and La Mort du Cygne (The Dying Swan), the miniature solo ballet Michel Fokine had devised for her in 1905, which was to become her symbol.

Such was the success, Pavlova returned for a full season in New York and a subsequent tour the following autumn, bringing Mordkin’s adaptation of Giselle, and another Mordkin work, Azayae.

It was six years later that The Swan floated into my life. In 1916, Charles B. Dillingham, Broadway theatrical producer with a difference, was the director of the Hippodrome, the unforgettable Sixth Avenue institution. Dillingham was “different” for a number of reasons. He was a theatre man of vision; the Hippodrome, with its fantastic and colossal entertainments, if not his idea, was his triumph; he was perhaps the only Broadway manager who had been offered the post of business manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, an offer he refused, but he did accept a commission to make a complete survey of the Metropolitan’s business affairs.

For years I had stood in awe of him.

In 1916, Dillingham engaged Pavlova to appear at the Hippodrome, with her partner, Alexandre Volinine. Neither the auspices, the billing, nor the setting could, by any stretch of the imagination, be termed ideal. Dillingham’s Hippodrome bore the subtitle “The National Amusement Institution of America,” an appellation as grandiose as the building itself. The evening’s entertainment (plus daily matinees), of which The Swan’s appearance was a part, was billed as “The Big Show, the Mammoth Minstrels, and the Ice Ballet, The Merry Doll.”

Every night I was there in my favorite place at the back of the house. I soon learned the time schedule. I could manage to miss the skaters, the jugglers, the “mammoth” minstrels, the acrobats, the jumbo elephants. I would arrive a few minutes before Pavlova’s entrance. I watched and worshipped from afar. I had never met her. “Who was I,” I asked myself, “to meet a divinity?”

One night, as the falling curtain cut her off from my view, a hand fell on my shoulder. It was Dillingham, for whom my admiration remained but my awe of him had decreased, since, by this time, we were both managers. He looked at me with a little smile and said, “Come along, Sol. I’m going back to her dressing-room.”

The long hoped for but never really expected moment had come. Long had I rehearsed the speech I should make when and if this moment ever arrived. Now the time was here and I was dumb. I could only look.

The Swan extended her hand as Dillingham presented me. She smiled. I bent low over the world’s most expressive hand. At her suggestion the three of us went to supper in the Palisades Amusement Park outdoor restaurant, overlooking the Hudson and upper Manhattan.

I shall have a few things to say about Pavlova, the artist, about Pavlova, the ballerina. Perhaps even more important is Pavlova, the woman, Pavlova, the human being. These qualities came tumbling forth at our first meeting. The impression was ineradicable. As she ate a prodigious steak, as she laughed and talked, here was a sure and certain indication of her insatiable love of life and its good things. One of her tragedies, as I happen to know, is that fullness of life and love were denied her.

I already have described this night in detail. I mention it again because it sets a time and place: the beginnings of the realization of the other part of my dream. I was already happily embarked on my avowed purpose of bringing music to the masses. Although I may not have realized it, that night when we first dined and talked and laughed, when we rode the roller-coaster, and together danced the fox-trot at the Palisades Amusement Park, was the beginning of my career in the world of the dance.

During Pavlova’s Hippodrome engagement I doubt I missed a performance. I also saw a good deal of her off stage. A close friendship was formed and grew. Many suppers together, with Volinine, her partner, and Ivan Clustine, her ballet-master.

In the years that followed there developed a long and unforgettable association. Her first tour under my management, and large parts of others, we made together; and not, I may say, entirely for business reasons. Thus did I learn to know the real Anna Pavlova.

For those of a generation who know Pavlova only as a legend, there is a large library of books about her as artist and dancer. As for myself, I can only echo the opinion of J. L. Vaudoyer, the eminent French critic, when he said: “Pavlova means to the dance, what a Racine is to poetry; a Poussin to painting; a Gluck to music.”

At the time of the Pavlova tours, the state of balletic appreciation in America was certainly not very high. Pioneering in ballet was hard, slogging work for all concerned, from every point of view. The endless travel was not only boring but fatiguing. It took all our joint and several wits to overcome the former, a strong constitution to endure the latter. Traveling conditions then were infinitely more primitive than now, making the strain of constant touring all the greater. The reason that Pavlova willingly endured these grinding tours year after year was because, in my belief, she simply could not live without working. These tours were not predicated upon any necessity. Twenty-five years of her life, at least one-half of it, she spent on trains and ships. Aside from Ivy House, in London, to which she made brief visits, hotel rooms were almost her only home. There was no financial necessity for this.

Then, in addition to all the vicissitudes of travel under such conditions, there persisted another aspect: the aesthetic inertia of the public at the whistle-stops demanded every ounce and every facet of audience persuasion.

Among certain latter-day critics there exists a tendency not so much to belittle as to try to underrate Pavlova, the dancer, Pavlova, the artist; to negate her very great achievement Many of these denigrators never saw her; still fewer knew her. Let me, for the benefit of the doubters and those readers of another generation who are in the same predicament, try to sum her up as she was, in terms of today.

There exists a legend principally dealing with a certain intangible quality she is said to have possessed. This legend is not exaggerated. In any assessment of Anna Pavlova, her company, her productions, I ask the reader to bear in mind that for twelve years she was the only ballet pioneer regularly touring the country. She was the first to bring ballet to hundreds of American communities. I should be the first to admit that her stage productions, taken by and large, were less effective than are those of today; but I ask you, at the same time, to bear in mind the development of, and changes that have taken place in, the provincial theatre in its progress from the gas-light age, and to try to compare producing conditions as they were then, with the splendid auditoriums and the modern equipment to be found in many places today. Compare, if you will, the Broadway theatre productions of today with those of thirty-five years ago.

Anna Pavlova was a firm believer in the “star” system, firmly entrenched as she was in the unassailable position of the prima ballerina assoluta. Her companies were always adequate. They were completely and perfectly disciplined. They were at all times reflections of her own directing and organizing ability. Always there were supporting dancers of more than competence. Her partners are names to be honored and remembered in ballet: Adolph Bolm, with whom she made her first tour away from Imperial Russia and its Ballet: Mikhail Mordkin, Laurent Novikoff, Alexandre Volinine, and Pierre Vladimiroff; the latter three, one in the American mid-west, one in Paris, and one in New York, still founts of technical knowledge and tradition for aspiring dancers.

In its time and place her repertoire was large and varied. Pavlova was acquainting a great country with an art hitherto unknown. She was bringing ballet to the masses. If there was more convention than experiment in her programmes, it must be remembered that there did not exist an audience even for convention, much less one ready for experimentation. An audience had to be created.

It should be noted that at this time there did not exist as well, so far as this continent was concerned, as there did in Europe, any body of informed critical opinion. The newspapers of the wide open spaces did not have a single dance critic. In these places dance was left to music and theatre reporters in the better instances; to sports writers on less fortunate occasions.

Conditions were not notably better in New York. Richard Aldrich, then the music critic of The New York Times, was completely anti-dance, and used the word “sacrilege” in connection with Pavlova and her performances. More sympathetic attitudes were recorded later by W. J. Henderson of The Sun, and by Deems Taylor. About the only New York metropolitan critic with any real understanding of and appreciation for the dance was that informed champion of the arts, Carl Van Vechten.

I have mentioned Pavlova’s title as prima ballerina assoluta. She held it indisputably. In the hierarchy of ballet it is a three-fold title, signifying honor, dignity, and the establishment of its holder in the highest rank. With Pavlova it was all these things. But it was something more. Hers was a unique position. She was the possessor of an absolute perfection, a perfection achieved in the most difficult of all schools—the school of tradition of the classical ballet. She possessed, as an artist, the accumulated wisdom of a unique aesthetic language. This language she uttered with a beauty and conviction greater than that of her contemporaries.

Unlike certain ballerinas of today, and one in particular who would like ballet-lovers to regard her as the protégé, disciple, and reincarnation of Pavlova rolled into one, Pavlova never indulged in exhibitions of technical feats of remarkable virtuosity for the mere sake of eliciting gasps from an audience. Hers was an exhibition of the traditional school at its best, a school famed for its soundness. Her balance was something almost incredible; but never was it used for circus effects. There was in everything she did an exquisite lyricism, and an incomparable grace. And I come once again to that intangible quality of hers. Diaghileff, with whom her independent, individualistic spirit could remain only a brief time, called her “ ... the greatest ballerina in the world. Like a Taglioni, she doesn’t dance, but floats; of her, also, one might say she could walk over a cornfield without breaking a stalk.” The distinguished playwright, John Van Druten, years later, used a similar simile, when he described Pavlova’s dancing “as the wind passing like a shadow over a field of wheat.”

Does it matter that Pavlova did not leave behind any examples of great choreographic art? Is it of any lasting importance that her repertoire was not studded with experiments, but rather was composed of sound, well-made pieces, chiefly by her ballet-master, Ivan Clustine? Hers was a highly personal art. The purity and nobility of her style compensated and more than compensated for any production shortcomings. The important thing she left behind is an ineffable spirit that inhabits every performance of classical ballet, every classroom where classical ballet is taught. As a dancer, no one had had a greater flexibility in styles, a finer dramatic ability, a deeper sense of character, a wider range of facial expressions. Let us not forget her successful excursions into the Oriental dance, the Hindu, the dances of Japan.

Above and beyond all this, I like to remember the great humanity and simplicity of Pavlova, the woman. I have seen all sides of her character. There are those who could testify to a very human side. A friend of mine, on being taken back stage at the Manhattan Opera House in New York to meet Pavlova for the first time, was greeted by a fusillade of ballet slippers being hurled with unerring aim, not at him, but at the departing back of her husband, Victor Dandré, all to the accompaniment of pungent Russian imprecations. Under the strain of constant performance and rehearsal, she was human enough to be ill tempered. It was quite possible for her to be completely unreasonable.

On the other hand, there are innumerable instances of her warmheartedness, her generosity, her tenderness. Passionately fond of children, and denied any of her own, the tenderness and concern she showed for all children was touching. This took on a very practical expression in the home she established and maintained in a hôtel privé in Paris for some thirty-odd refugee children. This she supported, not only with money, but with a close personal supervision.

Worldly things, money, jewelry, meant little to her. She was a truly simple person. Much of her most valuable jewelry was rarely, if ever, worn. Most of it remained in a safe-deposit vault in a Broadway bank in New York City, where it was found only after her death.

Money was anything but a motivating force in her life. I remember once when she was playing an engagement in Chicago. For some reason business was bad, very bad, as, on more than one occasion, it was. The public at this time was firmly staying away from the theatre. I was in a depressed mood, not only because expenses were high and receipts low, but because of the effect that half-empty houses might have on Pavlova and her spirits.

While I tried to put on a smiling front that night at supper after the performance, Pavlova soon penetrated my poker-faced veneer. She leaned across the table, took my hand.

“What’s wrong, Hurokchik?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I shrugged, with as much gallantry as I could muster.

She continued to regard me seriously for a moment. Then:

“Nonsense.” She repeated it with her usual finality of emphasis. “Nonsense. I know what’s wrong. Business is bad, and I’m to blame for it.... Look here ... I don’t want a penny, not a kopeck.... If you can manage, pay the boys and girls; but as for me, nothing. Nothing, do you understand? I don’t want it, and I shan’t take it.”

Pavlova’s human qualities were, perhaps, never more in evidence than at those times when, between tours and new productions, she rested “at home,” at lovely Ivy House, in that northern London suburb, Golder’s Green, not far from where there now rests all that was mortal of her: East Wall 3711.

Here in the rambling unpretentiousness of Ivy House, among her treasures, surrounded by her pets, she was completely herself. Here such parties as she gave took place. They were small parties, and the “chosen” who were invited were old friends and colleagues. Although the parties were small in size, the food was abundant and superlative. On her American tours she had discovered that peculiarly American institution, the cafeteria. After rehearsals, she would often pop into one with the entire company. Eyes a-twinkle, she would wait until all the company had chosen their various dishes, then select her own; after depositing her heavily laden tray at her own table, she would pass among the tables where the company was seated and sample something from every dish. Pavlova adored good food. She saw to it that good food was served at Ivy House and, for one so slight of figure, consumed it in amazing abundance.

One of these Ivy House parties in particular I remember vividly, for her old friend, Féodor Chaliapine, that stupendous figure of the world of the theatre who had played such an important part in my own life and career, was, on this occasion, the life of the party. He was in a gargantuan mood. He had already dined before he arrived at Ivy House. I could imagine the dinner he had put away, for often his table abounded with such delicacies as a large salmon, often a side of lamb, suckling pigs, and tureens of schchee and borscht. But despite this, he did ample justice to Pavlova’s buffet and bar. His jokes and stories were told to a spellbound audience. These were the rare occasions on which I have seen this great musician, with his sombre, rather monkish face, really relax.

This night Pavlova was equally animated, and Chaliapine and she vied with each other in story-telling. I studied them both as I watched them. Pavlova had told me of her own origins and first beginnings; about her father, her mother, her childhood poverty. Here she sat, sprung from such a humble start, the world’s greatest dancer, the chatelaine of a beautiful and simple home, the entire world at her feet.

Facing her was another achievement, the poor boy of Kazan, who, in his early life, suffered the pangs of hunger and misery which are the common experience of the Russian poor. He had told me how, as a lad of seventeen in the town of Kazan without a kopeck in his pocket, day after day, he would walk through the streets and hungrily gaze into the windows of the bakers’ shops with hopeless longing. “Hurok,” he had said, “hunger is the most debasing of all suffering; it makes a man like a beast, it humiliates him.”

One of the few serious stories he told that evening was of the time when he and my childhood idol, Maxim Gorky, were working on the boats on the Volga and had to improvise trousers out of two pairs of old wheat-sacks which they tied round their waists. Gorky and Chaliapine were both from Kazan and of the same age. Tonight, as the party wore on, Chaliapine sang folk songs, gay songs, sad songs, ribald songs. Loving fine raiment, tonight he had worn a tall gray top hat. When he arrived and we had greeted him in the hallway, I caught him watching his reflection in the long mirror and getting great satisfaction out of it. Now, as he sang, he became a Tsar, and it was difficult to imagine that he had never been anything but a great Tsar all his life.

The party waxed even gayer, the hour grew late. We were all sitting on the floor: Pavlova, Chaliapine, his wife Masha, and the other guests. Chaliapine had been gazing at Pavlova for some time. Suddenly he turned and fixed his eyes on his wife appraisingly.

“Masha, my dear,” he said, after a long moment, “you don’t object to my having a child by Annushka?”

Masha smiled tolerantly and quickly replied:

“Why don’t you ask her?”

Chaliapine, with all the dignity and solemnity of a Boris Godunoff, put the question to Pavlova. Pavlova’s eyes fixed themselves on his, with equal gravity.

“My dear Fedya,” she said, quite solemnly, “such matters are not discussed in public.”

She paused, then added mischievously:

“Let us make an appointment. I am leaving for Paris in a day or two.... Perhaps I shall take you along with me....”

* * *

In all the dance, Pavlova was my first love. It was from her I received my strongest and most lasting impressions. She proved and realized my dreams. To the Western World, and particularly to America, she brought a new and stimulating form of art expression. She introduced standards, if not ideas, that have had an almost revolutionary effect.

Anna Pavlova had everything, both as an artist and as a human being.

[3.] Three Ladies: Not From the Maryinsky

A. A NEGLECTED AMERICAN GENIUS—AND
HER “CHILDREN”

ALTHOUGH my association with her was marked by a series of explosions and an overall atmosphere of tragi-comedy, it is a source of pride to me that I was able to number among my dance connections that neglected American genius, Isadora Duncan.

It was Anna Pavlova who spurred my enthusiasm to bring Isadora to her own country, in 1922, a fact accomplished only with considerable difficulty, as those who have read my earlier volume of memoirs will recollect.

Despite the fact they had little in common, Pavlova had a tremendous respect for this tall American dancer, who abhorred ballet.

Genius is a dangerous word. Often it is bandied about carelessly and, sometimes, indiscriminately. In the case of this long-limbed girl from California it could not be applied more accurately or more precisely, for she was a genius as a person as well as an artist. She brought to Europe and to her own America, as well, a new aesthetic.

One of four children of a rebellious mother who divorced the father she did not love, Isadora’s childhood was spent in a quasi-Bohemian atmosphere in her native San Francisco, where her mother eked out a dubious living by giving music lessons. Isadora was the youngest of the four. Brother Augustin took to the theatre; Brother Raymond to long hair, sandals, Greek robes, and asceticism; Sister Elizabeth eventually took over Isadora’s Berlin School.

What started Isadora on the road of the dance may never be known; although it is a well established fact that she danced as a child in San Francisco, and early in her career traveled across the United States, dancing her way, more or less, to New York. I am reasonably certain that her dancing of that period bore little or no relation to that of her later period. Her early works were, for the most part, innocuous little pieces done to snippets of music by Romantic composers. Her triumphs were in monumental works by Beethoven, Wagner, César Franck.

Her battle was for “freedom”: freedom in the dance; freedom in wearing apparel; freedom for women; freedom for the body; freedom for the human spirit. In the dance, ballet was to her a distortion of the human form. Personally, I suspect the truth was that the strict discipline of ballet was something to which Isadora could not submit. Inspiration was her guiding force. She wore Greek draperies when she danced; her feet were bare. Yet there are photographs of Isadora, taken in the later ’nineties, showing her wearing ballet slippers, and a costume in which considerable lace is to be seen. It was Europe, I feel, that “freed” her dance.

Isadora’s was a European triumph. In turn she conquered Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Greece. She was hailed and fêted. There was no place in the American theatre for Isadora’s simplicity and utter artlessness. It was in Budapest that the tide turned for her, thanks particularly to an able manager, one Alexander Gross. While I never knew Mr. Gross, I believe he fulfilled the true manager’s purpose and function. Gross made an audience for a great artist, an audience where one did not exist before, until, eventually, all Europe was her audience.

I have said that inspiration was Isadora’s guide. She did, of course, have theories of dance; but these theories were, for the most part, expressed in vague and general, rather than in precise and particular, terms. They can be summed up in a sentence. She believed that dance was life: therefore, the expression of some inner impulse, or urge, or inspiration. The source of this impulse she believed was centered in the solar plexus. She also believed she was of tremendous importance. Her own ideas of her own importance were, in my opinion, sometimes inflated.

To her eternal credit it must be noted that she battled against sugary music, against trivial themes, against artificiality of all sorts. When her “inspiration” did not proceed directly from the solar plexus, she found it in nature—in the waves of the sea and their rhythms, in the simple process of the opening of a flower.

These frank and simple and desirable objectives, if they had been all, would not have excited the tremendous opposition that was hers throughout her lifetime. Nor did this opposition, I believe, spring solely from her unconventional ideas on love and sex. Isadora insisted on becoming a citizen of the world, a champion of the world’s less fortunate, the underprivileged. In doing so she cleared the air of a lot of nonsense and a lot of nineteenth century prudery which was by way of being carried over into the twentieth.

In Europe, in each and every country she visited, she arrayed herself on the side of the angels, i.e., the revolutionaries. The same is true in her own country. She shocked her wealthy patrons with demonstrations of her own particular brand of democracy.

There was an occasion, during one of her appearances at the Metropolitan Opera House, when she walked with that especial Isadorian grace to the footlights and gave the audience, with special reference to the boxholders, the benefits of the following speech:

“Beethoven and Schubert,” she said, “were children of the people all their lives. They were poor men and their great work was inspired by and belongs to humanity. The people need great drama, music, dancing. We went over to the East Side and gave a performance for nothing. What happened? The people sat there transfixed, with tears rolling down their cheeks. That is how they cared for it. Funds of life and poetry and art are waiting to spring from the people of the East Side.... Build for them a great amphitheatre, the only democratic form of theatre, where everyone has an equal view, no boxes; no balconies.... Why don’t you give art to the people who really need it? Great music should no longer be kept for the delight of a handful of cultured people. It should be given free to the masses. It is as necessary for them as air and bread. Give it to them, for it is the spiritual wine of humanity.”

As for the ballet, she continued to have none of it. She once remarked: “The old-fashioned waltz and mazurka are merely an expression of sickly sentimentality and romance which our youth and our times have outgrown. The minuet is but the expression of the unctuous servility of courtiers at the time of Louis XIV and hooped skirts.”

Isadora’s European successes led to the establishment of schools of her own, where her theories could be expounded and developed. The first of these was in Berlin, and as her pupils, her “children,” developed, she appeared with them. When she first went to Russia, the controversy she stirred up has become a matter of ballet history; and it is a matter of record that she influenced that father of the “romantic revolution” in ballet, Michel Fokine.

Russia figured extensively in Isadora’s life, for she gave seasons there, first in 1905, and again in 1907 and 1912. Then, revolutionary that she was, she returned to the Soviet in 1921, established a school there and, in 1922, married the “hooligan” poet, Sergei Essenin. Throughout her life, Isadora had denounced marriage as an institution, disavowed it, fought it, bore three children outside it, on the ground that it existed only for the enslavement of woman.

There had been three Duncan seasons in America before I brought her, in 1922, for what proved to be her final visit to her native country. The earlier American series were in 1908, when she danced with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, at the Metropolitan Opera House, prior to a tour; in 1911, when she again danced with Damrosch; again in 1916, when she returned to California, early the next year, after a twenty-two years’ absence. She also visited New York, briefly, in 1915, impulsively renting a studio at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, with the idea of establishing a school. It was during this brief visit that she made history of a kind by suddenly improvising a dance to the French national anthem at the Metropolitan Opera House.

As I have pointed out, enlightened dance criticism, so far as the newspapers were concerned, in those days was almost non-existent. For those readers who might be interested, however, there are available, in the files of The New York Times, penetrating analyses of her performances by the discerning Carl Van Vechten.

The story of Isadora’s intervening years is marked by light and shadow. Hers was a life that could not long retain happiness within its grasp. Snatches of happiness were hers in her brief association with England’s greatly talented stage designer, that misunderstood genius of the theatre, Gordon Craig, the son of Ellen Terry, by whom Isadora had a child; and yet another child by the lover who was known only as Lohengrin.

Her passionate love of children was touching. Never was it better exemplified than by her several schools, her devotion to the girls and her concern for them. Most of all was it apparent in her selflessness in her attitude towards her own two children. It is not difficult to imagine the depth of the tragedy for her when a car in which they were riding on their way to Versailles toppled into the Seine, and the children were drowned. A third child, her dream of comfort and consolation, died at birth.

It was in an attempt to forget this last tragedy that she brought her school to New York. That same Otto Kahn, who had made Pavlova’s first visit to America possible, came to her rescue and footed the bills for a four weeks’ season at the old Century Theatre, which stood in lower Central Park West, where Brother Augustin held forth with Greek drama and biblical verse, and Isadora and the “children” danced. The public remained away. There was a press appeal for funds with which to liquidate a $12,000 indebtedness and to provide funds with which to get Isadora and the “children” to Italy. Another distinguished art patron, the late Frank Vanderlip, and others came to the rescue with cash and note endorsements. Thus, once again, Isadora put her native America behind her in disgust. Her parting shot at the country of her birth was a blast at Americans living and battening in luxury on their war profits while Europe bled.

Her 1916-1917 visit to her home shores was no more auspicious than the others. She danced, as I have said, at the Metropolitan Opera House. Lover Lohengrin gave her a magnificent party following the performance, a soirée that ended in an expensive and scandalous debácle. Isadora sold her jewels piece by piece, and succeeded in establishing her school at Long Beach. Quickly the money disappeared, and Gordon Selfridge, the London equivalent of Marshall Field, paid her passage to London. The “children,” now grown up into the “Isadorables,” remained behind to make themselves American careers.

It was after Isadora’s departure for London, in 1917, that I undertook to help the six “children” to attain their desires. They were a half-dozen of the loveliest children imaginable.

For their American debut as an independent group, we first engaged George Copeland, specialist in the works of contemporary French and Spanish composers, and an artist of the first rank, and later, Beryl Rubinstein, American composer and teacher, and until his recent death director of the Cleveland Institute, as accompanists.

Smart New York had adopted the “Isadorables.” The fashionable magazines had taken them up and had spread Dr. Arnold Genthe’s photographs of Anna, Lysel, Gretl, Thérése, Erica, and Irma over their pages. Frank Crowninshield championed them. During a hot June they sold out a half-dozen performances in Carnegie Hall, which takes some doing at any time of the year. Following a successful tour, I presented them at the Metropolitan Opera House, this time with an orchestra.

The girls, charming, delightful, fresh, were a direct product of Isadora, for which she used herself as model. Theirs was a reproduction of Isadora’s art. One of them functions actively today, Maria Thérésa, giving out a fine, strong, sturdy reflection of Isadora’s training and ideas. Basically, as an individualist, Isadora was a solo artist. She made no great effort to build up group dances into a series of linked dances that result in some form of dance drama. Such mass dances as she arranged were in imitation of the Greek chorus. Broken down into simple elements, they were nothing more than lines of girls, all of whom repeated the same simple movements. Her own creative gifts, which were magnificent, found their expression in her solo dances, and it is in this respect Maria Thérésa splendidly carries on.

It was in Germany that Isadora’s ideas made the deepest impression, and any legacy she may have left finds its expression in the “free” school that comes out of that country. If she had no abiding place, Berlin saw more of her when she was at her best than any other country. It was there that the term “goddess” was attached to her. Even the sick were brought to see the performances of the Göttliche Heilige Isadora in order that they might be cured. The serious German writers were greatly impressed. Isadora expressed it thus: “The weekly receptions at our house in Victoria Strasse became the centre of artistic and literary enthusiasm. Here took place many learned discussions on the dance as a fine art; for the Germans take every art discussion most seriously, and give the deepest consideration to it. My dance became the subject of violent and even fiery debates. Whole columns constantly appeared in all the papers, sometimes hailing me as a genius of a newly discovered art, sometimes denouncing me as a destroyer of the real classic dance, i.e., the ballet.”

In Impresario I have written about Isadora’s last American tour, under my management, in all its more lurid aspects. In February, 1923, she returned to France, and in 1924 went back to Russia with her poet-husband, Essenin. Not long after, Essenin hanged himself to a hook on the wall of his room in the Hotel Angleterre, in Leningrad. In 1927, Isadora returned to Paris, and on 8th July gave her last concert at the Théâtre Mogador.

Her last conversation with me in Paris was of the “children.” This time she was referring to the pupils at her school in Russia. As I listened, I could only feel that these “children” were to her but symbols of her own two children wastefully drowned in the Seine. She wanted me to bring her Russian “children” to America—a visit, as it were, of her own spirit to her native land which had refused to accept her.

I promised.

In 1928, I was able to fulfill that promise by bringing fifteen of them, chosen by Irma of the “Isadorables,” for a tour. Irma came with them, presided over them; brought them back for a second tour. Irma now lives quietly in the Connecticut countryside.

A twisting scarf, caught in the wheels of the car in which she was riding, ended the earthly career of a misunderstood American genius. Was the end deliberate? I only know she longed to die, she with the passionate love for life.

A tremendous freedom-loving American, she may, I feel, be called the first American dancer, in the sense that she brought a new style and a new manner, away from the accepted form of ballet. I, for one, believe that Isadora did more than any one else I know for the dance in America, and received less gratitude and recognition for her contribution.

Now that she is dead, I feel for her exactly as I always felt. Though we do not love our friends for one particular quality but as a whole, there is usually an element which, while the friend is still with us, especially appeals to us, and the memory of which we most cherish when he or she is absent for a while or for ever. For me that element in Isadora was and is the extreme gentleness hidden in her heart of hearts. Those who knew her only as a combative spirit in the world of the dance may be astonished at that statement. Yet I hold that gentleness to have been absolutely fundamental in her character and that not a few of her troubles were attributable to continuing and exasperating outrage of it.

There was a superficial side of her that may seem to contradict that gentleness. She had exasperating eccentricities, stupid affectations. Her childishness and capriciousness, her downright wilfulness could drive me nearly to distraction. She could, and often did waste infinite hours of my time, and her own and others’ money. She lacked discipline in herself, her life, her work. She could have been less arbitrary in many things, including her condemnation of ballet. On the other hand, she had a quality of communication rare indeed in the theatre. Her faults were, as I have said, superficialities. At base she was a genuinely gentle person.

Just because she was gentle she could, her sympathy being aroused, exert herself to an extraordinary degree and after no gentle fashion on behalf of those things in which she believed, and of others, particularly artists. For the same reason, she frequently could not properly exert herself on her own behalf. She was weary (weary unto death at the last) when that spring of gentleness, in which some of her best work had its origin, failed her. Hers was an intellect, in my opinion, of wider range, of sterner mettle, of tougher integrity, of more persistent energy and of more imaginative quality than those of her detractors. I hold because of Isadora’s innate gentleness, and the fact it was so fundamental a thing in her, being exasperated both by the events of her life and by her intellect’s persistent commentary upon those events, she became towards the close so utterly weary and exhausted that any capacity for a rational synthesis was lost. Hers was a romantic nature, and a rational synthesis usually proceeds by the tenderness of the heart working upon the intellect to urge upon it some suspension of judgment, and not by the hardness of the intellect working upon the heart and bidding it, in reason’s name, to cease expecting to find things other and better than they are: the hearts of other humans more tender and their heads one whit less dense.

A few words on what has been criticized by many as her “free living.” Today an unthinking license prevails in many circles. If Isadora’s life displayed “license” in this sense, it certainly was not an unthinking “license.” Isadora strongly held theories about personal freedom of thought and behavior and dared to act according to them. Those theories may be wrong. That is a problem I have not here space to discuss. But that, believing in those theories, Isadora acted upon them and did not reserve them merely for academic discussion, I hold to her eternal credit. That Isadora did others and herself damage in the process must be admitted. But I have observed that many “conventional” persons do others and themselves a great deal of damage without displaying a tithe of Isadora’s integrity and courage, since they act crudely upon theories in which they no longer in their heart of hearts believe, or contradict their theories in captious action for lack of courage to discover new theories. Let us not forget that “few know the use of life before ’tis past.” Isadora died before she was fifty, endowed with a temperament little calculated to make easy the paths of true wisdom, paths which, I venture to suggest, often contradict the stereotyped notions of them entertained by those who are unable or unwilling too closely to consider the matter. To her personal tragedies must be added the depressing influence of the unfathomable indifference of her countrymen to art and artists and to herself.

I take it I have said enough to indicate that such “conventional” solutions as may occur to some readers were inadmissible in Isadora’s case, just as inadmissible in fact as they would be in a novel by Dostoievsky. In any event, she paid to the end for any mistakes she may have made, and it is not our duty to sit in judgment on her, whether one theoretically disapproves of her use of what sometimes has been called the “escape-road.” It is one’s duty to understand, and by understanding to forgive.

I have heard it remarked that there was a streak of cruelty in Isadora. Gentle natures of acute sensibility and strong intelligence, long exasperated by indifference and opposition to what they hold of sovereign importance in art and life, are apt to turn cruel and even vindictive at times. I never witnessed her alleged cruelty or vindictiveness to any one and I will not go on hearsay.

One of the great satisfactions of a long career in the world of dance is that I was able to be of some service to this neglected genius. I can think of no finer summation of her than the words of that strange, aloof genius of the British theatre, Gordon Craig, when he wrote:

“ .... She springs from the Great Race——
From the line of Sovereigns, who
Maintain the world and make it move,
From the Courageous Giants,
The Guardians of Beauty——
The Solver of all Riddles.”

B. COLORED LIGHTS AND FLUTTERING SCARVES

It is a far cry from Isadora to another American dancer, whose “children” I toured across America and back, in 1926.

Loie Fuller, “the lady with the scarf,” was at that period championed by her friend, the late Queen Marie of Roumania, when that royal lady embarked upon a lecture tour of the United States that same year. Loie Fuller was loosely attached to the royal entourage.

“La Loie” had established a school in Paris, and wanted to exhibit the prowess of her pupils. I was inveigled into bringing them quite as much by Loie Fuller’s dynamic, active manager, Mrs. Bloch, as I was by the aging dancer herself.

Loie Fuller was something of a phenomenon. Born in Chicago, in 1862, her first fame was gained as a child temperance lecturer in the mid-west. According to her biographers, she took some dancing lessons, but found the lessons too difficult and abandoned them after a short time. Switching to the study of voice, she gave up her youthful Carrie Nation attacks on alcohol and obtained a singing part in a stage production. As the story goes, while she was appearing in this stage role, a friend in India made her a gift of a long scarf of very light weight silk. Playing with her present, watching it float through the air with the greatest of ease, she found her vocation. It was as simple as that.

Here was something new: a dance in which a great amount of fluttering silk was kept aloft, the while upon it there constantly played variegated lights, projected by what in the profession is known as a “color-wheel,” a circular device containing various colored media, rotated before an arc-lamp. Thus was born the Serpentine Dance.

Here was no struggle on the part of the artist to find her medium of expression, no seeking for a new technique or slogging effort perfecting an old one; no hours spent sweating at the barre; no heartache. Loie Fuller was not concerned with steps, with style, with a unique and individual quality of movement. Loie Fuller had a scarf. Loie Fuller had an instantaneous success. Her career was made on the Serpentine Dance. But she also had one other inspiration. A “sunrise” stage effect that she used was mistaken by the audience as a dance of fire, as the light rays touched her flowing scarves and draperies. “La Loie” was not one to miss a chance. She gathered her electricians about her—for in the early days of stage lighting with electricity nothing was impossible. The revolving “light-wheels” were increased in number, as were the spot-lights.

Since all this happened in Paris, Loie Fuller’s Danse de Feu became to France what the Serpentine Dance had been to America. The French adopted her as their own. Widely loved, she became “La Loie.” Her stage arrangements were often startling; they could not always be called dancing. The arms and feet of her “children” were always subordinated to the movements of the draperies. So tricky was the business of the draperies that it is said that none of her designers or seamstresses were permitted to know more than a small part of their actual construction.

Her imitators were many, with the result that, for a time, the musical comedy stages of both Europe and America had an inundation of illuminated dry goods. It was the “children” who kept “La Loie’s” serpentine and fire dances alive.

When Loie Fuller suggested the American tour, the idea interested me because of the novelty involved. It was, incidentally, my only “incognito” tour. I accepted an invitation from Queen Marie of Roumania to visit her at the Royal Palace in Bucharest to discuss the proposed tour with Her Majesty and Loie Fuller, who was a close friend and confidante of the Queen. The tour was in the interest of one of the Queen’s pet charities and, moreover, it had diplomatic overtones. Naturally, under the circumstances, no managerial auspices were credited on the programmes.

In addition to the purely Loie Fuller characteristic numbers, the Loie Fuller Dancers, on this tour, offered Some Dance Scenes from the Fairy Tale of Her Majesty Queen Marie’s “The Lilly of Life,” as presented at the Grand Opera, Paris.

Apart from this, the “children” had all the old Loie Fuller tricks, and a few new ones. Their dance vocabulary was far from extensive, but there was a pleasant enough quality about it.

When I made the tour, in association with Queen Marie, the “children” were, to put it kindly, on the mature side; and it took a great deal of their dramatic, vital and dynamic managers drive to keep the silks fluttering aloft. Mrs. Bloch was a remarkable woman, who had handled the “children” for Loie Fuller a long time.

The tour of the Loie Fuller Dancers is not one of my proudest achievements; but I know the gay colours, the changing lights brought pleasure to many.

Years later, on a visit to Paris, I received a telephone call from Mrs. Bloch, requesting an appointment. It was arranged for the following day. At the appointed hour I went down to the foyer of the Hotel Meurice to await her coming.

Some minutes later, I observed an elderly lady, supported by a cane, enter and cross the foyer, walking slowly as the aged do, and using her cane noticeably to assist her. I paid scant attention until, from where I sat near the desk, I overheard her explaining to the conciérge that she had a “rendezvous” with Monsieur Hurok.

I simply did not recognize the human dynamo of 1926. A quarter of a century had slipped by. Much of that time, she told me, she had spent in Africa. Despite the change in her physical appearance, despite the toll of the years, the flame still burned within her.

Her mission? To try to get me to bring the Loie Fuller Dancers to America for another tour.

As I observed the changes that had taken place in their manager, I could not help visualizing what twenty-five years must have done to the “children.”

C. A TEUTONIC PRIESTESS

My dance associations in what I may call my “early middle” period led me into excursions far afield from that form of dance expression which is to me the most completely satisfying form of theatrical experience.

For the sake of the record, let us set the date of this period as 1930. Surely there have been few in the history of the dance whose approach to the medium was so foreign to and so different from the classical ballet, where lie my deepest interests and my chief delight, than that Teutonic priestess, Mary Wigman.

When I brought Wigman to America, shortly after the Great Crash, she was no longer young. She had been born in Germany, in 1886, and could hardly have been called a “baby ballerina.” Originally a pupil of Emile Jacques Dalcroze, the father of Eurhythmics, whose pupils in a “demonstration” had kindled Wigman’s interest in the dance, she did not remain long with him. Dalcroze himself, at this stage, apparently had little interest in dancing. However, he established certain methods which proved of interest to certain gifted dancers. The Dalcroze basis was musical, and his chief function was to foster a feeling for music in his pupils. Music frustrated, handicapped, restricted her, Wigman felt. Individualist that she was, she left her teacher in order to work out her own dance destiny. There followed a period of some uncertainty on her part, and, for a time, she became a pupil of the Hungarian teacher, Rudolf von Laban, who laid down in pre-war Germany the foundations for modern dance. Unlike Isadora Duncan, Laban had no aversion to ballet. As a matter of fact, he liked much of it, was influenced by it; was impressed by the Diaghileff Ballet, was friendly with Diaghileff, and became an intimate of Michel Fokine. His later violent reaction from ballet was certainly not based on lack of knowledge of it.

At the Laban school, Wigman collaborated with him, and having a streak of choreographic genius, was able to put some of Laban’s theories into practical form. However, Mary Wigman’s forceful personality was greater than any school and, in 1919, she broke away from Laban, and formed a school of her own. She abandoned what were to her the restricting influences of formal music, as Isadora had abandoned clothing restrictions. A dancer of tremendous power, like Isadora she had an overwhelming personality. Again, like Isadora, all this had a tendency to make her pupils only pale imitations of herself. Wigman’s public career, a secondary matter with her, actually began in Dresden, in 1918, with her Seven Dances of Life. Dresden was her temple. Here the Teutonic Priestess of the Dance presided over her personal religion of movement. German girls were joined by Americans. The disciples grew in number and spread out through Germany like proselyting missionaries. Wigman groups radiated the gospel until one found schools and factories and societies turning out en masse for “demonstrations” of the Wigman method. I have said that Wigman found music a deterrent to her method.

On the other hand, one of the most important features of her “school” was a serious, thorough, Germanic research into the question of what she felt was the proper musical accompaniment for dance. Her pupils learned to devise their own rhythmic accompaniment. In her show pieces, at any rate, Wigman’s technique was to have the music for the dance composed simultaneously with the creation of the dance movements—certainly a new type of collaboration.

In addition to forming a “schule,” where great emphasis was laid on “spannungen,” perhaps best explained as tensions and relaxations, she also created a philosophical cult in that strange hot-house that was pre-war Germany, with an intellectualized approach to sex.

I had known about her and her work long before I signed a contract with her for the 1930-1931 season. Pavlova had talked to me about her and had aroused my curiosity and interest; but I was unable to imagine what might be America’s reaction to her. I was turning the idea over in my mind, when there appeared at my office,—in those days in West Forty-second Street, overlooking Bryant Park,—a young and earnest enthusiast to plead her case. His name was John Martin.

In an earlier chapter I have pointed out the low estate of dance criticism of that period. In its wisdom, the New York Times had, shortly before the period of which I now write, taken tentative steps to correct this deficiency by creating a dance department on the paper, with John Martin engaged to report the dance. Martin’s earnest and special pleading on behalf of Mary Wigman moved me and, as always, eager to experiment and present something new and fresh, I decided to cast the die.

The effect of my first announcement of her coming was a bit disconcerting. The first to react were the devotees. There was a fanaticism about them that was disturbing. It is one thing to have a handful of vociferous idolaters, and quite another to be able to fill houses with paying customers night after night.

When I met Wigman at the pier on her arrival in New York, I greeted a middle-aged muscular Amazon, a rather stuffy appearing Teutonic Amazon, wearing a beaver coat of dubious age, and a hat that had seen better days. But what struck me more forcibly than the plainness of her apparel was the woman herself. She greeted me with a warm smile; her gray eyes were large, frank, and widely set; and from beneath the venerable and rather battered hat, fell a shock of thick, wavy brown hair. She spoke softly, deeply, in a completely unaccented English with a British intonation.

There was no ballet company with her, no ship-load of scenery, properties and costumes. Her company was made up of two persons in addition to herself: a lesser Amazon in the person of Meta Mens, who presided over Wigman’s costumes—one trunk—and her percussion instruments—tam-tams, Balinese gongs, and a fistful of reedy wind instruments; the other, a lanky, pale-faced chap with hyper-thyroid eyes, Hanns Hastings, who composed and played such music as Wigman used.

On the day before the opening, I gave a party at the Plaza Hotel as a semi-official welcome on the part of our American dancers, among whom were included that great pioneer of our native contemporary dance, Martha Graham, together with Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and, of course, that champion of the modern dance, John Martin.

Much depended upon Wigman’s first New York performance. A tour had been arranged, but not booked. There is a decided difference in the terms. In the language of the theatre, a tour is not “booked” until the contracts have been signed. The preliminary arrangements are called “pencilling in.” The pencil notations are inked only when signatures are attached to the contracts. If the New York première fizzled, there would be no inking. I had taken the Forty-sixth Street Theatre, and the publicity campaign under the direction of my good friend, Gerald Goode, had been under way for weeks.

It was a distinguished audience and a curious one that assembled in the Forty-sixth Street Theatre for the opening performance. It was an enthusiastic one that left at the end. I had gone back stage before the curtain rose to wish Wigman well, but the priestess was unapproachable. As she did before each performance, she entered the “silence.” Under no circumstances did she permit any disturbance. She would arrive at the theatre a long time before the scheduled time of the curtain’s rise, and, in her darkened dressing-room, lie in a mystic trance. Later she danced as one possessed.

If the opening night audience was enthusiastic, which it was, I am equally sure some of its members were confused. At later performances, as I stood in my customary position at the rear of the auditorium as the public left the theatre, I was not infrequently pressed by questions. These questions, however they may have been phrased, meant the same thing. “What do the dances mean?” “What is she trying to say?” “What does it all signify?” I am not easily embarrassed, as a rule. The constant reiteration of this question, however, proved an exception.

For the benefit of a generation unfamiliar with the Wigman dance, I should explain that her dances were, as she called them, “cycles.” In other words, her performances consisted of groups of dances with an alleged relationship: a relationship so difficult to discern, however, that I suspect it must have existed only in Wigman’s mind. The one dance that stands out most vividly in my mind is one she called Monotonie. In Monotonie, Wigman stood in the dead center of the stage. Then she whirled and whirled and whirled. As the whirling continued she was first erect, then slowly crouching, slowly rising until she was erect again; but always whirling, the while a puny four-note phrase was endlessly repeated. Through a sort of self-hypnosis, her whirling had an hypnotic effect on her. In a sort of mystic trance herself, Wigman succeeded, up to a point, in inducing a similar reaction on her public.

But what did it mean? I did not know, but I was determined to find out. Audience members, local managers, newspaper men were badgering me for an answer. To any query that I put to Wigman, her deep-throated reply was always the same:

“Oh, the meaning is too deep; I really can’t explain it.”

It was much later, during the course of the tour following the New York season, that I arrived at the “meaning” of Wigman’s dances, and that will be told in its proper place.

After the tumult and the shouting had died that opening night at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre, I took Wigman to supper with some friends. As we left the theatre together, Wigman was still in her trance; but, as the food was served, she came out of it with glistening eyes and a rapid-fire sort of highly literate chatter, in the manner of one sliding back to earth from the upper world.

The party over and Wigman back in her hotel, I sat up to await the press notices. They were splendid. No one dared describe her “meaning,” but all were agreed that here was a dynamic force in dance that drove home her “message.” The notice I awaited most eagerly was that of the New York Times. The first City Edition did not carry it, something which I attributed to the lateness of the final curtain. I waited for the Late City Edition. Still not a line about Wigman. I simply could not understand.

For years I had struggled to have the dance treated with respect by the press. Through the Pavlova days I talked and tried to convert editors to a realization of its importance. Any readers who are interested have only to turn up the files of their local newspapers and read the “reviews” of the period of the Pavlova and Diaghileff companies to find that ballet, in most cases, was “covered” by disgruntled music critics, who had been assigned, in many cases obviously against their wills, to review. You would find that the average music critic either overtly disliked ballet and had said so, or else treated it flippantly.

At the time of Wigman’s arrival in America, the ice had been broken, as I have said, by the appointment of John Martin at the head of a full-time dance department at the New York Times. Mary Watkins, eager, enthusiastic, informed, was fulfilling a like function on the New York Herald-Tribune. Thus dance criticism was on its way to becoming professional; and the men and women of knowledge and taste and discernment who criticize dance today, I cannot criticize. For I have respect for the professional.

The New York Times review of Wigman’s opening performance did not appear. Since John Martin had urged me to bring Wigman to America, it was the more baffling. Prior to Martin’s engagement by the New York Times, that remarkable and beloved figure, William (“Bill”) Chase, for so many years the editor of the music department of the Times and formerly the music critic of the Sun, and to the end of his life my very good friend, had “reported” the dance. Since he insisted he knew nothing about it, he never attempted to criticize it. I had frequently suggested to “Bill” that the Times should have a qualified person at the head of a bona fide dance department. Eventually John Martin was engaged, and I am happy to have been able to play a part in the beginnings of the change on the part of the American press.

I have mentioned that the change was gradual, for Martin’s articles at first were unsigned and had no by-line. In the early days, Martin merely reported on dance events. To be sure, at that time, there was little enough to report. Then Leonide Massine was brought to the Roxy Theatre by the late Samuel Rothapfel to stage weekly presentations of ballet; and then there was something about which to write. Since then John Martin has helped materially to spread the gospel of ballet and dance.

It was at approximately the Massine-Roxy stage of the dance criticism development that I searched the Times for the Wigman notice. Most of the newspapers carried rave reviews, and because they did, I was the more mystified, since in the Times there was not so much as a mention even that the event had taken place. However, out-of-town friends, including the late Richard Copley, well-known concert manager, telephoned me from New Jersey to congratulate me on the glowing review they had read in the Suburban Edition, and read it to me over the telephone. There were dozens of other calls from suburban communities to the same effect.

I called the editorial department of the Times to enquire about its omission from the New York City edition. There was some delay, but eventually I was informed that it would seem that the night city editor had read John Martin’s story in the Suburban Edition, saw that it carried no by-line, no signature; read its glowing and enthusiastic account of the Wigman première; and because it was so fulsome in its enthusiasm, assumed it was merely a piece of press-agent’s ballyhoo, and forthwith pulled it out of all other editions.

Armed with this information, I proceeded to bombard the Times with protests. One of these was directly to the head of the editorial department, whom I asked to reprint the notice that had been dropped. I was rather summarily told I was not to try to dictate to the Times what it should print. By now utterly exasperated, I got hold of my friend “Bill” Chase, who drily counselled me to “keep my shirt on.” Chase immediately went on a tour of investigation. He called me back to tell me that the Board of Editors at their daily meeting had gone into the matter but were unwilling to print the notice I had asked, since they had been “scooped” by the other newspapers and it was, therefore, no longer news: but, they had decided that, in the future, Martin would have a by-line. Then Chase added, with that wry New England humour of his for which he was famous, that, with the possession of a by-line, no editor would dare “kill” a review. It might, of course, be cut for space, but never “killed.”

The next Sunday the readers of the New York Times read John Martin’s notice of Mary Wigman’s first performance, and it was uncut. But it was a paid advertisement, bearing, in bold-faced type, the heading: “THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO REPRINT.”

As a result of the New York première, the “pencilled” tour was “inked,” and I traveled most of the tour with the Priestess. Newspaper men continued to demand to know the “meaning” of her dances. Since Wigman, most literate of dancers, refused any explanation, I made up my own. I told a reporter that Wigman was continuing and developing the work of Isadora Duncan. The reporter wrote his story. It was printed. Wigman read it without comment. From then on, however, Wigman’s reply to all queries on the subject was: “Where Isadora Duncan stopped, there I began.”

The quickly “inked” tour was a success beyond any anticipations I had had, and a second tour was booked and played with equal success. The mistake I made was when I brought her back for a third season, and with a group of her disciples. America would accept one Wigman; but twenty husky, bulky Teutonic Amazons in bathing suits with skirts were more than our public could take.

Moreover, the group was not typical of the Wigman “schule” at anything like its best. As a matter of fact, it was a long way from the Teutonic Priestess’s highest standards.

It was after the war. Mrs. Hurok and I were paying our first post-war visit to Switzerland, and stopped off at Zurich. My right-hand bower, Mae Frohman, had come to Zurich to join us. We learned that Wigman was there as well, giving master-classes in association with Harald Kreutzberg. Our initial efforts to find her were not successful.

Mrs. Hurok, Miss Frohman and I were at dinner. We were unaware that another diner in the same restaurant was Mary Wigman. It was Miss Frohman who recognized her as she was leaving the room. Wigman had changed. Time had taken its inevitable toll. The meeting was a touching one. We all foregathered in the lounge for a talk. Things were not easy for her; nor was conversation exactly smooth. Her Dresden “schule” had been commandeered by the Nazis. She was now living in the Russian sector of Germany. It had been very difficult for her to obtain permission from the Russian authorities to come to Zurich for her master-classes. She was obliged to return within a fixed period. She preferred not to talk about the war. Conversation, as I have said, was not easy. But there are things which do not require saying. My sympathies were aroused. The great, strong personality could never be quite erased, nor could the fine mind be utterly stultified.

I watched and remembered a great lady and a goodly artist. It is gratifying to me to know that she is now resident in the American zone of Berlin, and able to continue her classes.

[4.] Sextette

A. A SPANISH GYPSY

SUCH was the influence of The Swan on my approach to dance that, although she was no longer in our midst, I found myself being guided subconsciously by her direction. There were arrangements for a tour of Pavlova and a small company, for the season 1931-1932, not under my management. Death liquidated these arrangements. Had the tour been made, Pavlova was to have numbered among her company the famous Spanish gypsy dancer of the 1930’s, Vicente Escudero, one of the greatest Iberian dancers of all time.

Pavlova had championed Duncan and Wigman. I had brought them. I determined to bring Escudero to help round out the catholicity of my dance presentations. Spanish dancing had always intrigued me, and I had a soft spot for gypsies of all nationalities.

Escudero, who had been the partner of the ineffable Argentina, had earned a reputation which, to understate, bordered on the picturesque. Small, wiry, dark-skinned, with an aquiline nose, he wore his kinky, glossy black hair long to cover a lack-lustre bald spot. He, like most Spanish gypsies, claimed descent from the Moors, and there was about him more of the Arab than the Indian. As I watched him I could understand how he must have borne within him the stigma of the treatment Spain had meted out to his people; for it was not until the nineteenth century that the gypsies in Spain had any freedom at all. Until then, they were pariahs, hounded by the people, hounded by the law. Only within the last fifty-or-so years has the Spanish gypsy come into his own with the universal acknowledgment of being a creative artist, the originator of a highly individual and beautiful art.

Escudero was a Granada gypsy, a “gitano” from the white caves hollowed out in the Sacred Mountain. I point this out in order to distinguish him from his Sevillian cousins, the “flamenco.” His repertoire ranged through the Zapateado, the Soleares, the Alegrias, the Bulerias, the Tango, the Zamba. His special triumph was the Farruca.

It was on the 17th January, 1932, that I introduced Vicente Escudero to New York audiences at the 46th Street Theatre, where Wigman had had her triumph. A number of New York performances were given, followed by a brief tour, which, in turn, was succeeded by a longer coast-to-coast tour the following year. His company consisted of four besides himself: a pianist, a guitarist; the fiery, shrewish Carmita, his favorite; and the shy, gentle-voiced Carmela.

But it was Escudero’s sinister, communicative personality that drew and held audiences. His gypsy arrogance shone in his eyes, in the audacious tilt of his flat-brimmed hat, in his complete assurance; above all it stood out in his strutting masculinity. Eschewing castanets, for gypsy men consider their use effeminate, he moved sinuously but majestically, with the clean heel rhythm and crackling fingers that marked him as the outstanding gypsy dancer of his day and, quite possibly, of all time. For accompaniment there was no symphony orchestra, only the hoarse syncopation of a single guitar. Through half-parted lips shone the gleaming ivory of small, perfectly matched teeth.

For two successful seasons I toured Escudero across America, spreading a new and thrilling concept of the dance of Spain to excited audiences, audiences that reached a tremendous crescendo of fervor at the climax of his Farruca. No theatrical Farruca this, but a feline, animal dance straight from the ancient Spanish gypsy camp.

I had been forewarned to be on my guard. However, though his arrival in America had been preceded by tall tales of his completely unmanageable nature, Escudero proved to be one of the simplest, most tractable artists I ever have handled. There was on his part an utter freedom from the all too usual fits of “temperament,” a complete absence of the hysterics sometimes indulged in—and all too often—by artists of lesser talents. I happen to know, from other sources than Escudero, that he took a dim view of American food, hotels, and the railway train accommodations in the remoter parts of this great land. He never complained to me. Escudero had his troubles with Carmita and Carmela, as they vied with each other for position and his favors. But these troubles never were brought to my official attention. Like the head of a gypsy camp, he was the master. He ruled his little troupe and distributed both favors and discipline.

In 1935, Escudero made his last American appearance, when I presented the Continental Revue at the Little Theatre, now the New York Times Hall. Among those appearing with Escudero in this typical European entertainment were the French chanteuse, Lucienne Boyer, Mrs. Hurok, Lydia Chaliapine, Rafael, together with that comic genius, Nikita Balieff, as master of ceremonies.

Other and younger dancers of Spain continue to spread the gospel of the Iberian dance. I venture to believe that, highly talented though many of them are, I may say with incontrovertible truth, there has been only one Escudero.

B. A SWISS COMEDIAN

In 1931, a slight, short Swiss girl named Trudi Schoop with the dual talents of a dancer and a comedienne—a combination not too common—organized a company in her native Switzerland. She named it the Trudi Schoop Comic Ballet.

The Paris Archives Internationales de la Danse, formed in 1931 by Rolf de Maré, the Swedish dance patron who was responsible for the Swedish Ballet in the early ’twenties, in 1932 sponsored the first International Choreographic Competition in Paris. The prize-winning work in this initial competition was won by Kurt Joos for his now famous The Green Table. The second prize went to this hitherto almost unknown Trudi Schoop, for her comic creation, Fridolin.

In 1936, I brought her with her company for their first tour. Here again was a fresh and new form of dance entertainment. Tiny, with a shock of boyishly cut blonde hair, Trudi Schoop had the body of a young lad, and a schoolboy’s face alternating impishness with the benign innocence of the lad caught with sticky fingers and mouth streaked with jam.

Her repertoire consisted of theatre pieces rather than ballets in the accepted sense of the term. Trudi herself was a clown in the sense Charles Chaplin is a clown. Her range was tremendous. With a company trained by her in her own medium of gentle satire, she was an immediate success. Her productions had no décor, and there was a minimum of costume. But there was a maximum of effective mime, of wit, of satire. Her brother, Paul Schoop, was her composer, conductor, accompanist.

Trudi Schoop’s outstanding success was the prize-winning work, Fridolin. Schoop was Fridolin; Fridolin was Schoop. Fridolin was an innocent boy in a black Sunday suit and hat who stumbled and bumbled through a world not necessarily the best of all possible, wringing peals of laughter out of one catastrophe after another.

Other almost equally happy and successful works in her repertoire included Hurray for Love; The Blonde Marie, the tale of a servant girl who eventually becomes an operatic diva; and Want Ads, giving the background behind those particularly humorous items that still appear regularly in the “Agony Column” of The Times (London); you know, the sort of announcement that reads: “Honourable Lady (middle fifties) seeks acquaintance: object matrimony.”

The critical fraternity dubbed her the “funniest girl in the world”; the public adored her, and theatre folk made her their darling. Prior to the outbreak of the war, I sent Trudi and her Swiss Comedians across America. When, at last, war broke in all its fury, Schoop retired to her native Switzerland and disbanded her company. She did not reassemble it until 1946; and in 1947 I brought them over again for a long tour of the United States and Canada. On this most recent of her tours, in addition to her familiar repertoire, we made a departure by presenting an evening-long work, in three acts, called Barbara. This was, so far as I know, the first full-length work to be presented in dance form in many cities and towns of the North American continent. Full length, of course, in the sense that one work occupied a full evening for the telling of its story. This is another form of dance pioneering in which I am happy to have played a part.

Today Trudi Schoop, who has retired from the stage, lives with her sister in Hollywood.

C. A HINDU DEITY

Back in 1924, in London, I had watched a young Hindu dancer with Pavlova in her ballet, Hindu Wedding. I was struck by the quality of his movement and by the simple beauty of the dance of India.

His name was Uday Shan-Kar. From Pavlova I learned that he was the son of a Hindu producer of plays, that he had been trained by his father, and had worked so successfully in collaboration with him in the production of native Hindu mimed dramas that Pavlova had persuaded Shan-Kar to return to London to assist her in the production of an Indian ballet she had in mind, based on the Radna-Krishna legend. Pavlova succeeded in persuading him to dance in the work as well.

Later I saw him at the Paris Colonial Exposition, where, with his company which he had organized in India, he made a tremendous impression, subsequently achieving equal triumphs in England, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Switzerland. At the Paris Exposition I saw long Hindu dramas, running for hours, beautifully and sumptuously produced, but played with the greatest leisure. Since I am committed to candor in this account of my life in the dance, I must admit that I saw only parts of these danced dramas, took them in relays, for I must confess mine is a nature that cannot remain immobile for long stretches at a time before a theatre form as unfamiliar as the Indian was to me then.

Gradually I came to know it, and I realized that in India formal mime and dance are much more a part of the life of the people than they are with us. With the Indian, dance is not only an entertainment, but a highly stylised stage art; it plays an important part in religious ritual; it is a genuinely communal experience.

As night after night I watched parts of these symbolic dance dramas of Hindu mythology, fascinated by them, I searched for a formula whereby they might be made palatable and understandable to American audiences. I was certain that, as they were being danced in Paris, to music strange and unfamiliar to Western ears, going on for hours on end, the American public was not ready for them, and would not accept them.

I put the matter straight to Shan-Kar. I told him I wanted to bring him and his art to America. He told me he wanted to come. Possessed of a fine scholarship, a magnificent three-fold talent as producer, choreographer, and dancer-musician, he also possessed to a remarkable degree a sense of theatre showmanship and an intuition that enabled him to grasp and quickly understand the space and time limitations of the non-oriental theatre.

Shan-Kar’s association with Pavlova, together with his own fine intelligence, made his transition from the dance theatre of the Orient to an adaptation of it acceptable to the West a comparatively simple task for him.

His success in America exceeded my most optimistic predictions. Until the arrival of Shan-Kar, America had not been exposed to very much of the dance of India. Twenty years before, the English woman known as Roshanara had had a vogue in esoteric circles with her adaptations of the dances of India and the East. On the other hand, the male dancing of India was virtually unknown. As presented by Shan-Kar, this was revealed in an expressive mime, with an emphasis on the enigmatic face, the flat hand, using the upper part of the body as the chief medium of expression, together with the unique use of the neck and shoulders, not only for expression, but for accentuation of rhythm. New, also, to our audiences were the spread knees, a type of movement exclusive to the male Indian dancer.

Here was an art and an artist that seemingly had none of the conventional elements of a popular success. About him and his presentations there was nothing spectacular, nothing stunning, nothing exciting. Colour was there, to be sure; but the dancing and the general tone of the entertainment was all of a piece, on a single level, soothing, and with that elusive, almost indefinable quality: the serenity of the East.

Our associations, save for a brief period of mistrust on my part, have always been pleasant. In addition to the original tour of 1932, I brought him back in the season 1936-1937, and again in 1938-1939. The war, of course, intervened, and I was unable to bring him again until the season 1949-1950.

At the outbreak of the war, through the benefaction of the Elmhirst Foundation of Dartington Hall, England, an activity organized by the former Dorothy Straight, Shan-Kar was enabled to found a school for the dance and a center for research into Hindu lore, which he set up in Benares. One outcome of this research center was the production of a motion picture film dealing with this lore.

After seeing many of the Eastern dances and dancers who have been brought to Western Europe and the United States, I am convinced Uday Shan-Kar is still the outstanding exponent. I hope to bring him again for further tours, for I feel the more the American people are exposed to his performances, the better we shall understand the fine and delicate art of the East, and the East itself.

D. A SPANISH LADY

Although my taste for the dances of Spain had been whetted by my association with Escudero, I had long wished to present to America the artist whom I knew was the finest exponent of the feminine dance of the Iberian peninsula. The task was by no means an easy one, for her first American venture had been a fiasco. The lady from Spain was anything but eager to risk another North American venture.

Her name was Encarnacion Lopez. But it was as Argentinita that she was known to and loved by all lovers of the dance of Spain, and recognized by them as its outstanding interpreter of our time. Her story will bear re-telling. My enthusiasm, my utmost admiration for the Spanish dance, and for the great art of Argentinita is something that is not easy for me to express. Diaghileff is known to have said with that unequivocation for which he was noted: “There are two schools of dancing: the Classic Ballet, which is the foundation of all ballet; and the Spanish school.”

I would have put it differently by saying that Classic Ballet and the Spanish school are the two types of dancing closest to my heart.

My first view of Argentinita was at New York’s Majestic Theatre, in 1931, when she made her American début in Lew Leslie’s ill-fated International Revue. This performance, coincidentally enough, also brought forth for his first American appearance, the British dancer, Anton Dolin, who later also came under my management and who, like Argentinita, was to become a close personal friend. For Dolin, the opening night of the International Revue was certainly no very conspicuous beginning; for Argentinita, however, it was definitely a sad one. This charming, quiet-voiced lady of Spain knew that she was a great artist. Thrust into the hurly-burly of an ineptly produced Broadway revue, where all was shouting and screaming, Argentinita continued her quiet way and, artist that she was, avoided shouting and screaming her demands.

I was present at the opening performance. Although she was outwardly calm, collected, restrained, I could sense the ordeal through which Argentinita was going. In order to insure proper rhythmic support, she had brought her own orchestra conductor from Spain. This gentleman was able to speak little, if any, English. From where I sat I could see the musicians poring over their parts and could hear them commenting to each other about the music. Obviously the parts were in bad order and, equally obviously, there had been little or no rehearsal; and, moreover, it appeared the music was difficult to read at short notice.

It was one of those strange ironies of fate that ruined something that, properly handled, should and would have been a triumph. Yet it was not only the orchestra and the music that were at fault. Argentinita herself was shockingly presented, if she can honestly be said to have been presented at all. She made her entrance as a Spanish peasant, in a Spanish peasant costume which, though correct in every detail, was devoid of any effect of what the average audience thinks is Spanish. She was asked to dance in a peasant scene against a fantastic set purporting to be Spanish, surrounded by a bevy of Broadway showgirls in marvellous exotic costumes, also purporting to be Iberian, with trains yards in length, which were no more authentically Spanish, or meant to be, than were those of the tango danced by that well-known ball-room dancing team of Moss and Fontana, who came on later in the same scene.

Under such circumstances, success for Argentinita was out of the question. So bitter was her disappointment that she left the cast and the company two weeks after the opening. Later she gave a Sunday night recital in her own repertoire, and although I set to work immediately to persuade her that there was an audience for her in America, a great, enthusiastic audience, such were her doubts that it took me six years to do it. I knew she was a born star, for I recognized, shining in the tawdry setting of this revue, a vivacious theatre personality.

When Argentinita finally returned to America, in 1938, under my management, and made her appearance on 13th November of that year, at the Majestic Theatre, on the same stage where, seven years before, she had so utterly and tragically failed, this time to enthusiastic cheers and a highly approving press, she admitted I had been correct in my judgment and in my insistence that she return.

There is little point in recounting at this time her subsequent triumphs all over America, for her hold on the public increased with each appearance, and she is all too close to the memories of contemporary dance lovers. I have said that Argentinita was a great artist. That will bear repeating over and over again. Every gesture she made was feminine and beautiful and, to my mind, she portrayed everything that was lovely and most desirable. While her castanets may not actually have sung, they spoke of many lovely things. Argentinita was a symbol of the womanhood of Spain, warm, rich-blooded, wholesome, and I always felt certain there were not enough hats in the world, least of all in Spain, to throw at her feet to pay her the homage that was her due.

Argentinita was born of Spanish parents in Buenos Aires, in 1898, and taken back to Spain by them when she was four years old. At that early age she commenced her training in the Spanish dance in all its varied forms and styles, for she was equally at home in the Spanish Classic dance as she was in the Gypsy or Flamenco dances. Those who saw the poem she could make from las Soleares of Andulasia, the basic rhythm of all Spanish gypsy dances, know how she gave them the magic of a magic land; or the gay Alegrias, performed in the sinuous manner, rich with contrasts of slow, soft, and energetic movements, with the characteristic stamping, stomping, sole-tapping, clapping, and finger-snapping. It was in the Alegrias that Argentinita let her fancy roam with the slow tempo of the music. The European dance analysts had noted that here, as also at other times and places, Argentinita danced to please herself. When the tempo quickened, her mood changed to one of gaiety and abandon.

It is a difficult matter for me to pin down my memories of this splendid artist and her work: las Sevillianas, the national dance of Seville, danced by all classes and conditions of people, the Queen of Flamenco dances; or the Bulerias, the most typical of all gypsy dances, light and gay, the dance of the fiesta.

Argentinita was not only a dancer. She was an actress of the first order. She had been a member of Martinez Sierra’s interesting and vital creative theatre in Madrid. She sang Chansons Populaires in a curiously throaty, plaintive little voice that could, nevertheless, fill the largest theatre, despite the cameo-like quality of her art, fill even the Metropolitan Opera House, with the sound, the color, the atmosphere of Spain.

Dancer of Spain that she was, her repertoire was not by any means confined to the dance and music and life of the peoples of the Iberian peninsula. She traveled far afield for her material, through the towns and villages of South and Central America. Yet she was no mere copyist. Works and ideas she found were transmuted into terms of the theatre by means of a subtle alchemy. She had a deep knowledge of the entire Spanish dance tradition, and knew it all, understood its wide historical and regional changes. In her regional works, from Spanish folk to the heart of the Andes, she kept the flavor of the original, but personalized the dances. About them all was a fundamental honesty; nothing was done for show. There were no heroics; no athleticism. In addition to the Alegrias, Sevillianas, Fandangos, Jotas of Spain, the folk dances and folk songs of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and the remote places of Latin America and of its Indian villages were hers. None who ever saw her do it can ever quite obliterate the memory of El Huayno, implicit as it was with the stark dignity and nobility of the Inca woman, and called by one critic, “the greatest dance of our generation.”

I have a particularly fond memory of On the Route to Seville, in which a smoothie from the city outwitted and outdid the gypsies in larceny; and also I remember fondly that nostalgic picture of the Madrid of 1900, which she called, simply enough, In Old Madrid.

As our association developed and continued, I was happy to be able to extend the scope of her work and bring her from the solitary and non-theatrical dance recital platform on which, one after the other, from coast to coast, her journeys were a succession of triumphs, to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Here, with her own ensemble, chief among which was her exceptionally talented sister, Pilar Lopez, I placed them as guests with one ballet company or another—with Leonide Massine in Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat and in Capriccio Espangnol, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, on the choreography of which she collaborated with Massine.

In addition to these theatre adaptations of the dances of Spain, she danced in her own dances, both solo and with Pilar Lopez. She trained and developed excellent men, notably José Greco and Manolo Vargas. I am especially happy in having been instrumental in bringing to the stage two of her most interesting theatrical creations. One was the ballet she staged to de Falla’s El Amor Brujo, which I produced for her. The other was the Garcia Lorca El Café de Chinitas. Argentinita had been a devoted friend of the martyred Loyalist poet, and to bring his work to the American stage was a project close to her heart and a real labor of love. Argentinita belonged to a close little circle of scholars, poets, and composers, which included Martinez Sierra, Jacinto Benavente, and the extraordinarily brilliant, genius-touched Garcia Lorca.

The production of El Café de Chinitas was made possible during a Spanish festival I gave, one spring, at the Metropolitan Opera House. For this festival I engaged José Iturbi to conduct a large orchestra composed of members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Argentinita had succeeded in interesting the Marquis de Cuevas in the project. For El Café de Chinitas the Marquis commissioned settings and costumes from Salvador Dali. The result was one of the most effective and best considered works for the theatre emanating from Dali’s brush. Dali, like Argentinita, had been a friend of the martyred patriot-poet-composer. His profounder emotions touched, Dali designed as effective a setting as the Metropolitan Opera House has seen. The first of the two scenes was a tremendously high wall on which hung literally hundreds of guitars, a “graveyard of guitars,” as Dali phrased it; while the second scene, the Café de Chinitas itself, revealed the heroic torso of a female dancer with her arms upstretched in what could be interpreted as an attitude of the dance, or, if one chose, as a crucifixion. From where the hands held the castanets there dripped blood, as though the hands had been pierced. In terms of symbols, this was Dali’s representation of the crucifixion of his country by hideous civil war. This was Argentinita’s last production, and one of her happiest creations.

A victim of cancer, Argentinita died in New York on 24th September, 1945. I was at the hospital at the end, together with my friend and hers, Anton Dolin. Her doctors had long prescribed complete rest for her and special care. But her life was the dance, and stop she could not. Heroically she ignored her illness. If there was one thing about her more conspicuous than another, it was her tiny, dainty, slippered feet. No longer will they dart delicately into the lovely positions on the floor.

In Argentinita there was never either bitterness or unkindness to any one. I have seen, at first hand, Argentinita’s encouragement and unstinted help to others, and to lesser dancers. The success of others, whether it was the artists in her own programmes, or elsewhere, was a joy to her; nothing but the best was good enough. Her sister, Pilar Lopez, who survives her and who today dances with great success in Europe, carrying on her sister’s work, is a magnificent dancer. When the two sisters danced together, everything that could be done to make Pilar shine more brilliantly was done; and that, too, was the work of Argentinita. Her loyalty to me was something of which I am very proud.

Above all, it was the dignity and charm of the woman that played a great part in the superb image of the artist who was known as Argentinita.

E. A TERPSICHOREAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

The mixture of dance and song and anthropology, with a firm accent on sex, that struck a new note in the dance theatre, hailed from Chicago. Her name is Katherine Dunham. She is a dynamo of energy; she is elusive; she is unpredictable. She is a quite superb combination of exoticism and intellectuality.

Daughter of a French-Canadian and an American Negro, Katherine was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1914. Her theatrical experience has ranged from art museums to night clubs, from Broadway to London’s West End, to the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, to European triumphs. Her early life was spent and her first dancing was done in Chicago. She flashed across the American entertainment world comet-like. More recently she has confined her activities almost exclusively to England and Europe.

I had no part in her beginnings. By the time I undertook to manage her, she had assembled her own company of Negro dancers and had oscillated between the rarefied atmosphere of women’s clubs and concert halls, on the one hand, to night clubs and road houses, on the other. The atmosphere of the latter was both smoky and rowdy. Katherine Dunham, I suspect, is something of a split personality, so far as her art is concerned. Possessor of a fine mind, it would seem to have been one frequently in turmoil. On the one side, there is a keen intellectual side to it, evidenced by both a Bachelor of Philosophy and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago, two Rosenwald Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her Masters degree is in anthropology. These studies she pursued, as I have said, on the one hand. On the other, she studied and practiced the dance with an equal fierceness.

Her intellectual pursuits have been concerned, for the most part, with anthropological researches into the Negro dance. Her first choreographic venture was her collaboration with Ruth Page, in Chicago, in La Guiablesse, a ballet on a Martinique theme, with a score based on Martinique folk melodies by the American composer, William Grant Still, a work with an all-Negro cast, seen both at the Century of Progress Exhibition and the Chicago Opera House, in 1933. Dunham became active in the Federal Dance Theatre, and its Chicago director. It was when she was doing the dances for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union depression-time revue, Pins and Needles, that she tried a Sunday dance concert in New York at the Forty-eighth Street Theatre. So successful was it that it was repeated every Sunday for three months.

Turning to the theatre, she added acting and singing to dancing and choreography, both on the stage and in films, appearing as both actress and singer in Cabin in the Sky. She intrigued me, both by the quality of her work, her exoticism, and her loyalty to her little troupe, for the members of which she felt herself responsible. I first met her while she was appearing at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, in San Francisco. She was closing her engagement. She was down and out, trying to keep her group together. I arranged for an audition and, after seeing her with her group, undertook to see what could be done. Present with me at this audition were Agnes de Mille, then in San Francisco rehearsing with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo what was to become her first choreographic triumph, Rodeo, together with Alexandra Danilova and Frederick Franklin.

My idea in taking over her management was to try to help her transform her concert pieces into revue material, suitable not only to the country’s concert halls, but also to the theatre of Broadway and those road theatres that were becoming increasingly unoccupied because of the paucity of productions to keep them open. Certain purely theatrical elements were added, including some singers, one of them being a Cuban tenor; and, to supplement her native percussion players, a jazz group, recruited from veterans of the famous “Dixieland Band.”

We called the entertainment the Tropical Revue. The Tropical Revue was an immediate success at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York and, thanks to some quick work, I was able to secure additional time at the theatre and to extend the run to six weeks. This set up some sort of record for an entertainment of the kind. As an entertainment form it rested somewhere between revue and recital. Miss Dunham herself had three outstanding numbers. These were her own impressions of what she called different “hot” styles. These were responsible for some of the heat that brought on the sizzling of the scenery to which the critics referred. The first of her numbers was Bahiana, a limpid and languid impression of Brazil; then Shore Excursion, a contrasting piece, fast, hot, tough, and Cuban. The third was Barrelhouse, an old stand-by of hers, straight out of Chicago’s Jungletown.

Tropical Revue, during its two years under my management, was in an almost perpetual state of flux. It was revised and revised, and revised again. As the tours proceeded, Dunham did less and less dancing and more and more impersonation. But while her “bumps” grew more discreet, there was no lessening of the heat. Dunham’s choreography was best in theatricalized West Indian and Latin American folk dances, some of which approached full-scale ballets. The best of these, in my opinion, was L’Ag’ya, a three-scened work, Martinique at core, the high light of which was the “ag’ya,” a kicking dance. Here she was able to put to excellent use authentic Afro-Caribbean steps, and in the overall choreographic style, I would not feel it unfair to say that Dunham’s style had been considerably influenced by the Chicago choreographer and dancer, Ruth Page, with whom Dunham had collaborated early in her career.

It did not take me long to discover the public was more interested in sizzling scenery than it was in anthropology, at least in the theatre. Since the Tropical Revue was fairly highly budgeted, it was necessary for us, in order to attract the public, to emphasize sex over anthropology. Dunham, with a shrewd eye to publicity, oscillated between emphasis first on one and then on the other; her fingers were in everything. In addition to running the company, dancing, singing, revising, she lectured, carried on an unending correspondence by letter and by wire, entertained lavishly, and added considerably, I am sure, to the profits of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Columns were written about her, and fulsome essays, a good deal of which was balderdash.

The handling of this tour presented its own special set of problems. Not the least of these was the constantly recurring one of housing. We have come a long way in the United States in disposing of Jim Crow; but there is still a great deal to be done. Hotel accommodations for the artists of the Tropical Revue were a continual source of worry. One Pacific Coast city was impossible. When, after days of fruitless searching, our representative thought he had been able to install them in a neighboring town, the Chinese owner of the hotel, on learning his guests were not white, canceled the reservations.

A certain midwestern city was another trouble spot, where, in one of the city’s leading hostelries, the employees threatened to strike because of the presence there of some of the principal artists. This was averted by some quick work on the part of our staff. It should be noted, too, that these unfortunate difficulties were all in cities north of what we hoped was the non-existent Mason and Dixon Line.

Miss Dunham, quite naturally, was disturbed and exercised by this discrimination. In order to avoid this kind of unpleasantness, I had tried to restrict the bookings to northern cities. However, it became necessary to play an engagement in a southern border city. The results were not happy. At the time of making the booking, I did not realize that in this border state segregation was practiced in its Municipal Auditorium.

The house was sold out on the opening night. Owing to wartime transportation difficulties, the company was late in arriving. Just before the delayed curtain’s rise, Miss Dunham requested four seats for some of her local friends. She was asked by the manager of the Auditorium if they were colored. Miss Dunham replied that they were; whereupon the manager offered to place chairs for them in the balcony, since colored persons were not permitted in the orchestra stalls. Miss Dunham protested, and objected to her friends being seated other than in the orchestra. The fact was there were no seats available in the stalls, since the house was sold out. However, had it not been for the segregation rule, four extra chairs could have been placed in the boxes.

The performance was enthusiastically received, with repeated curtain calls at its close. Miss Dunham responded with a speech. She thanked the audience for its appreciation and its warm response. Then, smarting under the accumulated pressures of discrimination throughout the tour, climaxed by the incident involving her friends, she paused, and added: “This is good-bye. I shall not appear here again until people like me can sit with people like you. Good-bye, and God bless you—and you may need it.”

While there was no overt hostile demonstration in the theatre, there were those who felt Miss Dunham’s closing words implied a threat. The press, ever alert to scent a scandal, demanded a statement about my attitude on segregation in theatres, and to know if I approved of artists under my management threatening audiences. It was one of those rare times when, for some reason, I could not be reached by telephone. Faced with the necessity of making some sort of statement, my representative issued one to the effect that Mr. Hurok deplored and was unalterably opposed to discrimination of any kind anywhere; but that, as a law-abiding citizen, however much he deplored such regulations, he was bound to conform to the laws and regulations obtaining in those communities and theatres where he was contractually obliged to have his attractions appear. But I have taken care never again to submit artists to any possible indignities, if there is any way of avoiding it.

I shall relate a last example of the sort of difficulties that arose on this tour and, to my mind, it is the most stupid of them all, if there can be said to be degrees of stupidity in such matters.

In addition to the large orchestra of conventional instruments we carried, Miss Dunham had four Guatemalan percussionists who dramatically beat out the Caribbean rhythms on a wide assortment of gourds, tam-tams, and other native drums, both with the orchestra and in several scenes on the stage.

It happened in a northern city. The head of the musicians’ union local demanded to know if there were any “niggers” in our orchestra. My representative, who feels very strongly about such matters and who resents the term used by the local union president, replied that he did not understand the question. All members of the orchestra, he said, were members of the American Federation of Musicians, and had played as a unit across the entire country, and such a question had never arisen. The local union official thereupon tersely informed him the colored players would not be permitted to play with the other musicians in the orchestra pit in that city; if they attempted to do so, he would forbid the white players to play. My representative, refusing to bow to such an ukase, appealed to the head office of the Musicians’ Union, in Chicago—only to be informed by them that, however much headquarters disapproved of and deplored the situation, each union local was autonomous in its local rulings and there was nothing they could do.