Dancer from the Dance
WINKLER, CLAUDIA
Dancer, from the Dance Alexandra Danilova's Legacy By Claudia Winkler "Oi nly connect," said E.M. I Forster. Alexandra Dan-ilova's motto could have been, "Only distinguish." In a notable passage...
...The most treasured relationship, clearly, was with Balanchine, with whom she lived for some five years after he and his first wife parted...
...In Russia," she writes, "we were taught never to touch our knees to the floor when taking a bow unless there was royalty in the house...
...Her can-can in Massine's La Boutique Fantasque and her rendition of the street dancer in his Le Beau Danube were among her most celebrated roles, along with the more elevated Firebird, Swan Lake, and her renowned interpretation of the charming and resourceful Swanilda in Coppelia...
...The rest of us, no matter how good we were, were given eleven, or ten, or nine...
...They should read history and literature, and so refine the cultural and psychological understanding they bring to different roles...
...and as a gesture of thanks for the support and devotion I had received over the course of my Claudia Winkler is a managing editor of The Weekly Standard...
...she especially loved performing for servicemen during World War II...
...Dancers'] talent is God-given, and it sets them apart...
...At school, the brilliant George Balanchine was an admired classmate, then a fellow junior member of the State Ballet...
...we were to go on our knees only to royalty or to God...
...Petersburg, rigorous distinctions were observed...
...Although she never lacked for suitors, her two marriages were brief...
...Her professional life would keep her always near the center of one of the far-reaching artistic developments of the century: the spreading influence of Russian ballet in Europe, then America...
...it gives them a purpose...
...the highest distinction has already been spent...
...In Monte Carlo, the company rehearsed a succession of new ballets, to be performed in London and Paris...
...Danilova and Balanchine were part of the last wave of Russian emigres to work with the fabled impresario himself...
...Danilova first toured in the United States in 1933...
...Onstage and off, they should cultivate the glamour expected of a ballerina and never fail in their duty to their audience, whose "astonishment and enthusiasm" are the dancer's reward...
...She spent the final years of her working life based at his School of American Ballet in New York...
...When his choreographic experiments proved too bold for the commissars, he was expelled from the company...
...To her students (of whom I was privileged to be one, when she directed a Nutcracker in which I performed), she strove to communicate much more than technique: to convey a sense that theirs was a great tradition, to exemplify an ethic...
...Increasingly, Balan-chine did the choreography, to scores by the likes of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, and with sets and costumes from such avant-garde figures as Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Rouault, and Coco Chanel...
...By the mid-'20s, the Ballets Russes was already famous across Europe, and the creative ferment generated by its director Sergei Diaghilev made the company a magnet for talent...
...The queenly Danilova combined artistic sophistication and professionalism of a high order with a perfect lack of snobbery and a Russian joie de vivre...
...But often I think back on it, because it reserved a place in our minds for the utmost...
...It was a particularly happy, if incongruous, match...
...The 1930s were the period of her sparkling stage partnership with choreographer and dancer Leonide Massine...
...Danilova and Balanchine went their separate ways in search of work...
...This has been my lifelong conviction, and I pass it along to my students, just as my teachers instilled in me as part of my training a sense of dignity and pride...
...She lost her parents in infancy and was sent to live with a grandmother in straitened circumstances...
...Overusing what ought to be an ultimate expression of humility is "like talking all the time in superlatives—the most, the greatest, the best...
...His colorful, often comedic creations suited her dramatic flair...
...Hers, to be sure, was a way of thinking formed by the ancien regime...
...She writes of the joy it gave her to expose Americans to ballet, often for the first time...
...She goes on: "At the end of my last performance [in 1957], taking my final curtain calls, I spread the flowers I had been sent at my feet, to flatter the senders...
...At the Imperial School of the Ballet, on Theater Street in St...
...In her 1986 memoir, Choura, Danilova is candid about the disappointments of her personal life...
...Danilova first trod the boards of the Maryinsky Theater as a child in a crowd scene in the opera Faust starring the great Feodor Chaliapin...
...It is fitting that Dan-ilova, who had no family, should have bequeathed her collection of paintings, sculptures, costume sketches, set designs, 19th-century dance prints, photographs, and souvenir programs to the superb dance archive at the New York Public Library...
...All their lives, they were joined by a mutual respect and a common dedication to the dance...
...She tried to instill in her pupils a broad hunger for learning...
...This, she says, is "too much...
...A kind and wealthy family took her in, but her foster mother died when she was 9, her foster father when she was 14, and at 20 she quit her homeland...
...As always, the gesture was right...
...She had her dancing debut at 9, leading the children's mazurka in the last act of Paquita...
...They began early...
...It sustains and comforts them...
...One morning, when she was 4, she found her grandmother dead...
...In a notable passage in her memoirs, the ballerina, who died last week at 93, gently chides young dancers for too readily sinking to their knees in taking their bows or curtain calls...
...Balanchine always said that dancers are aristocrats," Danilova writes, "that we were born into the ranks of a nobility that is based on art, and I agree...
...Here was a worthy occasion: a dancer's farewell to her public...
...Oppressed by the lack of artistic and personal freedom and tired of being hungry, cold, and threadbare in Bolshevik Leningrad, Balanchine, Danilova, and four others left the Soviet Union in 1924 for a summer season in Europe...
...And before long, the mediocre is called the best, and the best is nothing special, because there is no longer any name for it...
...In Danilova's years as a boarder there, from 1911 to 1920, only two pupils (Olga Spessivtseva and Felia Doubrovska) graduated with a perfect grade of twelve...
...World War II anchored her on this side of the Atlantic, and she became a citizen in 1946...
...Both Danilova and the towering Balanchine, who died in 1983, enriched their new country with the best of the old...
...They would not return—except, in Danilo-va's case, in advanced old age...
...As the featured ballerina with one troupe or another, she danced in small towns from coast to coast, year in, year out, and after her retirement from the stage, Americans became the chief beneficiaries of her last incarnation, as a teacher...
...He would eventually found the New York City Ballet...
...They should study music and go to art exhibits and seek out every variety of dance, especially folk dancing, from which the classical vocabulary derives...
...After the Revolution, this scale was eliminated completely...
...career, I went down on my knee to my audience...
...Diaghilev's death in 1929 scattered the company...
...Danilova danced with several successor "Ballets Russes" in Europe...
Vol. 2 • July 1997 • No. 45
