Dance
McDonagh, Don
I was suspended after the performance which the Dowager Empress attended and never again danced in Russia. The Dance costume essentially is the one that is today worn throughout the world,...
...Lowenthal's nearly three-hour film is in effect a brief for the defense...
...They were men more than willing to ruin Hiss's life, waste his talents, and exploit the worst instincts and fears of the Ameri- can people in order to further their own careers...
...At the second of these Hiss was convicted and given a five-year prison sentence...
...But Chambers's accusations put an end to all that...
...As we might expect, the F.B.I...
...By going back and interviewing around a dozen of file principals involved in Hiss's trials, Lowenthal painstakingly builds a case showing howHiss was framed...
...Upon Nijinsky's return to St...
...Charter...
...is revealed to have had an especially villainous role in this conspiracy...
...They loved one another, they danced beautifully, and they believed in each other's talent...
...Since the instigation of their series under the general editorship of Dale Harris, a conscious effort has been made to offer a list balanced between the scholarly treatise and the lively memoir...
...This time I want to talk about another recent documentary whose subject is also the life of just one man, though a man about as different from Philly Wohl as is imaginable: Alger Hiss...
...Cecchetti's pedagogical methods were sound and molded a further generation of dancers when he settled in England...
...In fact, the two disagreed artistically and it's highly ironic that this little solo he designed for her has become one of his most enduring creations...
...Then during Hiss's trials the F.B.I...
...This is a classic "rags to riches" show business story, engaging because of its simplicity and genuineness...
...Yet all the people in it from Philly's parents to his teachers to cousin Ira himself are so protective of Philly that we can't help being generally encouraged about things...
...I was suspended after the performance which the Dowager Empress attended and never again danced in Russia...
...He is even this way when he admits that one of the effects of his trials was to destroy his marriage...
...Inadvertently he contributed to Nijinsky's departure from the Imperial Ballet by designing an exact period reproduction of the doublet and hose worn by the male in the original French production of "GiseUe" in 1841...
...Denis's husband) who was also one of those pioneers shows that world from the inside with his exuberant autobiography One Thousand and One Night Stands ($6.95, paper, 288 pp...
...Unlike Best Boy, whose power derives from the direct, spontaneous emotions people show in it, The Trials of Alger Hiss contains almost no visible emotion...
...They ultimately led beyond the Congressional hearings to two trials for perjury in the federal courts...
...is a landmark collection of essays that has yet to be bettered on that artist's creative greatness...
...Natalia Roslavleva's Era Of The Russian Ballet ($25,320 pp...
...More than that, we understand, if only dimly, that behind the public world in which this film is set there has been a private one just as painful and poignant as that in which Philty Wohl lives...
...This was a sewer we were working in," HUAC's own chief investigator, Robert Stripling, tells Lowenthal, and he's clearly not refer- ring to the people on the witness's side'of the committee tables...
...BALLET MEMOIRS DANCE BOOKS REPRINTED A s A PASSIONATE bookstore browser I have occasionally had the luck to find an out-of-print edition that I desper- ately wanted to add to my library...
...Picasso, Derain, Benois, and Bakst are all com-mented upon in a book whose only fault is that it~is too short...
...The two had been in Be Imperial Academy together and were hi[hly esteemed as a team...
...The world in which Alger Hiss has spent his life is, to say the least, not so full ofsweet and good-natured people...
...The fwst part of the text does indeed go deeply into the actual process of preparing theatrical scenery, but the joy of the book is the second half devoted to Polunin's work with Serge Diaghilev's pioneering Ballets Russes, a revolutionary departure from the old Imperial Ballet system...
...Olga Racster's The Master of the Russian Ballet ($19.50, 303 pp...
...Before the credits are even over, John Lowenthal's The Trials of Alger Hiss gives us some evidence of just how rough it can be...
...and Merle Armitage's Martha Graham: the Early Years ($19.50, cloth, $5.95, paper, 133 pp...
...Dancing in Petersburg ($25,273 pp...
...An erudite and sympathetic critic, she does an honorable job of making sense of this artistic course though her tendency to disparage any creative efforts made by ~migr~ Russians smacks more of politics than scholarship...
...Polunin: "It is impossible to find any vermillion, and the other red tones available are all very bad...
...Pavlova's subsequent career consisted of worldwide touring, and this aspect of her professional life is treated in an adoring memoir Flight of the Swan ($19.50, 285 pp...
...which captures Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, Ruth St...
...John Cronin so that Cronin could pass it on to Nixon for use in tripping up Hiss during his Congressional testimony...
...By temperament a finicky and querulous man, his relations with Diaghilev were strained to the breaking point many times before he severed all ties with the company...
...Drawing on meticulous research in old sources she makes the basse dance, bransle, gailliard, and pavan live with lively descriptions and accompanying musical quotations...
...The Dance costume essentially is the one that is today worn throughout the world, including Russia, but the propriety of the times dictated otherwise...
...Chambers is the only person involved who se~ms to have displayed his emotions, which, because they are his, are theatrical and highly suspect...
...More often, however I am disappointed: the first-edition market is in the speculative grip of the stock exchange mentality...
...by Andr~ Oliveroff, an American boy from Montclair, New Jersey, who russified his name and became a member of her company...
...DON McDONAGH Screen |J I I I I FAITH IN THE SYSTEM A BRIEF FOR ALGER HISS I N THE previous issue I was discussing Ira Wohl's Best Boy, which is about the life of Wohl's 52-year-old cousin Philly who is mentally retarded...
...Diaghilev subsequently attached him to his ~migr~ Ballets Russes and sent him his best dancers for polish- ing...
...From the time that a young California congressman named Richard Nixon went after Hiss in the hearings until an equally zealous pro- secutor, Thomas Murphy, did so during the trials, Hiss was the victim of unscrupulous, desperately ambitious men...
...is a view from the top by Mathilde Kschessinska, the first native-born Russian "ballerina assoluta," who displaced the need for the Imperial theaters to import virtuosic Italian stars for major productions...
...He Another great figure of the time who emerged from the Imperial Ballet and also danced with the Ballets Russes was Anna Pavlova, the subject of a collection of essays, Pavlova ($19.50, 144 pp...
...BestBoy is an appealing film because it shows what a decent place the world can be sometimes...
...One such item was a deposition in which Chambers admitted 9 May 1980:275...
...takes a scholarly overview of the whole of Russian dancing from early folk efforts through its Imperial era and right down to the mid-sixties when the Soviet style dominated...
...by Vladimir Polunin...
...Modem dance pioneers are celebrated through the eyes of sympathetic observers like Caroline and Charles H. Caffin in Dancing and Dancers of Today ($25, 301 pp...
...among which is a charming memoir by Fokine...
...Hiss is of course the man whom Whittaker Chambers named as a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s...
...traces his career, warmly from its beginninss in Italy (as a child performer in 1855) to his immensely successful teaching years, which ended only with his death in 1928...
...recounts their disappointments and successes...
...Along with those credits Lowenthal includes a list of people who refused to be interviewed for this film...
...It was for her that he created "The Dying Swan...
...The recollections are slight for the most part, but do convey a sense of the dedication that Pavlova brought to her art...
...In both the newsreel footage and the contemporary interviews, Hiss himself is calm, articulate, dispassionate...
...details his efforts there and elsewhere...
...First the agency fed restricted information incriminating to Hiss to the Rev...
...She was a powerhouse of energy both on stage and off, though the ever-present first person singular in her memoirs does get a bit wearying...
...danced with Nijinsky at the Maryinsky and tells of her life there and subsequently on variety entertainment bills in Lon- don...
...Fortunately for dance books the Da Capo reprint series has recently come to the rescue...
...Diaghilev: "'There is no interest in achieving the possible but it is exceedingly interesting to perform the impossible...
...suppressed, or allowed to be suppressed, information it had which might have cleared Hiss...
...Benois himself, who was one of the founding members of the Ballets Russes, contributed strongly to the success of the early Diaghilev seasons, and his Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet ($29.50, 414 pp...
...It is a large and very public world, and a pretty rough one...
...Despite his continuing need for money to support the critically successful but financially draining company, Diaghilev never compromised on the quality of the productions he placed before the public...
...A typical exchange occurred in the painting of "Contes Russes...
...In the face of her considerable ac- complishment it is a small blemish...
...Ted Shawn (St...
...Now we understand why her name is on that list of people who wouldn't be interviewed...
...This encounter between craftsman and artistic director is one of the .few self-conscious instances where we are able to experience the immediacy of Diaghilev's meticulousness in all aspects of production...
...The edifice upon which all of those talents rested was the Imperial school system, and an integral part of it was Enrico Cecchetti, who taught all of the above and performed with some of them...
...In the ballroom no couple has been more celebrated than Irene and Vernon Castle and her My Husband ($19,50, 275 pp...
...and Dances of England and France 1450 to 1600 ($19.50, 163 pp...
...Lydia Kyasht of Romantic Recollections ($19.50, 247 pp...
...He had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, been appointed to a post at the policy-making level in the New Deal, accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta, and helped draft the U.N...
...Its world is admittedly a small and very private one...
...Kschessinska equaled their skills--and doubly assuring her success--was Nicholas II's mistress, She left before being swept away by the Revolution and ended her years in affluent retirement, married to a Grand Duke in Paris...
...Petersburg from his summer's success in Paris, he elected to wear the same costume and refused to have it altered or wear the dumpy shorts that were offered to him as a compromise...
...Needless to say, Polunin found the pigment...
...It has been successful and has made available some real treasures such as The Continental Method of Scene Painting ($22.50, 85 pp...
...Denis, and Grete Wiesenthal of the emerging Central European school during the heat of their revolutionary activity...
...It simply was her life...
...His wife was by nature, he explains, a shy, private person who simply couldn't endure the public scrutiny and ridicule...
...Up until that time, Hiss had had the sort of career in govern- ment service which is usually described as "brilliant...
...Most of them are Hiss's old enemies, so we are a bit surprised and puzzled to notice that among their names that of Priscilla Hiss appears...
...Irene survived her husband by decades of retirement after he was killed instructing student flyers during World War I. The series promises to continue making these important documents available with an admirable catholicity of taste and should prove to be a boon both for the general reader and the more specialized dance scholar and historian...
...Commonweal: 274 The pre-ballet world is scrupulously presented by Mabel Dolmetsch in two volumes The Dances of Spain and Italy From 1400 to 1600 ($19.50, 174 pp...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 9
