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The Ballet Corporealities of Anna Pavlova and Albertina Rasch

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01472526.2011.650618

1532-4257

Carrie Gaiser Casey,

Physical education and sports games research

Abstract This article examines the dance practices and performance philosophies of Anna Pavlova and Albertina Rasch, two company directors, choreographers, and dancers of the early twentieth century, within the context of the discourses of the American women's movement. I reconstruct the "ballet corporealities" of Pavlova and Rasch—how their practices, techniques, and philosophies embodied larger cultural forces—based on archival evidence, interviews, photographs, film clips, and printed material. Through their ballet corporealities, Pavlova and Rasch reflected two distinct phases of American feminist thought: a Progressive-Era model based on public service and a post-Suffrage form focused on personal freedom. Notes 1. Lisa C. Arkin and Marian Smith, "National Dance in the Romantic Ballet," in Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, ed. Lynn Garafola (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 11–68. 2. See, for example, Evan Alderson, "Ballet as Ideology: Giselle, Act 2," in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 121–32; Ann Daly, "The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers," TDR, vol. 31, no. 1 (1987): 8–21; Elizabeth Dempster, "Women Writing the Body: Let's Watch a Little How She Dances," in Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, ed. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 21–38; Susan Leigh Foster, "The Ballerina's Phallic Pointe," in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture, and Power, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–24. 3. Christy Adair, Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens (London: Macmillan, 1992), 12. 4. See, for example, Alexandra Carter's study of the music hall ballet, Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005); Jennifer Fisher's ethnographic study, "Nutcracker" Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003); and Karen Eliot's Dancing Lives: Five Female Dancers from the Ballet d'Action to Merce Cunningham (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 5. Susan Leigh Foster, Introduction, in Corporealities, xi–xvii. 6. See, for example, Sally Banes, "Balanchine and Black Dance," in Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994); Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996). 7. Keith Money, Anna Pavlova: Her Life and Art (New York: Knopf, 1982), 2. 8. Sol Hurok, "Impresario's Viewpoint," in A. H. Franks, Pavlova: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 56. 9. Frank W. D. Ries, "Albertina Rasch: The Broadway Career," Dance Chronicle, vol. 6, no. 2 (1983): 96. 10. Hurok, "Impresario's Viewpoint," 56. 11. Program for "Saison Russe," June 26, 1910, Palace Theatre, Anna Pavlova Collection, San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design (hereafter SFMPD). 12. Albertina Rasch, photographs, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, The Jerome Robbins Dance Division (hereafter JRDD). 13. Avery Strakosch, "Wants to Teach American Girls Art of Dancing," Musical America, June 5, 1915. 14. Ries, "Albertina Rasch," 97. 15. Contract dated September 1, 1911, Anna Pavlova, miscellaneous manuscripts, JRDD. 16. Linda Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 47, 59. 17. See photograph reproduced in Albertina Rasch, "The New World Ballet," The Dance Magazine (February 1929): 14. 18. Rehearsal photograph, Pavlova company, Anna Pavlova Collection, SFMPD. 19. The section on Pavlova and the tunic ballet is presented in condensed form from Carrie Gaiser Casey, "Ballet's Feminisms: Genealogy and Gender in Twentieth-Century American Ballet" (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2009). 20. Judith Chazin-Bennahum, The Lure of Perfection: Fashion and Ballet, 1780–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 88. 21. Michel Fokine, "The New Ballet," in Dance as a Theatre Art: Source Readings in Dance History from 1581 to the Present, ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974), 102–8. 22. Quoted from an advance announcement of Pavlova and her students' recital on August 7, 1913, at the Palace Theatre, London, Anna Pavlova, scrapbooks, JRDD. The garden party itself was held on June 13, 1912. 23. "Spirituality in Dancing," World-Wide News Service, Inc., Boston, Mass., 1924, Anna Pavlova, scrapbooks, SFMPD. 24. Muriel Stuart, interviews by Tobi Tobias, September 5, 14, 19, and October 10, 1978, [typescript], Oral History Archive, JRDD. 25. Duncan, "The Dance of the Future," in Dance as a Theatre Art, 123. 26. "The Children's Goddess: Mme. Pavlova and Her Devoted Pupils," Pall Mall Gazette, 1913, Anna Pavlova, clippings file, JRDD. 27. Duncan, "The Dance of the Future," 126. 28. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 119. 29. Anna Pavlova, scrapbooks, 1924, SFMPD. 30. "The Dance," (1922?), Anna Pavlova Collection, SFMPD. 31. Frank I. Odell, "Indiana Interview: October 26, 1910," Dance Magazine (January 1956): 22. 32. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 36. 33. Oleg Kerensky, Anna Pavlova (New York: Dutton, 1973), 134. 34. Victor Dandré, Anna Pavlova in Art and Life (London: Cassell and Company, 1932), 254. 35. Kerensky, Anna Pavlova, 134. 36. Photograph in Money, Anna Pavlova, 289. 37. Typed publicity notice from John F. Parker, "Social Leaders to Help Red Cross," Malvina Hoffman Collection, Special Collections, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (hereafter GRI). 38. Tomko, Dancing Class, 41. 39. Anna Pavlova, clippings file, JRDD. 40. Anna Pavlova, letter to Malvina Hoffman, January 1923, Malvina Hoffman Collection, GRI. 41. Tomko, Dancing Class, 66. 42. John Martin, "The Dance: Numbers for Our Revues," New York Times, October 18, 1931. 43. Quoted in Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola, eds., André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1991), 94. 44. The Broadway version premiered at the Center Theater on September 22, 1934. The Great Waltz, VHS, directed by Julien Duvivier (orig. release 1938; MGM Home Entertainment, 1998). 45. Hollywood Revue of 1929, DVD, directed by Charles F. Reisner (orig. release 1929; MGM/Turner Entertainment, 2009); Sally, DVD, directed by John Francis Dillon (orig. release 1929; MGM/Turner Entertainment, 2009). 46. The Rogue Song, directed by Lionel Barrymore (MGM, 1930). This film does not survive in its entirety, but a clip of Rasch's "The Swan Ballet" may be viewed at http://songbook1.wordpress.com/pp/fx/features-2-older-2/albertina-rasch-dancers/ (accessed February 14, 2011). 47. Dmitri Tiomkin and Prosper Buranelli, Please Don't Hate Me (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 126. 48. For the African American influence on vaudeville, see chapter 2 of Nadine George-Graves, The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900–1940 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). 49. Tiomkin, Please Don't Hate Me, 128. 50. Julie Malnig, Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 113. 51. Bernard Simon, "Albertina Rasch Has Added Jazz to the Classic Ballet," no source [1927?], Albertina Rasch, clippings file, JRDD. 52. Albertina Rasch, "The New World Ballet," The Dance (February 1929): 17. 53. Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996). 54. Dorothy Kilgallen, "Lessons on Ballet, Nos. 1–10, by Mme. Albertina Rasch," New York Evening Journal (193-), Albertina Rasch, scrapbook, JRDD. Frank Ries estimates the probable publication date of this article to be 1930. 55. Frank W. D. Ries, "Albertina Rasch: The Concert Career and the Concept of the American Ballet," Dance Chronicle, vol. 7, no. 2 (1984): 176. 56. The March of Time (MGM, 1930 [unreleased]), "The Hades Ballet" dance section by Albertina Rasch was reused in Devil's Cabaret (MGM, 1930). The ballet may be viewed at http://talkieking.blogspot.com/2008/10/march-of-time-unfinished-mgm-1930.html (accessed February 14, 2011). 57. Danielle Robinson, "Performing American: Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy," Dance Chronicle, vol. 32, no. 1 (2009): 105–6. 58. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 90. The phrase "women adrift" comes from Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 59. Reprinted in Money, Anna Pavlova, 198–9. 60. Robinson, "Performing American," 101, 102. 61. Quoted in Margot Fonteyn, Roberta Lazzarini, and John Lazzarini, Pavlova: Portrait of a Dancer (New York: Viking, 1984), 125. 62. Albertina Rasch, catalogs and announcements, JRDD. 63. Albertina Rasch, clippings file, JRDD. 64. Albertina Rasch, catalogs and announcements, JRDD. 65. Kilgallen, "Lessons on Ballet." 66. Ray Harper, "The Magic of the Rasch Cane," The Dance (January 1928): 19, 55. 67. Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993), 56. 68. See, for example, Siegfried Kracauer's "The Mass Ornament," in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 69. Nanette Kutner, "Fall in Love—and Become a Ballet Dancer, Says Albertina Rasch," Dance Lover's Magazine (June 1924): 33. 70. Simon, "Albertina Rasch Has Added Jazz to the Classic Ballet." 71. Rasch, quoted in Tiomkin, Please Don't Hate Me, 117.