La Goulue - Louise Weber (1866-1929) - Cancan Star of Le Moulin Rouge

Adolph Bolm (1884-1958) - Famed Ballets Russes Dancer

Bolm and Karsavina in Firebird (1911)

Bolm in 'DanceMacabre' (1924)

This site ...

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.adolphbolm.com/archive/Ballets/DanseMacabre/OB_DanceMacabre_1924_400.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.adolphbolm.com/html/danseur.html&h=579&w=400&sz=15&hl=en&start=4&sig2=iX5CVaUWlH5MrvoXjhr64w&usg=__24mWtPXHh3ySUwM0pnqfh7GmVnw=&tbnid=9JRZL1BnZD-Y4M:&tbnh=134&tbnw=93&ei=a366SKvBFYGaoQTi9r3gAQ&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dadolph%2Bbolm%2Bdance%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG

... has tons of photos of Bolm in various ballets and places him in the context of the Ballets Russes and C20 dance in general through listing publications and his papers.

More 'Footage' of Nijinsky in 'L'apres midi d'un faune'

More footage if Nijinsky dancing in 'L'apres midi d'un faune' has appeared.




I suspect something like Jim Clark's 'poem animation' - see:

http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/poetrylad

What do you think?

Tamara Karsavina Exercises at the Mariinsky Theatre c1920

Finally I managed to locate the footage of Tamara Karsavina doing exercises at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersberg c1920.

Karsavina in 'Les Papillions'

Karsavina in 'Cleopatre'

Karsavina in 'Firebird'

There is so little film of any of the dancers from the Serge Diaghilev era of the 'Ballets Russes'.

Just fragments of footage of Anna Pavlova, Olga Spessitzseva, Anton Dolin, Alicia Markova, Alexand Alexandra Danilova and a tiny handful of others.

More of Olga Spessivtzseva (1895-1991) in Act One of 'Giselle'

I've come across more footage of Olga Spessivtzseva as 'Giselle'.

It is also from the only known film of her dancing which was recorded at the Savoy Theatre in London in 1932. Her Albrecht was another Ballets Russes dancer, Anton Dolin.

Anton Dolin in Les Ballets Russes 'Le Train Bleu' (1924)

The two clips below are essentially the same.

However, the first begins a little earlier in the ballet (as Giselle is coming out of her mother's cottage) and ends with Dolin chatting with Spessivtzseva about how much he enjoyed dancing with her.

The second begins with Giselle already out-of-doors and dancing, and ends with Dolin questioning her about identity of the composer of the music (not Adam) of one of her solos.

He is a bit brutally insistent with these questions, and doesn't really take it gently and slowly enough to allow her to consider a response.

Olga Spessivtzseva (1895-1991) in Act One of 'Giselle'

Another amazing find - of Olga Spessivtzseva in 'Giselle'!

Spessivtzseva is initially being interviewed by Anton Dolin, an old partner. And then dances part of Act One.

As you may know, her career was cut short by madness and hospitalization.

Then later in life she made some kind of recovery - though it may just have been that a 'suitable' medication was found.

She was the perfect dancer, dancing to her inner music own rather than that played by the orchestra.

Vaslav Nijinsky in 'L'apres-midi d'un faune' (1912)

Unbelievably, I noticed footage today of Nijinsky in 'l'apres-midi d'un faune'.

26 seconds worth, discovered in 2006 in the archive of Louis MAISTRE (1862-1948) and now uploaded onto YouTube by his descendant Christian Comte, with the accompanying information:

'nijinsky original movie of nijinsky dance 1912 film inédit de Nijinsky sur fragment de pellicule découvert en 2006 dans les archives de Louis Maistre http://www.christiancomte.fr'

The legendary dancer's movement seems strangely and evenly fluid, and so slightly unnatural.

And there are a couple of seeming 're-takes', like rap music where the record is being wound back and forward.

Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes - 'Ondine'

Margot Fonteyn - Rehearsing Daphnis and Cloe

Margot Fonteyn - 'Firebird' (1959)

Fonteyn and Nureyev - 'Giselle' Act 2

La Bayadere' - 'Kingdom of the Shades' (Rudolph Nureyev and the Paris Opera Ballet

Moving Glimpses of Great Dancers - Anna Pavlova (1881-1931)

Anna Pavlova in South Africa (1926) - A Close-Up

Talking to her Swans (1930)


Table Dancing (1920's)

Moving Glimpses of Great Dancers - Isadora Duncan (1877-1927)

In Redemption (1915)

Isadora Duncan at the Parthenon (1920)

Isadora Duncan on the Lido in Venice (Raymond Duncan 1903)

Moving Glimpses of Great Dancers - Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991) and Rudolph Nureyev (1938-1993)

'Le Corsaire' (1960's)

Fonteyn and Nureyev at Work

I've always loved this pic - a quiet contemplative moment between two great artists in the midst of creation.

Or maybe discussing the indifferent trout at lunch!

Carla Fracci

Just a couple of photographs of Carla Fracci. I saw her in 'Giselle' with Nureyev in Milan, probably round 1973. And in 'Pas de Quatre' bout the same time. So perfect in the Romantic repetory. She could create the period line and atmosphere. Re-creating the period rather than reinterpreting it. A bit like the Royal Ballet, who see themselves as the guardians of the past rather than re-making for now.

And I then saw Fracci in a modern work in 2003! A dramatic piece that could help get round her changed technique.

Super Piroutte

Technique is nothing in itself but every now and then, well, ... .

Rex Reid - My Teacher at the Australian Dance Theatre School

Quite by chance in London a few years back, I came across some photos of Rex Reid in a pile being discarded at the Australian High Commission where I was working.

Rex had been a dance teacher of mine at the Australian Dance Theatre School in Adelaide.

He had gone to the British capital as a prodigy, like Robert Helpmann, but in the 1950's. After dancing with Festival Ballet and Ballet Rambert (second shot below - the non-partnering dancer on the left), he formed a company in South Africa with Princess Natasha Watchinadze, a Georgian who had fled the USSR with George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova in the 1920's.

Princess Natasha Watchinadze, the 'Black Garbo'

I knew Natasha from dinner parties at Rex's in Adelaide. Where she always used to refer to me as the 'person who speaks French'. Natasha would come into the room in a green Chinese silk jacket and gold Arabian pantaloons, preceded by a long and very Auntie Mame-ish cigarette holder, belching smoke from her Gitane. Her face would be whitened and her lips made blood red, the colour to match long fingernail claws.

Natasha would tell of knowing Cocteau, Nijinska (whom she nursed in her final illness) and dancers of the Ballets Russes, and many luminaries of the artistic world of the period.

She was also a friend of Picasso, having a table napkin in which the artist had sketched her then extraordinary almond-shaped green eyes and incribed with the sentence 'I have been seduced by your eyes' (in French). I particularly remember a story of her time in Berlin in the 1930's. Deitrich had commented on the the princess's beautiful bone structure and Natasha told her she had achieved this by having her back teeth removed. Apparently Deitrich followed suite. At which point in the story, Natasha would open her mouth to show a full set of teeth accompanied by roars of laughter.

Rex Reid came from the old school of dance instruction where, with a rapier slashing tongue, the pedagogue would bully students into progress. I recall him correcting a port de bras - 'looks as though you are wearing earrings!!!' - the shoulders were too lifted up and tense.

The last (small) photo is of Rex at the time I knew him. He died only a few years back.

Makarova in 'Le Lac des Cygnes' at Les Nuits du Louvre

In July 1973, Makarova and Nureyev gave a series of performances of 'Le Lac des Cygnes' in the Court Carre at Le Louvre in Paris. Things went wrong, and, at one point, I remember Nureyev yelling at the dancers from the 'wings' of this essentially outdoor event. Curiously, the most memorable thing for me was this photograph of Makarova as Odette in Act 2.