Comment on Elizabeth Souritz's Paper International ...

Comment on Elizabeth Souritz's Paper
International Symposium of Russian Ballet

12 October 2007
Lynn Garafola

What was the culture of the dancers of Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet during the
"reforms" of the 1880s? This is one of the important questions that Elizabeth Souritzasks
in her paper, as she considers the earnings of the lowest-paid members of the company
and weighs them against the prices of both daily necessities and cultural "goods." In
posing this question, she raises an issue especially troubling for historians of the more
distant dance past. How to give voice to the anonymous men and women who spent their
lives as performers, contributing their bodies and their energies to a work that can be
documented, but whose presence as dancers has vanished from the historical record? We
don't know their names, or how they lived, or where they lived, how they trained, if they
married, if they were orphaned or childless, or the member of a multi-generational family
of theater people. And we can only imagine what they thought about their art, if, indeed,
they thought about it at all.

To be sure, documentary sources do allow an occasional peek at the
ordinary dancer's world. Anna Petrovna Natarova, for instance, in a memoir of her
school days at the Imperial Theater School in the 1840s, recalled the weekly thrashings of
junior students by senior students, the spankings by the staff, and the "repulsive" food
they sometimes had to endure.1 More than half a century later the memory of "beef with

a...muddy [potato] sauce," meat that was "all gristle," and a "pea sauce" that was "really
awful" seemed to curdle in her throat.2 Other details are equally graphic: the scramble
for tights that might or might not fit, the doling out of pins and needles, but not thread,
although the girls were expected to hem not only their pelerines and pinafores but also
their sheets.3 The Romantic ballets of the time extolled flight. But a frightening reality
lay behind the mirage of ethereal lightness--a ring stitched into the children's corsets from
which they were hoisted into the air.4 Still, as Natarova remarks, "however badly they
fed us, it was worse at home." "Many students never imagined the poverty in which their
parents lived," she writes, or the many relatives who would look to the young graduate
for help.5 It made liaisons with "protectors" virtually a necessity.

In 1894, a little more than a decade after the Moscow office of the Imperial
Theaters fired nearly half the Bolshoi's dancers, the dancers of London's Empire Theatre
of Varieties were threatened with a similar loss of their livelihood. Because the Empire
was a commercial venue as opposed to a State institution, the forces behind the
threatened action were quite different. In 1894, when the Empire's license came up for
renewal, the Licensing Committee of the London County Council, bowing to pressure
from "meddlesome" guardians of public morality led by Mrs. Ormiston Chant, declined
to renew the theater's music and dancing license unless its bars and promenades--where
ladies of the night were known to ply their trade--were abolished.6 In response, George
Edwardes, the Empire's managing director, gave his 670 employees two-weeks' notice
and said he would close the theater down.7 Meetings were held to protest the licensing
decision, and irate readers wrote letters to newspapers.

Among the chorus of protesters were a surprising number of dancers. For
instance, The Times reported that a Miss Shepherd, "one of the ladies of the Empire
ballet," stood up at a meeting of the theatrical unions and "claimed for her class...lives...as
pure and honourable...as those of Mrs. Ormiston Chant and her friends." She went on to
say that "she had been six years at the Empire, and had...been able to earn sufficient
money to make the last days of her widowed mother happy," a statement greeted by
cheers.8 In the Daily Telegraph a dancer who signed herself "a chorus girl" made a
similar point: "The ballet-girls keep their homes together with their salaries, and if they
have to wear the costumes given them it is not their wish thereby to excite impure
feelings in the audience: it is simply their business"--a reference to the body-revealing
tights worn by many of the era's music-hall dancers.9 Another, who signed herself only
as "an old Empire dancer," questioned the wisdom of sacrificing the livelihood of
"hundreds of girls," all "hard-working, and practising self-denial for the sake of their
families." "Do the ladies of the Vigilance Society," she asked, "propose to do anything
for the girls...thrown out of employment if the Empire closes"?10 In the end the Empire
stayed open.

If a Moscow dancer of the 1880s earned 10 or 15 rubles a month, and a
cake of fine soap cost more than 60 kopeks, what did that mean in terms of keeping
clean? In terms of personal hygiene? In terms of self-respect? If she was relegated, as
Elizabeth (Souritz) says, "to the very lowest rank of the social ladder," what did this
suggest about her attitude toward her profession? Did she even consider herself an artist?
Did she ever find a voice?

Many years ago, I came across a letter in the Otto Kahn Papers (at
Princeton University) written in 1916 by Doris Faithfull, an English dancer, on behalf of
herself and six other corps members of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The company, touring
the United States under Nijinsky's direction, was in shambles. It took courage for her to
write to Kahn, who was not only the chairman of the Metropolitan Opera's board of
directors but also a major underwriter of the Allied war effort: his investment house had
just loaned fifty million dollars to the French government. The dancers, by contrast, were
earning $33 and $34 a week. Her letter read in part:

I am writing this on some of the girls' behalf, also my own. It
is concerning our salaries--we wondered if you could
intercede with Mr. Diaghileff on the matter. It is absolutely
impossible for us to live on the salary we receive--let alone
some who have parents to support. When we arrive in a town
we have to go hunting about for cheap rooms (carrying heavy
suitcases) because we can't afford to stay at the better hotels.
We are very sorry to have to trouble you with our private
affairs but we are not in communication with Diaghileff. It
seems so futile to think that every penny we earn and work
hard for has to go in expenses.11
Suitcases, cakes of soap, potato sauce, unsigned letters in newspapers--the history of
generations of anonymous dancers lies embedded in simple pedestrian objects like these.
What stories can they help us imagine? What realities can they summon? Can they bring

faces into focus? Fears and desires into view? Detach the individual–if only
intermittently or speculatively--from the anonymous mass? Surely, the history of the
dancer is integral to the study of dance as an art form, and as Elizabeth Souritz
demonstrates, the materials to begin to construct such a history lie close at hand.

Notes

1 Anna Petrovna Natarova, "From the 'Recollections of the Artiste A. P. Natarova,'" in A
Century of Russian Ballet: Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1810-1910, ed. and
trans. Roland John Wiley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 147, 154.

2 Ibid., pp. 153-4.

3 Ibid., p. 138.

4 Ibid., p. 155.

5 Ibid., p. 160.

6 "The Empire Theatre of Varieties," The Times, 15 Oct. 1894, p. 4.

7 Ibid. The Daily Telegraph (15 Oct. 1894) reported that Edwardes, "in the course of an
interview," said that "he had given a formal fortnight's notice to employees who
numbered some 670, and upon whose labours fully 3,000 mouths depended for their daily
bread.”

8 "County Council and the Empire Theatre," The Times, 22 Oct. 1894, p. 7.

9 "A Chorus Girl," Letter to the Editor, The Daily Telegraph, 16 Oct. 1894.

10 "An Old Empire Dancer," Letter to the Editor, The Daily Telegraph, 15 Oct. 1894.

11 Doris Faithfull, Letter to Otto Kahn, 11 Nov. 1916, Box 57, Otto Kahn Papers,
Princeton University. She was writing on behalf of Anna and Lubov Samarokoff
[Sumarokova], Mechkovska [Mieczkowska], Galina Chabelska, Stas Pazerska
[Pajewska?], and Lila [Valentina] Kachouba. Kahn's reply, if any, has not survived.