DVD "Ballet Russes"

Dance & DVD Film.

The War of the Russes, Ballet's Fabled Troupe By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH Published: April 8, 2007

Geller/Goldfine Productions From the documentary "Ballet Russes": George Zoritch and Nini Theilade in "Rouge et Noir."

NOW, just weeks from the start of the spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, is as good a time as any to consider the Americanization of classical dance. Again and again, the story has been told through George Balanchine, who came, saw and conquered. But there was ballet in the United States before Balanchine got here. And there were other forces kindling the flame far beyond New York. Their influence persists even now, as Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller show in their documentary "Ballets Russes." The film does not diminish Balanchine; he is a player here too. But it shows him in a transcontinental, even intercontinental, context, and his is not the name on the marquee. Admired at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, the film opened to raves in theaters that year and is now available on DVD from Zeitgeist Films. Young dancers who care where they come from should see it. So should balletomanes of all ages and persuasions, both for the sheer pleasure of the thing and for the historical implications. Serge Diaghilev, impresario extraordinaire, died in 1929, and the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev died with him. The film follows the vicissitudes of rival companies that sprang up to fill the void, laying claim to the Ballets Russes franchise. From Paris the chronicle spirals to London, North and South America and even Australia. Without striking explicit revisionist attitudes, the filmmakers present priceless archival material and oral histories of dancers who toured America during the war years. In so doing they quietly set the record straight. Consider the testimony of the imperious Yugoslavian beauty Mia Slavenska. When Balanchine returned to the Ballets Russes in the mid-1940s after an absence of 12 years, he sent word that he was expecting her for an early morning rehearsal. She had never heard of him. Miffed, she refused to go. "Big mistake," she admits on screen. On a happier note she takes credit for training the American Indian ballerina Maria Tallchief, who went on to fame as one of Balanchine's brightest stars (and the third of his four wives). "That's why she had that technique," Ms. Slavenska says. In the words of the dancer Frederic Franklin, "We were the covered wagons of ballet." Born in 1914 and still going strong at American Ballet Theater as Friar Laurence in "Romeo and Juliet" and the Tutor in "Swan Lake," Mr. Franklin shares vivid memories of the 1940s, when the Ballets Russes performed one-night stands throughout the United States. The members slept on the train, leaving perplexity and astonishment in their wake wherever they danced. The filmmakers illustrate with a clip from Léonide Massine's bizarre "Bacchanale," music by Wagner, décor by Salvador Dalí, in which the ballerina Nini Theilade slithered onstage through the womb of a bleeding swan. We hear too from Irina Baronova, one of the three "baby ballerinas" hand-picked by Balanchine in 1932 as stars of the new Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. (She was 12 at the time.) "We loved what we were doing," she says. Riding the rails was tiring, and she doubts that today's dancers would tolerate it. "It never occurred to us to call a union," she adds. "It was fun. Sometimes you even got paid. What more do you want?" When they reached Hollywood, they were the toast of the town. In its wanderings, the Ballets Russes company picked up new dancers. There are glimpses of the American Indian Yvonne Choteau, who left Oklahoma at 12 to study on scholarship with the School of American Ballet in New York. Two years later she won a spot in the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. Her Russian counterparts had their mothers for company, but Ms. Choteau traveled alone. "To this day," she says, "I can't hear a train whistle without thinking of the years I missed mom and dad terribly. Happy as I was, and fulfilled, there is a price to pay." New York was not the only place where good instruction was to be had. The teenage Marc Platt auditioned in Seattle and promptly went to work as Marc Platoff. In "Seventh Symphony," danced to Beethoven, Massine showcased him as the Spirit of Creation. "Best part I ever had," Mr. Platt recalls. "Danced my fool head off." Vintage clips from Hollywood capture him tearing up a soundstage to music ranging from jazz to Rossini. At 89, backstage at a community theater in Marin County, Calif., he applies his makeup for a turn in "The Nutcracker." And so the legacy of the Ballets Russes keeps filtering down, much of it through immigrants. The third-generation Russian ballerina Nathalie Krassovska put down roots in Dallas and founded a school. Tatiana Riabouchinska, another baby ballerina, founded a school in Beverly Hills, Calif. "What will I do?" she says, when asked why she still teaches. "Sell books? Sell fruit? It's my life." George Zoritch, in his youth an Adonis the Ballets Russes alumnae still rhapsodize about, ended his career on the dance faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "I'm still a dreamer at 83," Mr. Zoritch says, smiling angelically, working the machines at a gym before joining Ms. Krassovska in his stocking feet for a tender moment from "Giselle," likely their last. No one can say how many new dreamers the Ballets Russes inspired in America. But they're out there, everywhere.

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Copyright by the New York Times 2007