Vaganova’s Illustrations and Graphics
By Alan Jones
Agrippina Vaganova (1879–1951) with students in ballet class.
Most great classics tend to be both innovative and derivative to some degree, and Vaganova’s Basic Principles of Classical Ballet is no exception. The familiar graphic images of a senior female pupil demonstrating nearly the entire syllabus of early Soviet ballet were highly original in their time, and yet they owed something to the past. In 1895, when Vaganova was still a pupil at the Imperial Theater School, the French academic Maurice Emmanuel published his Essai sur l’orchestique grecque. He examined the technique of classical dance simply as a means to an end—to better equip himself to revive lost dances of ancient Greece. Emmanuel exploited the modern technique of “Chronophotography,” filming dancers in motion and sometimes redrawing the images, as he did here with his illustration of a pas de chat. This reproduction comes from the dance writings of Lioubov Blok, who would not have failed to bring it to the attention of Vaganova, her longtime friend. It was out of the question for Vaganova to incorporate such detailed sequences in her book, which was intended to be concise, economical, and accessible to everyone. She opted to have a graphic artist present as few as three key moments to clarify the execution of any given step. As a result, the images do not always speak for themselves, as was the case for Emmanuel. The reader needs to read Vaganova’s text attentively to understand the mechanics. Vaganova’s pas de chat turns out to be an entirely different step, part of the family of temps de flèche, not unrelated to steps known in other traditions as pas (or temps) de poisson or pas de papillon: the dancer flings the right leg behind, pushes off the floor with the left foot and lands on the right foot, immediately bringing the left foot forward into fourth. This is the only step to which Vaganova gives the name pas de chat, and she does not deal with the jumps known as saut de chat or grand pas de chat. Vaganova expressed no interest in dance notation, and yet in the specific instance of explaining batterie, she found it useful to borrow from Bernhard Klemm’s Katechismus der Tanzkunst, a bestseller from the 1850s into the early twentieth century. Vaganova’s graphic representation of beaten steps was unquestionably based on Klemm’s, and it would have fair for her to acknowledge her debt. She no doubt declined to do so because his pedagogy on the whole embodied the worst of what she regarded as the old “French” school. Klemm’s method of writing down steps went further, exploiting music symbols, as had Arthur Saint-Léon’s Sténochorégraphie, and in this respect, both works fed into Vladimir Stepanov’s notation system, which has recently allowed for the re-creation of so many nineteenth-century ballets. As Stepanov had been one of her former teachers, Vaganova duly mentions him, though only for his innovation of introducing numbers to orient the dancer in space. She nevertheless chose to create her own system of numbering the walls and corners of the studio. Vaganova states that was in possession of The Cecchetti Method of Classical Ballet by Stanislas Idzikowski and Cyril W. Beaumont , published in London in 1922. Having taken classes with Cecchetti himself, she bases her judgments of the “Italian” school on that personal experience and does not dwell at any length on the book’s contents. Vaganova nevertheless gave serious thought to its strong and weak points, including its graphic element. In the example seen here, a male dancer in écarté, she must have found the turnout of the standing leg unnecessarily exaggerated, and the raised leg distorted. She preferred simpler, more dynamic representations of the body, avoiding all distracting effects of shading and details of musculature. The artist engaged by Beaumont and Idzikowski was Randolph Schwabe, a military draftsman who went on from this early project to enjoy a successful career as a graphic artist. Vaganova’s artist, identified only as “P. Goncharov,” was Pavel Goncharov, a fellow former graduate of the Imperial Theater School and dancer of the Mariinsky Theater. He later turned to graphic arts, creating costume designs and illustrations for other books. Goncharov he clearly did not draw from imagination or memory. His work must have entailed many hours of observation in the studio under Vaganova’s immediate supervision, with any number of pupils demonstrating the steps over and over. It may be that filming was involved in the process to some degree, and it is certain that still photographs played a role, as a select number of photographs figure in the finished volume, to illustrate the arabesques and attitudes, as well as one example of the écarté seen here, by Natalia Dudinskaya. It may even be that Dudinskaya served as Goncharov’s principal model, as there is a certain resemblance between her, when she would have been about twenty or twenty-one when the project was undertaken, and the universally familiar dark-haired dancer seen throughout Vaganova’s book. ©2024 by Alan Jones early.ballet.usa@gmail.com
Agrippina Vaganova in pas de trois from Paquita.
Andre Glegolski
A great teacher - 1943 - 2024
Balanchine
by John Clifford
Balanchine teaching at the School of American Ballet
BALANCHINE AS TEACHER
Without question George Balanchine was the greatest teacher I’ve ever known. This rather grand statement is because he was a teacher of how to live life, as well as how to dance classical ballet as he knew it. No need here to go into his background or training methodology, or even his technical innovations, because those have been very well covered in Suki Schorer’s book, Suki Schorer on BALANCHINE TECHNIQUE, and her video series, The Balanchine Essays. I will however try and cover things left out of those two sources. When I first took Balanchine’s class, I was 19, and had just joined the New York City Ballet. Balanchine had seen my choreography in Los Angeles, (all in my autobiography, BALANCHINE’S APPRENTICE: From Hollywood to New York and Back) and he then invited me to choreograph at his School of American Ballet (SAB). Within six-weeks he invited me to join the company. Even though I was already a professional dancer appearing regularly on TV, ( The Danny Kaye Show and other TV shows) and had worked with some of the era’s major dance-makers and teachers, including Eugene Loring, Hermes Pan(Fred Astaire's choreographer), Willie Covan (Eleanor Powell's tap teacher), Tony Charmoli (the foremost choreographer for television of his day, 1960’s-1980’s) Asaf Messerer, Maya Plisetskaya, Stanley Williams, André Eglevsky, Pierre Vladimiroff, George Zoritch, Irina Kosmovska (Balanchine’s favorite Los Angeles teacher), Natalia Clare, and more… nothing prepared me for the rigors of Balanchine’s company class.
After that first class my muscles were burning so much, I thought I’d never walk again. Needless to say, it got much easier after I was used to it…but that first day? Wow! It was a combination of the speed, faster than Messerer’s class, or Piere Vladimiroff’s, (both gave barres no longer than 15-20 mins) and the repetition. Balanchine gave tons of tendues, but only one grand plie in first, second, and fifth, at the start of his barre. It wasn’t so much that everything was fast, but everything he wanted had to be done absolutely perfectly. This quest for perfection was a constant in all of his classes. He did not “invent” in his classes as some have recently stated, (so much bad information out there) but he did push limits. He would often give us brain-teaser combinations with simple steps like jetes and pas de bourrees, but put together in unexpected ways, because he’d say, “The brain is a muscle too.” In other words, he wanted us to wake-up. He never “choreographed” in class, nor asked us to do anything outside of the normal ballet vocabulary. Also, on some days he’d spend the majority of the center working on one particular step…or steps, like pirouettes, port de bras, or even just glissades. (His glissades were very similar to the Bournonville stye, as were much of his petit allegro combinations). He’d stand in the wings for every single performance…in those years 250 a year… and the next day give us combinations to clean up what he didn’t like he saw the night before. His eye missed nothing, and his attention to detail was supernatural. Lastly, it was his kindness, sense of humor, and respect for us as dancers, and as people, that really impressed me the most. He had a stern face, but he was anything but. Daily he showed how much he cared for us. He always sensed when we were tired and would tell a joke (sometimes pretty long ones), to lighten the mood. I asked him about this, and he said he just knew when we needed a rest. His famous quote of “Now is all there is,”is what he meant. He wanted us to live in the moment, and not miss a thing. It was/is a great way to approach life!
John Clifford rehearsing dancers in SERENADE
Teaching Balanchine ballets to students brings a special joy. Unlike some professional companies that are steeped in their own styles and traditions, students are generally more open…and hungry for the challenges of Balanchine’s choreography. Here I am teaching SERENADE to the students of the Kirov Academy in Washington DC. It was their first attempt at Balanchine, and I taught some classes there too, and much of it was filmed for IN BALANCHINE’S CLASSROOM, but was cut from the film, as was my teaching at MMAC and interview. I found this strange as more than most I had been teaching and staging Balanchine for years. Oh well…In that film I found some odd statements from some that barely took his class, and was sorry not to hear from others like Verdy, Farrell, Kent, McBride, and men like Ib Andersen.
John Clifford in rehearsal with Balanchine
John Clifford giving class