Invitation to the Dance

An American premiere of sorts of The Sleeping Beauty took place in 1916 when Anna Pavlova and her troupe presented excerpts from that ballet at New York’s Hippodrome. It must have been quite a presentation. The Hippodrome Ballet Girls formed the corps de ballet. Apparently the Hippodrome management believed in giving the public its money’s worth, for Pavlova and the other ballerinas were sandwiched in between a dancing skeleton, a grand minstrel show, an ice pageant, the Six Musical Browns and the Peerless Charlotte. Even at that, the public was disappointed, and in subsequent performances Pavlova was obliged to interpolate her Dying Swan.

Ballet in this country did, however, achieve a sophistication above the level of vaudeville that same year with the first tour of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. Americans at last were seeing Nijinsky in The Afternoon of a Faun and his tremendous leap in The Spectre of the Rose, and the Corot enchantment of Fokine’s Les Syiphides. Then, after the war to end wars, American interest in the ballet vanished, as if that precise and elaborated art form were somehow linked with the years everyone was trying to forget. To intellectuals the ballet was decadence divorced from social reality, a Faubergé symbol of the reactionary Russia of the czars. Casual America had moved on from Diaghilev and Nijinsky to Ziegfeld and a black-face Al Jolson singing “Mammy.” For the non-intellectuals the world of the dance could be thumped out by the varsity drag, the kinkajou and the black bottom.

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Francis Russell

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An American premiere of sorts of The Sleeping Beauty took place in 1916 when Anna Pavlova and her troupe presented excerpts from that ballet at New York’s Hippodrome. It must have been quite a presentation. The Hippodrome Ballet Girls formed the corps de ballet. Apparently the Hippodrome management believed in giving the public its money’s worth, for Pavlova and the other ballerinas were sandwiched in between a dancing skeleton, a grand minstrel show, an ice pageant, the Six Musical Browns and the Peerless Charlotte. Even at that, the public was disappointed, and in subsequent performances Pavlova was obliged to interpolate her Dying Swan.

Ballet in this country did, however, achieve a sophistication above the level of vaudeville that same year with the first tour of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. Americans at last were seeing Nijinsky in The Afternoon of a Faun and his tremendous leap in The Spectre of the Rose, and the Corot enchantment of Fokine’s Les Syiphides. Then, after the war to end wars, American interest in the ballet vanished, as if that precise and elaborated art form were somehow linked with the years everyone was trying to forget. To intellectuals the ballet was decadence divorced from social reality, a Faubergé symbol of the reactionary Russia of the czars. Casual America had moved on from Diaghilev and Nijinsky to Ziegfeld and a black-face Al Jolson singing “Mammy.” For the non-intellectuals the world of the dance could be thumped out by the varsity drag, the kinkajou and the black bottom.