Please refer to the image at left in which Moscow-trained ballet star Theodore Kosloff poses awesomely with his favorite spear in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Woman God Forgot” (1917). Reminds me, through his body carriage, of David Hallberg’s posture in partnering Osipova in “Giselle.”

They are similarly “laid-back.” Is there a Bolshoi connection?
I would never suggest the Bolshoi is backward. Perish the thought.

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• Moscow shocker! The Bolshoi attempts to even the score of the U.S. having trounced Russia in the Cold War by STEALING one of our best dancers!  Grrrr… that makes arts·meme really mad! We are plotting our next move. Please submit your ideas, dear readers!

~your heart picks up pace,
~ it messes you up,
~ you “get it,”
~ you feel deep joy …

seeing the way that David Hallberg is leaning away from his “Giselle” partner, Natasha Osipova,

well then …

mazel tov, you’re a balletomane. My world and welcome to it.

Hallberg’s stance is very old-world, I never saw that precise pose before, and yet, Theodore Kosloff, who trained in the Bolshoi Academy at the turn of the 20th century, often tilted his torso in that way…

Of course Kosloff would also flare his nostrils.

Hallberg’s move to the Bolshoi, announced yesterday, is predicated in great part by the Russian coaching system.

Alastair Macaulay writes: “Each lead Bolshoi dancer, as at the Mariinsky, has a former company dancer as a full-time coach. Mr. Hallberg’s will be Alexander Vetrov, who has worked in America and speaks English.”

Roslyn Sulcas’s lovely New York Times profile of Hallberg here.

p.s. she [Osipova] doesn’t look too bad, either.

From Corriere della Serra, via arts•meme‘s good friend Stefano Tomassini, a dance historian at University CaFoscari in Venice: the only film to date of the Ballets Russes. The footage portrays Michel Fokine’s Chopin ballet ”Les Sylphides,” and features principal dancer, Serge Lifar. It seems to have been filmed in 1928 at the Fête des Narcisses in Montreux, Switzerland.

Jane Pritchard, the British co-curator of the recent Ballets Russes exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum writes about the discovery of the 30-second film clip here.

Lifar, described in this good Anna Kisselgoff essay, was the late-starting danseur noble who replaced Nijinsky as the most charismatic leading male of the Ballets Russes in its final years. Balanchine choreographed “Apollo” and “The Prodigal Son” on Lifar. That’s why it’s interesting to see this footage. He’s no technical wizard by today’s standards, but his movement is clean and credible. I like it.

Indeed Kisselgoff notes that, “Diaghilev sent him to study with Enrico Cecchetti in Turin,” and Lifar’s Cecchetti technique is evident in the film:  the contained torso twisting in épaulement, the simple c-curving, tapering arms, and the upper spine thrust forward in arabesque position.

The Italian newspaper notes, “Diaghilev did not like the cameras. Indeed, strictly prohibiting the performance of his company were filmed, perhaps for fear that someone, without going to the theater, could see the breakthrough performances of his dancers.” Diaghilev would have had a conniption if he knew Theodore Kosloff, who was with Ballets Russes for one year only (1909), was knocking off  “Les Sylphides” as he did under the pirated name, “Chopin Memories,” in the 1930s in Los Angeles and Dallas.

In her first appearance in the film, cinematographer James Wong Howe shoots Lamarr, known as “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” in deep shadow. As she approaches the camera, her face emerges in the light.

“The entire audience gasped,” Shearer’s mother recalled. Hedy Lamarr was that beautiful.

And they didn’t make ‘em like that in Ottawa, Illinois.

I learned this fun nugget at a book talk at Larry Edmund’s Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, celebrating Shearer’s new biography “Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr.”  The Austria-born actress was among the many German-speaking Jewish artists who made their way to California in the 1930s.

Born Hedwig Kiesler, Lamarr was a celebrity in Europe before coming  to the U.S. — notorious for bobbling in the buff in “Ecstasy” (1933). In 1937, anticipating the Anschluss (Shearer intimated that Lamarr was well connected in political circles), she and her husband departed Vienna. Meeting L.B. Mayer in London (he was in town scooping up European talent, to his credit, much of it Jewish), she inked her MGM contract.

As the duo plowed across the pond aboard the S.S. Normandie, Mayer renamed his exotic charge, so the legend goes, after Barbara La Marr, the heroin-addled silent film actress. In an alternate version, which I prefer, the multilingual Lamarr gazed at the sea through her gorgeous eyes and murmured, “La mer!”

A star — Lamarr — was born.

One other charming detail of that crossing is that L.B. dispatched Hedy — who more or less had a knapsack and about 80 bucks to her name — to the ocean liner’s Chanel boutique on the first-class deck. There, on MGM’s dime, Lamarr was suited up for the mob of press awaiting the Normandie’s arrival in New York harbor.

Shearer noted that Mayer mismanaged Lamarr’s career. He was gifted at dolling up homegirls like Garland and Turner into cinema royalty. But in casting an elegant, intelligent, sophisticated woman like Lamarr, L.B. was flatfooted. This problem is amusingly addressed in “What Not to do with Hedy Lamarr,” LIFE magazine, August, 1939.

* * *

I’m a big fan of Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson & Delilah” (1949); one reason why is the gorgeous Hedy Lamarr’s precise performance. Leafing through the “Samson” files at the DeMille archives while investigating Theodore Kosloff‘s choreography of the epic, I came across a telegram Hedy sent to DeMille. Holding the fragile paper in my hands, I read the words of a woman sitting on top of the world.

Kosloff brought to the stage the role in which he made his cinematic debut  — Guatemoco, the Aztec prince, in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Woman God Forgot” in 1917.

Here’s a still from the film. At far left stands Kosloff. Note: same costume.

Kosloff’s partner Rambova was born as Winifred Shaughnessy in the great state of Utah in 1897. Receiving a superlative arts education while residing in Paris with her aunt, interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe, Winifred was dazzled by the triumphant Kosloff in a London performance circa 1909.

Five years later, in 1914, the willful lass found her way to the stick-wielding ballet master’s Times Square dance studio in New York. There the Russian seduced his 17-year-old student, renaming her Natacha Rambova after a prior Moscow girlfriend. The fact that a 32-year-old married man-in-tights was philandering with her daughter vexed Winifred’s mother exceedingly.

Joining Kosloff’s band of gypsies, Rambova teamed with the arts entrepreneur (nice way of saying that Kosloff was very keen on making a buck) on the road trip to Los Angeles. Arriving in the cultural backwater, Kosloff deemed the natives ripe for high art, and here he settled for the next forty years. He also had the crazy good luck of bumping into Cecil B. DeMille right when silent pictures were taking off. 

Rambova costumed her lover for his film roles (early-silent actors commonly provided their own gear, i.e., no costume department!) and to my eye, she dressed others in the cast as well. She was good at it. She gained skill as a film costumer and then as an art designer.

Meanwhile, Kosloff, a legend in his own mind, took credit around town for Rambova’s work, using her as an anonymous subcontractor.

Fed up, the strong-spirited girl left Kosloff (I tell the story of their parting here.) Rambova got her best revenge by marrying the nearest available gorgeous hunk, Rudolph Valentino.

But we get ahead of ourselves. Back to the costume.

An early gossip column in the Los Angeles Times dated September 9, 1917 and entitled “Kosloff Now Happy” (apparently this was headline news) features the Russian kvetching about his cloak:

“To meet the historical demands concerning Aztec princes, a wonderful white feather coat was designed which came to be quite significant in the studio. So costly was the robe, solidly set with virgin white feathers, that the business manager almost had a stroke when the bill was presented. Then the pesky thing was nine meters long, which made it impossible to pack, as to fold it would break the feathers and ruin it utterly. It was, therefore, always necessary to have a special automobile to take it to location from the studio. More expense and vexation. … Mr. Kosloff complains rather querulously that his fellow-artists were loathe to participate in scenes with him for fear of breaking the expensive feathers. In fact, he declares it was a vast relief when he finally doffed the troublesome thing.”

The feather coat rings true as a Rambova touch. She was a serious aesthete; within five years, shorn of Kosloff, she would be designing extraordinary art deco sets and costumes for Alla Nazimova’s art films, notably Salome (1923).

She was a major talent. More on Rambova’s artful designs soon.

photo credits: “Madam Valentino,” Michael Morris (Abbeville Press) , 1991

This rustic boulevard, photographed at the turn of the twentieth century, occupied a Los Angeles neighborhood with the aspirational name of Edendale. One hundred years later, it’s called Echo Park. The street was then Allesandro. Now it’s Glendale Boulevard, or more accurately, a two-mile suction tube for automobiles hurtling toward downtown Los Angeles.

On this modest strip, from 1909 to 1928, prospered a genial group of fruits and nuts who flocked to our sunny clime to make moving pictures. Edendale wasn’t a random happening. At its height it was a beehive of integrated film activity.

Selig Polyscope was the groundbreaker, but pioneering Keystone Film Company (home of the Kops) soon followed. Then came the American branch of French filmmaker Pathe, Norbig, and Mixville, the “ville” named after cowboy star Tom Mix.

The big guy on the block was Mack Sennett whose impressive campus-style film factory prefigured those to be erected in Culver City, Westwood, and Universal City. Sennett’s eventual move to Studio City in 1928 would mark the end of the Edendale era.

On Allesandro Street’s dusty outdoor stages, under the glaring southern California sun, trod the likes of Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, Chester Conklin, and the young Mabel Normand.

The era’s most accomplished film director was Francis Boggs. The violent murder of Boggs shattered the community and spurred its gradual decline as a center of film making. Jesse Lasky, Cecil DeMille and Carl Lammele picked up the shards of Edendale and advanced the industry, giving birth to “real” Hollywood.

There’s an astonishing lack of awareness of the existence of this pre-Hollywood neighborhood in Los Angeles. The only memorial is an inadequate plaque honoring Sennett but stuck in the wrong location – it’s where the Selig studio once stood.

All of this arcania I learned at a marvelous lecture at Hollywood Heritage‘s Evening at the Barn series. Giving the talk was Robert Birchard, a film historian whose vast knowledge informed my piece about Theodore Kosloff, the Ballets Russes dancer who was a loyal member of Cecil B. DeMille’s repertory troupe of actors.

Cameras rolled on the first Edendale production in October 1909, one hundred years ago this month. Happy Birthday, Edendale. For your birthday present, we are going to remember you.

_{photo credit: robert s. birchard collection}

Theodore Kosloff, my subject in the Los Angeles Times and on arts•meme, was a first-generation member of Ballets Russes. Kosloff’s story piqued my interest (a polite way of saying “I’m obsessed!”) to attend the “Spirit of Diaghilev” conference at Boston University. The three-day centenary event focused on the famed Russian-born impresario who made it all happen.

The aesthetic revolution that Serge Diaghilev cooked in Paris in the early twentieth century was a magnet for Imperial Ballet-trained dancers escaping the chaos of pre-revolutionary Russia. Residing in transient hotels in Paris and the south of France, this floating crew of creatives worked under the most tenuous and insecure of conditions. And yet, their results not only endure, but inspire awe.

When Diaghilev’s supply of Russian dancers ran out, he filled his corps de ballet with willing Brits who cheerfully donned faux Russian stage names (Lillian Alice Marks ~ Alicia Markova; Sydney Francis Patrick Healey ~ Anton Dolin; Hilda Munnings ~ Lydia Sokolova; Edris Stannus ~ Ninette de Valois).

To create the dances for this glamorous posse, Diaghilev engaged five choreographers over the course of twenty years. This quintet now occupies a permanent spot in choreography heaven as classical ballet’s A-team. Explaining why at the Boston conference was a panel of the nation’s top dance writers.

Alastair Macaulay, chief dance critic of the New York Times, described Diaghilev’s first house choreographer Michel Fokine as a grumpy old man. Beyond this personality flaw, Macaulay praised Fokine’s versatility, vivid imagination, theatricality, and musicality.

Fokine’s brand was the high degree of intimacy he created with music, as well as the unprecedented psychological truth of his choreography. He pulled from his dancers performances that etch ballet history’s most memorable characters: a dying swan with undulating arms; a broken puppet-man in Petrouchka; the exotic golden slave of Scheherazade; and an unattainable femme fetale Firebird.

Casting these crystalline characters into vivid scenarios with no deficit of bodies on stage (94 in Petrouchka, all with distinct choreography) Fokine created works across genres: from pure movement, to Russian folk tale, to ballets d’atmosphere.

By closing his ballets in ambiguity — a touchstone of modernism — Fokine innovated, according to Macaulay.

Poor Nijinsky. During his decade-long splash as the world’s most sensual and emotionally present male dancer, he also tried his hand at choreography — with mesmerizing results.

Then he went crazy.

“Genetically loaded” for schizophrenia, according to Joan Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker magazine who also edited Nijinsky’s diaries, the child-like, naive ballet superstar spent his last thirty years on earth in the grip of mental illness.

Before his fall, Nijinsky’s creative output included L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune, an abundantly readable movement-jewel that is seven captivating minutes long. Set to Debussy’s shimmering music and unfolding before Leon Bakst’s art nouveau backdrop, Faune transcends its earthly components. Nijinsky also choreographed Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, which caused a riot at its premiere. Nijinsky had to shout counts to his dancers from the theater wings over the din of the catcalling audience.

(I was thrilled to discover that Nijinsky danced in Pittsburgh, my home town.)

The ballet master is giving hands-on instruction to silent film star Betty Compson with whom he co-starred in The Green Temptation that same year. Kosloff’s ballet training of Compson led to this startling pose in the film.

One famous dancer who studied with Kosloff was Nana Gollner. Another was Charles Weidman, then a Denishawn dancer and one of the early pioneers of American modern dance. Weidman noted that Kosloff would “sit in lounging pyjamas in a chair with a bamboo back, barking out counts in Russian.”

Was Kosloff a fine instructor? Malcolm McCormick, co-author of the 20th century dance history book, No Fixed Points, says: “Kosloff was sending dancers to New York in the 1950s. They arrived strong and rigorously trained — they had been required to wear weights on their angles to develop strength.”

In her 1952 memoir, Dance to the Piper, choreographer Agnes De Mille, who also studied with Kosloff, describes the annual Christmas party the Russian hosted at his home:

“At Christmas there was a table covered with gifts, photographs for the first year pupils gold pins for the second year, and pins with additional diamonds and wreaths and bars for the veterans. We were called out singly by name and given our gift. We then made a reverence, said “thank you” in Russian and retired.”

Marc Wanamaker of Bison Archives owns one of the pins and shares it with us.

Kosloff taught class at his Hollywood Boulevard ballet studio the day he died in 1956.

Read more about Theodore Kosloff in my article in the Los Angeles Times.

_{Photo credits: Bison Archives}