Haunting the Russian ballet
My name is Katerina and I'm not a ballerina. Though that rhymes and scans a dream. I did, however, flitter anxiously into conferences all dressed up in blue, (blue was my colour: turquoise, navy, sky and midnight), and talk about ballets that happened before I was born and weren't fully recorded, anyway.
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I was doing a PhD in art history, and couldn't be certain about what the art actually was. My research explored how Russians who emigrated to Europe and America after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 influenced how women dressed, moved and thought about their bodies. The movements I was chasing - the dances, the treks from Russia to France to America to everywhere else in the world - had taken place and gone by 1950. I had to make a story from testaments, photos, patchy film reels, mouldering costumes and hair. The hair being Vera Zorina's in the Harvard Theater Collection. I lost my locker key in those long, impossibly golden locks. It was there on the table one minute, and gone the next. One theory is that the ghost of this dead ballerina lost patience with me muddling around her things, and took the key out of spite. The incident of me rummaging through hair and boxes in search of the key, was documented in a poem. The Collection's resident poet was in the library that day and recording how none of the researchers were paying him any attention, including a 'young woman holding a little black shoe.'
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I spent the best part of my twenties engaged in historical detective work and then marrying it with modern theory. I didn't have all the moves or the lingo, just an empathetic body, nursery Russian and literary French. Still, I was happy to improvise, because hanging out with cool dead people, who battled through tundra and waves and still had energy to dance, sustained me. I should mention that a handful of my sources were alive, and could remember, for instance, Nijinsky's daughter, or the New York dance scene in the 1940s. Also, that I was not alone in my interest in these émigrés - a whole community of dance researchers were haunted by their movements, and haunted archives in search of them. Sometimes we squabbled over interpretations of the past, but mostly, we were happy to learn from each other.
My own movements at this time were frequent and far-ranging. I was astonishingly lucky to have the Arts and Humanities Research Council funding to be able to travel, and track my dancers as far as the archives where their surviving things had been collected. There were plush Parisian archives adjunct to opera houses and decorative arts museums, sweet-smelling, woody New England stores, and the low-tech gloom of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, where I made my way after Hurricane Sandy had shut down the whole city and kept the Hallowe'en decorations hanging well into December. The archives hosted the expected tutus and theatre clippings, but there were also hand-drawn Valentines, foreign language phrase books, and pre-lycra stockings, the exact shape and size of a human leg. It was at these moments that I felt like I was unearthing a body, coming face to face with someone who had once lived. This was my favourite part of the process.
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I also travelled as far East as Zurich, as far West as San Fransisco, attending and lecturing at academic conferences. This is what the story looks like now, I would say. Then I would change the story when I had learned more. Being steeped in accounts of people improvising, making the best of whatever resources they had, gave me the confidence to do the same. Sometimes, I'd come away feeling like I'd made a difference to people's day - that my dancers had given them a fresh perspective on what they already knew. At other times they didn't get it, and I'd feel flatter than roadkill. Go on smiling and have a biscuit. This is a niche passion, and you can't force it on everyone.
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Below, you'll find a list of papers I published on this subject. However, if you're really interested, I'd recommend that you go and visit the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, once the pandemic is over, and consult the hard copy of my thesis in the reading room there. My supervisor, Rebecca, once described her thesis as her dream book because she was allowed to feature all the images she desired, without having to worry about copyright fees. I feel the same about mine - it's a repository of rare photographs and illustrations, and in between, are some fascinating accounts of human movements and my interpretations of them. In the end, the only journey I can vouch for is my own, but I traced those dancers' footprints as far as I could in the time I had. One day, I'll replant my feet into those grooves and make something new of them.
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Here is a list of publications related to my thesis research. Where possible, I have provided links:
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'Divining the 1920s: Precocious Body Image in Nijinsky’s Ballets of 1913,’ Revisiting the Rite: The Rite of Spring Centenary Conference, Online Archive, 2016
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‘Dancing in the City: Balletic Body Image in 1940s New York,’ Balanchine/Reinvention Ballet, Course Reader, Barnard College, Columbia University, 2015
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‘Made for Love?: Feminine Embodiment in George Balanchine’s Ballets and Haute Couture Evening-wear, c.1927-33,’ Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, 2014
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