Ballet
From Feet to Feet
By CLIVE BARNES
'AFTER my death the public will say what nonsense Fokine staged!' Choreographers are much obsessed with death; their art is fragile, transient—David Lichine once described it as `moisture in the mouth of an orator.' In much of his recently- published posthumous Memoirs* Michel Fokine can be seen defiantly clutching the shreds of immortality to his reputation.
A correspondent recently asked me to write about dance-notation and 1 fully Intend to. The new and, I believe, at last practicable methods of dance notation which have been developed over the past three decades are potentially the most important advance ever made in ballet. Only consider what notation achieved for music and you will see my meaning. Unfortunately for Fokine 'everything was transferred without any written directions from one generation of dancers to another, by word of mouth—or, to be more exact, from feet to feet.'
So much has been written about Fokine. Now, with these Memoirs. 'Fokine has his own rather bitter say. The book adds comparatively little to our knowledge of him—a stray fact here and there—but by expressing that knowledge from Fokine's own point of view, it takes on enormous importance. Here is the true, authentically biased story of the great reformer of modern ballet. Fokine's mission was to transform ballet into a naturally expressive art form. The young missionary found it as an after-dinner entertain- ment of the Russian court, a lackey institution stuffed with formality. Splendid girls in skirts shaped like wilting umbrellas made bedroom eyes to a gorgeous audience, all to the soothing rumpty-tum of Minkus and Pugni. No wonder his father, on hearing of Fokine's intention to join the ballet school, was angry and said: 'I don't want my Mimotchka to be a hoofer!'
The Memoirs are largely concerned with his relationship with Diaghilev. The ground here is churned and muddy with the patter of tiny minds, and few now can take Fokine's obsession with injustice seriously. That after the rupture with Diaghilev Fokine himself was virtually spent as a creative force seems more of a coincidence than anything else. Diaghilev's loss was the greater. After the first break in 1212 with Fokine (and, independently, with Benois) Diaghilev, the Napoleon of ballet, began his retreat from Moscow. True to historical precedent it ultima- tely proved his undoing.
• Constable, 42s. Looking back one wonders whether Diaghilev really understood what ballet was about. Fokine certainly knew, and in the most interesting sections of this book, he tells. Fokine's struggles to make ballet a Gesamtkunstwerk—which Diaghilev to his immortal glory appreciated—and also to make dancing itself more expressive (which Diaghilev did not) have been summed up more succinctly than in his Memoirs, notably in his celebrated letter to the Times in 1914. But the picture given here of both the reformer and his reform is important.
The post-Diaghilev end ot the book is made up of excerpts with a connecting narrative by Fokine's son, Vitale It is a sad, wintry end, unlightened by the genius that inflamed Fokine's early career. Perhaps saddest of all is the sight—which we could advantageously have been spared by the editor—of Fokine arguing acrimoniously with his spiritual god-daughter Martha Graham; in it we can see the old reformer beaten down into a reactionary by life and hard times.
The tough residue of Fokine's career has been passed down 'from feet to feet' and even now bears spectral testimony to his greatness. Yet much has been lost, and it is to be hoped the present custodians of his work will examine their charges in the light of this book. Let me give one example. At one point in the Royal Ballet's Firebird the Tsarevitch taps his head in a gesture of inspiration, which balloons out into a meta- phoric bubble marked 'Thinks!' Fokine writes: 'This gesture is identical with and done in pre- cisely the same manner as that of Pierrot in my Carnaval. There the thought is about catching the Butterfly; here, to break open the gates. Of course I never staged this in. The Firebird. . . . There is no similarity between The Firebird and Carnaval. They are totally different in style, temperament, and everything else. Such injections and graftings from one of my ballets to another endanger them greatly.' Can I smell someone's ears burning?
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