“It is utter nonsense to say that the English temperament is unsuitable for dancing,” said Edouard Espinosa, a London dance instructor, in 1916. It was just a lack of qualified instruction that prevented the creation of “perfect dancers”. ”Espinosa spoke to a reporter from Lady’s Pictorial about an uproar he had caused in the dance world with this idea: dance teachers should adhere to standards and be screened for their work.
Four years later, in 1920, Espinosa and several others, including Danish-born Adeline Genée and Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina, founded a teaching organization that would become the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD). Today the academy is one of the largest ballet education programs in the world. Students in 92 countries follow the curriculum and take their exams, which are regulated by the organization. And as the exhibition “On Point: Royal Academy of Dance at 100” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London shows, its history is synonymous with the history of ballet in Great Britain.
“Much of the legacy of British dance began with the RAD,” said Darcey Bussell, a former Royal Ballet ballerina who has served as the academy’s president since 2012. “It is important that dance training and instruction are closely linked to the professional world. The RAD has done this from the start.”
When the Royal Academy was founded, there was no national ballet company in Britain. But there was a lot of ballet, said Jane Pritchard, the curator of dance, theater, and performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She curated the exhibition with Eleanor Fitzpatrick, the archive and archive manager of the Royal Academy of Dance. “The Ballets Russes were there, Pavlova performed in London and excellent emigrant teachers came,” said Ms. Pritchard. “So the RAD was born at just the right moment, using the best of the Italian, French and Russian schools to create a British style that it then sent back to the world.”
The exhibition, which runs until September 2021, opened in May due to Covid-19 restrictions. It opened on December 2nd but closed again when the UK re-introduced restrictions in mid-December. While we wait for the museum to reopen, here’s a tour of some of the exhibition’s photographs, designs, and objects that touch on some of the most important figures in 20th century ballet history.
“The greatest dancer in the world” (or so said Ziegfeld)
Adeline Genée (1878-1970), who spent much of her career in England, reigned as prima ballerina at the Empire Theater for a decade, appearing on various programs. She was both revered as a classical dancer and very popular with the public. Florence Ziegfeld called her “The World’s Greatest Dancer” when she performed in the USA in 1907. Genée became the first female president of the Royal Academy of Dance, and her royal connections and popularity with the public made her a formidable figurehead.
The photo from 1915 shows Genée in her own short ballet “A Dream of Butterflies and Roses” in a costume by Wilhelm, the resident designer at the Empire Theater and an important figure in the theater scene. “It’s a really good example of the type of costume and type of ballets that were being shown at the time,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. “Ballet was still part of the music hall entertainment.”
Popular entertainment
This 1922 weekly vaudeville poster in the Coliseum of London shows how ballet was seen at the time the Royal Academy of Dance was founded. “It was part of a bigger picture, and it shows it visually,” said Ms. Pritchard. “Sybil Thorndike was a great British actress and would have given a brief performance of a play or monologue. Grock was a very famous clown. Most of the Colosseum’s bills had some sort of dance element, but it wasn’t always ballet. “
Karsavina: An independent artist
Jumping Joan was one of three characters that Tamara Karsavina danced in “Nursery Rhymes”, which she choreographed to music by Schubert for an evening at the Coliseum Theater in London in 1921. Unusually for ballet at the time in London, it was a standalone show rather than part of a variety program. Karsavina and her company did it twice a day for two weeks.
“People associate Karsavina with the Ballets Russes, but they also had their own group of dancers who performed regularly at the Colosseum,” Ms. Pritchard said. “She was really an independent artist in a way that we think is very modern, who works with a large company, but also has an independent existence.”
She also tried to promote British artists; The costume design is by Claud Lovat Fraser, a brilliant theater designer who died in his early 30s. “I think Lovat Fraser is the British equivalent of Bakst,” said Ms. Pritchard. “His drawings are so animated and precise, and he uses color wonderfully to create a sense of character.”
Also good for athletes
In 1954 the Whip and Carrot Club, an association of high jumpers, approached the Royal Academy of Dance with an unusual request. Members had read that athletes in both Russia and America had benefited from ballet lessons, and they asked the academy to formulate lessons that would improve their height.
The result was a multi-year course with courses for high jumpers and hurdlers and later for “obstacle hunters, discus and javelin throwers”, as can be seen from a Pathé film clip that is shown in the exhibition. In 1955, a leaflet containing 13 exercises for jumping was produced, drawn by cartoonist Cyril Kenneth Bird, professionally known as Fougasse, best known for government propaganda posters (“Careless Talk Costs Lives”) made during World War II .
“I love the photo of Margot Fonteyn watching in her fur coat!” Said Mrs. Pritchard.
From generation to generation
Karsavina, until 1955 Vice President of the Royal Academy of Dance, developed a curriculum for teacher training and other sections of the advanced exams. As a dancer, she created the title role in Mikhail Fokine’s “The Firebird” with music by Stravinsky when the Ballets Russes performed the ballet at the Paris Opera in 1910. Here she is shown coaching Margot Fonteyn when the Royal Ballet first staged the ballet in 1954, the year Fonteyn took over from Genée as President of the Royal Academy of Dance.
“Karsavina knew firsthand what the choreographer and composer wanted and is passing it on,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. (“I was never someone who counted,” says Karsavina in a film about learning “The Firebird”. “Stravinsky was very nice.”) “It gives a wonderful feeling of passing things on from one generation to the next.”
Fonteyn and Nureyev
This relaxed moment of a rehearsal from 1963 shows the ease and the relationship between Fonteyn and the young Rudolf Nureyev, who had left Russia two years earlier. They were rehearsing for the Royal Academy of Dance’s annual gala, which Fonteyn had launched to raise funds for the organization. Her fame allowed her to bring together international guests, British dancers and even contemporary dance choreographers like Paul Taylor.
“The gala was also an opportunity for Fonteyn and Nureyev to try things that they might not have danced with the Royal Ballet,” said Ms. Pritchard. “Here they were rehearsing for ‘La Sylphide’ because Nureyev was passionate about the Bournonville choreography. They really look like two dancers who are happy together. “
“Diminutive, neat and precise”
Stanislas Idzikowski, known to his students as Idzi, was a Polish dancer who moved to London as a teenager and danced with Anna Pavlova’s company before joining the Ballets Russes, where he inherited many roles from Vaslav Nijinsky. A close friend of Karsavina, he later became a popular teacher and worked closely with the Royal Academy of Dance. Always formally dressed in a three-piece suit with a stiff collared shirt and sleek shoes, he was “tiny, elegant and precise,” according to Fonteyn in her autobiography.
In this 1952 photo, he is teaching fifth-year girls who may have been hoping for a career. Idzikowski was also a member of the Royal Academy of Dance’s Production Club, which was founded in 1932 to allow students over the age of 14 to work with choreographers. Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann were among the early volunteers, and later a young John Cranko created his first job there.
Party polka
This 1972 photo of young girls about to begin a sequence called “Party Polka” was taken by Fonteyn’s brother Felix, who was also filming a group of elementary school students demonstrating for Fonteyn and other teachers. The footage, which was kept in canisters labeled “Children’s Curriculum” in the archives of the Royal Academy of Dance, was recently discovered by Ms. Fitzpatrick.
The film offers a rare glimpse into Fonteyn in her offstage role at the Royal Academy of Dance, Ms. Fitzgerald said, and reflects an important change the ballerina made during her presidency. “People really think about Fonteyn as a dancer, but she has been very involved in teaching and curriculum development,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. Previous curricula, she explained, included pantomime, drama, and history, but when a body including Fonteyn revised the program in 1968, much of it was scrapped.
“They wanted to streamline everything and make it more comfortable for the kids and just focus on movement,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. “The party polka is a great example of having a great feel for the kids to swirl around the room and really dance.”
