5
Dancing Revolution
In the spring of 1921, the American dance pioneer Isadora Duncan accepted an invitation from A. V. Lunacharsky, Soviet commissar for the enlightenment, to open a children’s dance school in Moscow. She was “sick of bourgeois, commercial art . . . sick of the modern theater, which resembles a house of prostitution more than a temple of art.” She wanted “to dance for the masses,” for those “who need my art and have never had the money to come and see me.” And she wanted “to dance for them for nothing, knowing that they have not been brought to me by clever publicity, but because they really want to have what I can give them.” If the Bolsheviks could give her this opportunity, then, she promised, “I will come and work for the future of the Russian Republic and its children.”1
Although Russia was renowned throughout the world for its dance, after the revolution American dancers were drawn to Russia less to see innovative dance forms than to experience life under socialism and to dance for a revolutionary audience. Despite striking innovations like Nikolai Foregger’s dancers, whose mechanical movements mimicked those of machines, for the most part Russian dance was still dominated by ballet in the 1920s and 1930s, even as modern dance took other parts of the world by storm. Indeed, some of the most radical innovators in Russian ballet, most notably Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, performed only outside of Russia: Russian ballet traditions were so entrenched that this effort by primarily Russian-born choreographers, dancers, and composers to “extend the expressive possibilities of ballet” defined itself in terms of “secession” from Russia proper.2 Thus although the revolutionary dance movement in the United States was directly inspired by events in the Soviet Union, it was American dancers, most of them directly or indirectly influenced by Isadora Duncan, who brought revolutionary forms of dance there.
François Delsarte’s popularity in the United States and in Europe helped elevate dance as an expressive art in the early twentieth century. Indeed, Havelock Ellis, a sexologist, Fabian socialist, and freethinker, described dance as the most elemental and essential form of art. The theory of metakinesis, developed by John Martin, the most influential American dance critic of his day, suggested dance’s uniquely expressive properties: “Because of the inherent contagion of bodily movement, which makes the onlooker feel sympathetically in his own musculature the exertions he sees in somebody else’s musculature, the dancer is able to convey through movement the most intangible emotional experience.” Such understandings of kinesthesia, and its relationship to empathy, suggest that the “qualitative dimensions” of bodily movement—“the kind of flow, tension, and timing of any given action as well as the ways in which any person’s movement interacts and interrelates with objects, events, and other people”—are elemental components for the expression and comprehension of revolutionary desire.3
Modern dance is often described as a feminist form, “pioneered by women” in the early twentieth century. While ballet typically featured women performing dances created by men, modern dance most often featured female choreographers and dancers. Moreover, the reliance in modern dance on improvisation and the loose, flowing costumes challenged older models of spectatorship that made the dancer more an object of spectacle rather than a powerful subject. Isadora Duncan had predicted “the dancer of the future” as early as 1903: “The free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been; more beautiful than . . . all women in past centuries: The highest intelligence in the freest body.” This dancer of the future—implicitly Isadora herself—dancing a self of her own creation, unashamed of her body or her sexual urges, revealing, as lyrical leftist Floyd Dell put it, “the goodness of the whole body,” powerfully embodied the promise of the new Soviet woman for cultural rebels in the United States.4 To physically move in ways that expressed a revolutionary ethos could be tremendously liberating; for this reason alone dancers from the United States felt drawn to the Soviet Union where they could experience and attempt to embody that ethos. They also had the precedent of Isadora Duncan’s Russian days to follow.
Duncan had been influential in Russia as well as the United States before the revolution; her work and her very persona represented the utopian “Dionysian ecstasy” that fit especially well with Russian “pre-war aesthetic ideals.” In the years following the revolution, “dance schools and studios grew like mushrooms after a warm rain,” many of them run by dancers trained in Duncan technique. Duncan, it is said, “danced [her] personality into the soul of Russia.”5 Still, although Duncan never renounced her years in Bolshevik Russia, they were marked by disappointments. She charted a rocky path in the Soviet Union that several modern dancers would follow, unconsciously or consciously.
Isadora Duncan and the Revolutionary Soul
“She was our symbol,” one of Duncan’s contemporaries declared, “the symbol of a new art, a new literature, a new national polity, a new life.” Duncan popularized the idea of dance as a gateway to the soul. Inspired equally by ideas of ancient Greek dance and rhythms of nature, Duncan “sought a liberated way of moving that would express a range of emotions. Although her choreography was simple, based on walking, skipping, and running, those steps, combined with pantomimic gestures, a highly expressive face, eloquent stillness, and personal charisma made an extraordinary impact on the audiences of her day.”6 She used plain sets (usually nothing more than a blue curtain) and most often danced to symphonic music solo (but never alone, she would say, for she claimed to embody the collective).
Fig. 5.1 Isadora Duncan dancing the “Marseillaise,” 1917. In My Life Duncan writes: “On the day of the announcement of the Russian Revolution all lovers of freedom were filled with hopeful joy, and that night I danced the ‘Marseillaise’ in the real original revolutionary spirit in which it was composed.” Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.
Though born in San Francisco in 1877 or 1878, Duncan lived for extended periods in Germany, Greece, France, England, and Soviet Russia. She was at once an American in the spirit of Walt Whitman and a citizen of the world. She embraced free expression and pioneered a worldwide revolution in dance. Duncan had little interest in politics per se, but she thought of herself as a revolutionary. “I have constantly danced the Revolution and the call to arms of the oppressed,” she insisted, linking “dancing revolution” to performing the essence of the liberated self. She claimed that her sympathies had turned toward the “down-trodden” when, on her first visit to Saint Petersburg, she witnessed a nighttime funeral cortege for victims of the January 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre, which sparked the failed 1905 revolution. Twelve years later, “on the night of the Russian Revolution I danced with a terrible fierce joy,” she recalled. “My heart was bursting within me at the release of all those who had suffered, been tortured, died in the cause of Humanity.”7
After dancing “the ‘Marseillaise’ in the real revolutionary spirit in which it was composed,” she performed what has been called the first “revolutionary dance,” to Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slave, enacting the Russian people’s movement from oppression to liberation. She hailed the Bolshevik revolution several months later as “the birth of the future international community of love. A new world, a newly created mankind; the destruction of the old world of class injustice, and the creation of a new world of equal opportunity.” Duncan aimed to bring her dance, “a high religious art,” to this new mecca, where her “dancer of the future” could help fulfill “the ideals of the new world.”8
Isadora, Plyaska, and Silver Age Russia
On her tours through prerevolutionary Russia, Duncan tapped into and came to embody the popular spirit of rebellion during Russia’s Silver Age (late 1890s–late 1910s), a period marked by an outpouring of creativity in the visual arts, literature, and performing arts comparable to the Golden Age of Russian literature (1810s–1830s). Her ideas and work drew on influences that likewise fed the Russian revolutionary spirit, most notably Nietzsche’s philosophy, but she herself had a tremendous impact on Russia’s intellectual and artistic avant-garde. In Silver Age Russia, “Duncan’s ideas appealed to all who went against obsolete traditions, old standards. The free movements of a body liberated from restraint, her constant reaching upwards, represented a chance to form emancipated individuals.”9
Sergei Diaghilev said Duncan’s first performances in Saint Petersburg and Moscow “gave an irreparable jolt to the classic ballet of Imperial Russia.” And Michel Fokine felt Isadora embodied the idea of a dance that was expressive, “the poetry of motion.” Vsevolod Meyerhold was “moved to tears” the first time he saw Duncan perform. And Konstantin Stanislavsky said Isadora had found the “creative motor” he had so long been seeking.10 Other Russian critics emphasized the “revolution in choreographic art” she had initiated, in part by exposing her feet and legs, thus revealing the false conceits of the contemporary ballet. The few negative comments about her “coarse sensuality” seem only to confirm the idea that failure to appreciate Duncan’s dancing was a marker of decadence.11
Duncan’s popularity in Russia in the decades leading up to the Bolshevik revolution was tied to Silver Age Russians’ attraction to plyaska, or movement that “celebrates freedom from the prohibitions imposed by the repressive authorities of the official culture,” in contrast to tanets, which usually refers to ballet, ballroom, and other more scripted forms. Indeed, “one cannot ‘perform’ plyaska, one can only give oneself to it as one gives oneself to passion or ecstasy.” Plyaska connotes wholeness, nature, collectivity, and freedom from repressive authority, which “found its embodiment in Duncan and her dance.”12 Isadora’s expressiveness filled a popular yearning for authentic experience to counter a morally bankrupt society.
Duncan made much of the notion that her introduction to Russia coincided with the events of Bloody Sunday, though her initial performances in Saint Petersburg actually came before that day. In her autobiography she marvels:
How strange it must have been to those dilettantes of the gorgeous ballet, with its lavish decorations and scenery, to watch a young girl, clothed in a tunic of cobweb, appear and dance before a simple blue curtain to the music of Chopin; dance her soul as she understood the soul of Chopin! Yet even for the first dance there was a storm of applause. My soul that yearned and suffered the tragic notes of the Preludes; my soul that aspired and revolted to the thunder of the Polonaises; my soul that wept with righteous anger, thinking of the martyrs of that funeral procession of the dawn; this soul awakened in that wealthy, spoilt, and aristocratic audience, a response of stirring applause. How curious!13
During her 1904–1905 tours, she met the ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, the great costume designer and artist Leon Baskt, Diaghilev, and other prominent cultural figures. On her second tour, in 1908, she met Stanislavsky, with whom she formed a deep connection. Duncan began visiting Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre any evening that she was not dancing herself. One night, she went up to Stanislavlsky, placed her “hands on his shoulders and entwine[d] them about his strong neck,” and proceeded to kiss him on the lips. Stanislavsky returned Duncan’s kiss, but then drew back and, looking at her with “consternation, exclaimed, ‘But what should we do with the child?’ ‘What child?’” she asked. “Why, our child, of course.”14
Isadora’s union with Russia’s artistic and intellectual avant-garde would in fact produce many children. In addition to the dance studios she inspired, Duncan also had a transformative effect on flesh-and-blood children, both those she taught and those she influenced through her example. Young Stefanida Rudneva (1890–1989) and several teenaged friends, for instance, moved by Duncan’s early performances, formed the dance group, school, and commune Heptachor (“Dance of Seven” in Greek).15
Seeing Duncan dance convinced Rudneva—who had no dance training—that she “could no longer be the same person.” It was her mission in life to dance. She and her friends began having “‘white gatherings,’ where, dressed in tunics, they improvised to piano accompaniment, to their own singing or to ‘inner music.’ It gave them ‘the feeling of catharsis’ and . . . ‘protected them from flirtatiousness’: from a superficial, petty relationship with life.” In halting English the seventeen-year-old Rudneva wrote to Duncan in 1907, “I have seen you 3 times and from the first moment I saw you I thought: ‘this is what I looked for, this is what I dreamt about!’ When you first came out a new world appeared before me. . . . I was like one in a dream. I could not speak, I only longed to look at you and to feel in my heart all of your genial beauty.” Duncan represented the possibility of another life: “For see—our land is so miserable, our life is full of such dreadful reality, that every moment of forgetfulness for us is much more than you may think it is. That is why every one of us, who are tired and suffering, love you and thank you for your art, for your beauty.”16
Duncan remained Heptachor’s principal inspiration. In 1934, when Soviet authorities shut down nearly all avenues of expression not seen to be properly embodying the ideal of socialist realism, Heptachor nonetheless helped perpetuate the legacy of Duncan’s work, through published writings and through Rudneva’s students, and their students, whose work continues to this day (an Isadora Duncan Museum is Saint Petersburg is perhaps the most visible manifestation of Duncan’s legacy).
Duncan in Bolshevik Russia
If Duncan once promised to revitalize the decadence of imperial Russian life, in 1921 it was she who hoped that revolutionary Russia would offer her new life after a number of setbacks, most notably the death of her two young children in a tragic accident in 1913. “This coming to Russia is a tremendous experience, and I would not have missed it for anything,” she wrote not long after moving to Soviet Russia. “Here at last is a frame mighty enough to work in, and for the first time in my life I feel that I can stretch out my arms and breathe.” She was thrilled to be creating “a great school of new beings who will be worthy of the ideals of the new world.”17
Although Duncan projected optimism and excitement, in fact much of her stay in Soviet Russia was marked by frustration and disappointment. When Isadora, her student, protégé, and adopted daughter Irma, and her French maid, Jeanne, arrived in Moscow, they found no one at the station to meet them. They were even more surprised to learn that no arrangements had been made for their lodging. After spending the night in a small hotel room infested with flies, rats, and bedbugs, the three women were temporarily settled in a vacant apartment, while Duncan impatiently waited for news about where her school would be located and when it could open.18
In the meantime she attended her first Soviet soirée, at a mansion once owned by a member of the Russian aristocracy. The garish, Louis XV–style furnishings struck Duncan as ugly and inappropriate, and she was shocked and outraged to find a group of well-dressed Bolsheviks in the drawing room contentedly eating hors d’oeuvres, sipping wine, and listening to a young woman playing piano and singing in French. Duncan had dressed in what she thought would be an appropriate outfit for the occasion: her best red tunic, worn with a red cashmere shawl and a red tulle scarf wrapped around her head like a turban. Someone greeted her as “Mademoiselle Duncan,” but Duncan interrupted, insisting she be called “Comrade Duncan.” Then she stood up, glass in hand, to address a roomful of astonished guests: “Comrades, you have made a revolution. You are building a new, beautiful world, which means that you are breaking up all that is old, unwanted, and decayed. The break-up must be in everything—in education, in art, in morals, in everyday life, in dress. . . . I hoped to see something new here, but it seems all you want are frock coats and top hats to be indistinguishable from other diplomats.”19
Duncan was especially keen on showing the Russians how to properly train their children. She was taken to see a children’s colony in a suburb of Moscow, and she offered to give the children a lesson. After watching the boys and girls perform a series of their own peasant dances, Duncan explained, through an interpreter, that they were dancing incorrectly: “These are the dances of slaves you have danced. All the movements go down to the earth. You must learn to dance the dance of free people. You must hold your heads high and throw out wide your arms as though you would embrace the whole universe in a large fraternal gesture!”20 As with her plan to teach famine orphans to dance in order to foster Westerners’ sympathies, Duncan’s comments suggest both a dismissive attitude toward Russians’ culture and naïveté about the enormous obstacles to be overcome in Soviet society. On the other hand, Duncan’s idealism is part of what made it possible for her to have the impact she did.
Duncan did find kindred spirits and even had her share of revolutionary epiphanies. Nikolai Podvoysky, people’s commissar for physical education, immediately appreciated Duncan’s mission in Russia. Duncan did not wish to train professional dancers; instead, she wished to liberate young people through dance, to give them tools for physical and psychological regeneration, which they could then pass on to others. Podvoysky told her of his own plans to train “strong and splendid athletes,” to build “a great stadium for fifty thousand people,” and to raise young Soviets “according to the ideals of the new world.”21
Duncan was thrilled by Podvoysky’s vision. But she was not entirely uncritical of him, noting especially his lack of a feminist consciousness. Observing a youth camp under his supervision, she watched a group of girls follow an entourage of boys wearing swimming trunks and tramping down the hillside singing. “I was sorry to see the girls wear bloomers and shirt-waists,” she said. “They didn’t look as fine and free as the boys.” She told Podvoysky that “the bloomers were all wrong and the swimming drawers too. I told him they ought all to wear short tunics like Achilles, and the girls should not follow after the boys, but that they should dance down the hill together, hand in hand.”22
Duncan’s vocal admiration for Podvoysky paid off in the form of his support and patronage. He was instrumental in helping her secure a building for her school in September 1921—a remarkable feat at the height of the famine, when the state clearly had other priorities. The large house on the once-fashionable Prechistenka Street had been reclaimed from the wealthy head of a tea plantation whose wife had danced in the Moscow Opera ballet. Isadora, Irma, and Jeanne moved into the couple’s bedroom and boudoir and waited for the rest of the house to be cleared of occupants to make way for the school.23
Preparations to create a functioning school moved slowly. Porters, maids, secretaries, chefs, and other personnel came on board, but there was no stove, nor were there pots or pans. There was not enough fuel either. Nonetheless, 150 children were brought to the school. Preference was given to children of industrial workers. The students had little to no dance experience, so Duncan focused on the basics, teaching them to walk “naturally, but beautifully, to a slow march; then to stand, swaying their bodies rhythmically, ‘as if blown by the breeze.’”24
Although the children’s training had barely commenced, Duncan decided to have all of them participate in her first concert in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre. It was a gala celebrating the fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. All seats were to be free. But the workers for whom Isadora had wanted to dance were left outside on the snowy street, held back by a police cordon, as Communist Party elites, government officials, Red Army officers, trade union leaders, foreign correspondents and theatrical people filled the seats. Word had gotten out that she planned to perform to Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slave, an imperial hymn that contained several bars of “God Save the Czar.” Hard-line Communists were scandalized, but Lunacharsky, granted a preview of the performance, found it a “shattering” expression of Isadora’s solidarity with the revolutionaries and their victory.25
The program ended with “Duncan . . . walk[ing] to the music of the Internationale in an energetic, rhythmic step as if summoning masses to struggle, while her hand with two pointed fingers conducted the singing of an imaginary crowd. To the last strains of the music the artist ran upstage, and exposed her left breast, symbolizing a nursing mother giving strength to the popular elements.” For an encore, the entire audience stood and sang “The Internationale” as they watched Irma lead 150 children in red tunics onto the stage. Holding hands, the children circled their teacher as they raised their linked arms toward the sky.26
At the end of the performance, Lenin himself stood up and cried, “Bravo, bravo Miss Duncan!” Ivy Litvinov, the British-born wife of the Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov, was dazzled by the performance: “I have never even dreamed of such a human, living relation between artist and audience,” she wrote Duncan, enclosing sketches she’d made of the children dancing (“for you to see how you have made my imagination work so I can’t sleep”). “Now you have really given the Moscow proletariat something for their very own.” Despite this enthusiastic reception, many people actually “were shocked by [Duncan’s] appearance” (for she was older and heavier than they remembered) and, as Litvinov’s sketches would suggest, may have been most moved by the sight of the children.27
Of the 150 children at the Bolshoi, only 40 were allowed to enroll in the school when it officially opened on December 3, 1921—a far cry from the “thousand boys and girls from the poorest families” that Duncan had requested. But at least for a time, the Soviet government supported the school to the extent that it could, with help, perhaps inadvertently, from the United States, as the children’s blankets and much of their food came from the American Relief Administration. Walls were hung with blue curtains to hide the garish taste of the previous owners; a pink scarf covered the chandelier in the main room, diffusing the light. Girls and boys were placed in separate rooms and outfitted with slightly different tunics, but otherwise there was little attention to the particular needs of boys, who one-by-one dropped out until the school served only girls. But these girls adored Duncan, as she did them. Irma would demonstrate the dances while Isadora focused on the “spiritual side of dance.”28
After less than a year, the Soviet government stopped funding Duncan’s school, and she was forced to create a parallel track of paying students, as well as to perform, alone and with her students, to support the school. This was a mixed blessing, for although she had rejected the idea of charging for her performances, tickets were purchased for workers in blocks by labor unions. So she did, in fact, get to perform for the masses.29
At a performance for sailors in Leningrad, a near-disaster became one of the highlights of her initial fundraising tour: After her first piece, the lights went out. In the dark, there were sounds of feet shuffling and laughter. Someone whistled; others shouted. Finally, a lantern with a candle in it was found and brought to Duncan, who had been anxiously waiting on the stage. Instead of dancing, she held the lantern over her head and asked the sailors if they would sing for her. The request, translated into Russian, was greeted with silence. But after a few moments, there could be heard a single voice, “rich, vibrant, sure, singing the opening lines of the old revolutionary song, the Varshavianka.” And then many voices joined in:
The volume of deep warm tones welled up out of the darkness and poured over the stage where Isadora stood silent and alone. She who loved music more than all else in the world, was thrilled to her heart’s core: more thrilled even than she had been on first hearing the Aria of Bach or the Berlin Philharmonic under Nikisch playing the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven. For this mass music welling up from these unseen, simple men was more movingly human, more gloriously elemental than any instrument music had ever seen.30
The men continued singing, song after song, and Duncan stood perfectly still, holding the lantern over her head, while tears streamed down her cheeks.
This was one of many times that Duncan would find herself deeply moved by the spirit of the revolution. She described her first May Day in Moscow as a “wonderful sight,” the streets like “crimson roses,” as “thousands of men, women, and children, with red handkerchiefs about their heads and red flags in their hands, swept by singing the Internationale.”31 Later, Duncan was similarly moved by Lenin’s funeral procession, as she shivered and waited with thousands of others, hoping to glimpse his coffin. She composed two funeral marches in Lenin’s honor, one to the music of Lenin’s favorite revolutionary hymn and the other to the “Varshavianka.” These dances were well received, but they can be seen to mark the end not just of Lenin but of Duncan’s era as well. The next tour, a fundraiser for the school, was a disaster. Her tour of the United States in 1923, with Russian husband in tow, had been even more of a debacle, with Duncan—vocally praising the Soviet Union and condemning the land of her birth—now tagged as a Bolshevik hussy.32
Duncan had met the Imaginist poet Sergei Esenin, eighteen years her junior, while preparing for the school’s official opening.33 Witnesses to their meeting attest that there was an immediate, mutual attraction, but their relationship did little to foster Duncan’s work. The couple married in order to be able to travel together without causing a scandal, and Duncan claimed the marriage—a legal procedure so different in meaning under communism—did nothing to change her feeling that marriage was “an absurd and enslaving institution.”34 Esenin clearly felt threatened by Duncan’s fame and competitive with her. He was content to share in her glory, buying beautiful clothes with her money, drinking alcohol she provided, and relaxing in her home. He would get drunk and destroy things and she would clean up after him. In tears, she would forgive him and welcome him when he returned after leaving in a drunken rage.
As the “peasant poet”—adored in Russia for his earthy verse and deep devotion to the motherland—descended into alcoholism and violence, many of his devotees blamed Duncan. Maxim Gorky claimed Duncan could never understand her husband’s poetry, so superior to Isadora’s dancing, which, he said, looked like an older, overweight woman trying to keep warm. It was little solace to Duncan that American audiences were equally unappreciative of her husband, whose foreign status stripped Duncan of her US citizenship.35 The two split up in the fall of 1923, as Esenin’s drunken rampages and infidelity became more frequent. Two years later Esenin committed suicide.
On her final Soviet tour, the sets were all wrong, the transportation was poorly coordinated, the hotels were dirty, and audiences were so unenthusiastic that she could barely raise enough money to pay the orchestra. From a hotel room in Siberia with mice, bedbugs, stained sheets, and pistol shots in the mirror, Isadora wrote to Irma, “I feel extremely kaput.”36
Despite official appreciation for Duncan’s embrace of the workers’ republic, many perceived her to be out of step with the new era. As one Russian dance scholar has noted of Duncan’s Russian early acolytes, “Neither the Heptachorists nor their pupils studied with Isadora. They probably dreamed of it, but—thank God!—it did not happen. I believe that, were they to have studied in one of her schools, they would not have found there what they were looking for, and they would have left.”37
Natalia Roslavleva, who, like the girls from Heptachor, was also profoundly influenced in her early years by Duncan, “suffered a disillusionment” when she saw Duncan perform in 1923. In her teens Roslavleva had founded a “Society of Young Duncanists” as well as a journal devoted to Duncan’s work. However, in the flesh and in a new era, “Even from high up in the gallery, the heavily prancing woman with her exaggerated miming failed to impress me,” Roslavleva wrote. “And when her tunic fell off the shoulder intentionally in the ‘Internationale,’ exposing flesh that should have better remained unseen, a real crisis ensued” in her mind. Indeed, Rudneva and the girls from Heptachor were similarly disappointed when they saw Duncan perform in the 1920s: “Her previous dance-plyaska, free, natural, and joyful, had disappeared, to be replaced by theatrical pantomime.”38
While Soviet officials were publicly deferential, critics in the 1920s were mostly dismissive. Reflecting on Duncan’s significance for revolutionary Russia, Victor Iving, the most prominent Soviet dance critic at the time, could hardly contain his contempt:
This matriarch of “plastic dancers” is sometimes herself not at all plastic: her legs are widely spread, her feet are placed in a row, flat and heavy, reminiscent of rough wooden sculptures of the Middle Ages. . . . She is heavy getting up from the floor, her back clumsily coming up earlier than her head. She lies, stands, bends, walks, rarely jumps, and stretches her hands. Oh, those constantly pleading hands! What does their supplicatory gesture have in common with the heroic spirit of the motherland of a new humankind, to upbringing which Duncan wants to devote herself?”
Duncan now was “an old, flabby woman” who “tries to disguise her choreographic weakness as a new revelation in art.” Other critics complained that she looked too old, that her breasts were hanging, that her chin and neck were flabby, and that she was no longer quick and light.39
Duncan actually recognized that her own Soviet star was passing, but the children she and Irma taught suggested that she had, in fact, left her mark. While Isadora was away on her final tour of the Soviet Union, Irma and the school’s students decided to offer free classes to Moscow’s children. Hundreds of young people showed up at the red stadium in Sparrow Hills for lessons. Dressed in short red tunics, they were led through a series of exercises and taught simple dances; as Irma recalled: “They romped about in the sun singing their revolutionary songs, and from pale sallow children of the city streets they grew during the summer months to happy, sunburnt, and healthy dancing humans.” These children, five hundred strong, were there to greet Isadora when she returned from her disastrous tour: they marched in formation behind a brass band that played “The Internationale,” and carried a banner with the school’s slogan: “A Free Spirit Can Exist Only in a Freed Body.” Isadora was thrilled to see what the children had achieved in a few short months: “Seeing them rushing forward together, one perceived that they were a band of young warriors and amazons ready to do battle for the ideals of the New World,” she wrote.40
Fig. 5.2 Students of the Isadora Duncan School in Moscow at Sparrow Hills, 1924. Sign text, in part, translates: “A Free Spirit Can Exist Only in a Freed Body. Duncan School.” Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.
She spent the next few days teaching the children, whose songs inspired Duncan’s final compositions. These dances, to songs such as “With Courage Comrades March in Step” and “The Blacksmith (or Forging the Keys of Freedom),” were different in style, more like the revolutionary dance that was beginning to take hold in the United States:
Unlike the airy, free-flowing style usually associated with Duncan, these dances have a blunt, bound, rooted look to them. There are few of those swelling waves of energy that Duncan usually sent out into space with her lilting arms, tempering the strength of the deep plush steps she took into the earth. The body image emphasizes tension, especially through lunging thighs, laboring arms, and clenched fists. The body is self-contained, a twisting sculptural mass displacing empty space as it goes, rather than a porous entity gliding through its airy surrounds. The group formations are muscularly sculptural in feeling. Even the garments are different—the short squarish tunics frame the materiality of the body, rather than flowing with the body as the gauzy, shapeless chitons did.41
Although Irma later claimed these dances were among Isadora’s best, they were omitted from a memorial for Duncan held in Paris by her family in 1928. In the Soviet Union, although Duncan herself was mourned as a great supporter of the revolution, “Duncanism”—understood as something qualitatively different from these kinds of dances—was something to be scorned and avoided by dancers. Inspired as they were by the Russian children, Duncan’s final compositions marked her recognition that she had little more to offer: as she told Irma, “These red tunicked kids are the future.”42 In September 1924 Isadora Duncan left the Soviet Union, returning to her other adopted homeland, France. Almost exactly three years later, she was dead: while she was riding in a convertible, her flowing red scarf wrapped itself around the car’s front axle and strangled her. Duncan’s three years in Russia were very much a coda to her career.
While her school continued to operate until 1949 and her legacy was treated with at least an official attitude of respect, by the end of the 1920s, “the new aesthetic ideal was biomechanical exercises for healthy-looking workers and athletes, and not wave-like movements for girls in tunics.” Explaining in language that plainly referenced Duncan, Meyerhold said of dance, “We don’t need ecstasy, we need arousal, based upon a firm physical foundation.” Meyerhold’s own theory of biomechanics not only revolutionized Soviet theatre but also demonstrated the dramatic possibilities of dance. However, this was dance of a certain kind: as Meyerhold wrote, “The actor of the future must first of all be well-formed, rhythmical, able to organize his body in space.”43
Soviet Dimensions of the Revolutionary Dance Movement in America
Isadora Duncan is generally seen as a precursor to rather than a participant in the radical dance movement that swept New York City and other parts of the country in the 1930s, but her influence on the movement was indelible, and her pilgrimage to Russia likewise set a precedent for left-wing dancers in the 1930s. The US movement is usually said to have begun with Edith Segal’s 1924 performance at the Lenin Memorial Pageant in Chicago, sponsored by the Workers’ (or Communist) Party. Draped in black, the twenty-two-year-old performed to Chopin’s funeral march and then removed her black outer garments to expose a red tunic, as “sadness and mourning gave way to a vision of energy and hope.”44
Segal, like most of the revolutionary dancers, was a child of Jewish immigrants who had been introduced to Duncan-style dance through settlement houses. Studying at Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement and then at the Neighborhood Playhouse with Alice and Irene Lewisohn, Segal became a leading proponent of the radical dance movement. She taught children on New York’s Lower East Side and at left-wing summer camps; organized a group of working-class New York women into the Red Dancers, who performed in union halls and various left-wing clubs; and became a regular performer at Communist Party functions, often performing dances on Soviet themes. Her Dance in Four Parts, for instance, based on the Lenin Memorial Pageant and created for the children she taught for twenty-five cents a month at the Ukrainian Hall, showed the Russian Revolution, the “building of socialism,” and Lenin’s death (and a memorial). At the end, the dancers formed a hammer and sickle.45
Among the revolutionary dances, Segal’s were probably the most baldly ideological, but her employment of Soviet themes was quite common in the 1930s. Sophie Maslow composed Themes from a Slavic People in 1934 and Two Songs about Lenin (inspired by the 1934 Dziga Vertov film Three Songs about Lenin) in 1935. Lillian Shapero, the director of Artef Dance Group, choreographed a program called One Sixth of the Earth (the population of the Soviet Union), which included a ballet set to Marc Blitzstein’s “Moscow Metro,” a song about electrification. The program was performed at a twentieth-anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik revolution in a packed Madison Square Garden in November 1937, just after Shapero had returned from performing at the Moscow Theatre Festival. And the Workers’ Dance League, an umbrella organization for various left-wing dance groups, in 1932 sponsored contests called “Spartakiades” derived from the Soviet alternative to the Olympics.46
Publications associated with the US Left such as Workers Theatre and New Theatre regularly discussed dance in the Soviet Union. “The training of a vast army of dancers among the great mass of the population is as important to the government as the training of any army of soldiers for defense. The bodies of the youth of the Soviet Union must be developed and disciplined, and dancing plays an important role in that training, aside from its cultural benefits,” noted one 1934 article.47
American critics admired the attention devoted to dance in the Soviet Union, and left-wing dancers in the United States clearly took inspiration from Soviet life and culture: from events such as the revolution, Lenin’s death (and life), and the collectivization of agriculture, to theatrical techniques such as Stanislavsky’s “method,” to the Soviet practice of mass dance. But it’s also clear that even US Communists were critical of trends in Soviet dance. “It is startling that people who have the finest and most advanced theatre in the world should have practically no new dance,” noted an article in New Theatre. Still, in Moscow “everywhere you feel the spirit of dance. . . . If we are ahead of them in dance form they are ahead of us in dance spirit.”48
Edna Ocko, Anna Sokolow, Edith Segal, Mary “Mignon” Garlin, Dhimah Meadman, Lillian Shapero, and Pauline Koner, all of them Jewish, followed the trail Duncan had blazed to Moscow. Each of them relished many elements of the Soviet “new life” but offered few praises for Soviet dance. Segal, who visited the Soviet Union in 1931, said the dance she saw there was “awful. . . . They hadn’t learned anything. . . . They had no background of modern dance.” Sokolow, who spent three months in Russia in 1934, felt Russian audiences didn’t understand her work (“they said I was not revolutionary”) and was herself unimpressed by Russian dance: “I said, ‘You get on the point and wave a red flag, I don’t call that being revolutionary.’”49
Mary Garlin (or Garland), who wrote and danced under the name Mignon Verne (or just Mignon), is unique in that what most impressed her in the Soviet Union was Duncan’s marked influence. Mignon had studied under Anna Duncan, one of Isadora Duncan’s adopted daughters and protégés. When students from Duncan’s Moscow school visited the United States in 1930 with Irma Duncan, Mignon was asked to show them around the city. Instead, she “took the Russian girls to her own studio and danced for them,” prompting an invitation to come to Moscow and study with them. When the girls were ordered back to Moscow before Irma could fulfill her contract, Irma asked Anna to loan her best students, and so Mignon began touring with Irma in the United States and Cuba.50
A year later, with a seventy-two-hour visa, Mignon showed up in Moscow, made contact with one of the Duncan students she had met in New York, and managed to get a six-month visa, which she renewed twice, allowing her to study and dance with the Duncan School in Moscow. After returning to New York, she participated in a mass recital and rally in Madison Square Garden demanding diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union. There, she met Edith Segal, Anna Sokolow, and other participants in the radical dance movement, whose spirit she appreciated, but whose dances she often criticized as lacking in artistic value.51
In the United States, Mignon started the New Duncan Dancers, which she consciously aligned philosophically if not formally with other radical dance companies: “These groups stand for dance art that is socially conscious,” she wrote in New Theatre, where she was dance editor. Reviewing trends in revolutionary dance in 1934, Mignon asserted, “The thinking dancer realizes that dance art to be significant must express the force of living reality, and that only by allying dance with revolutionary ideology can that reality be optimistic.” Mignon believed that “the [Duncan-style] Dance that expressed the love, the joy, the freedom and the profound emotions of all humanity” was revolutionary without needing ideological content per se. The New Duncan Dancers performed Soviet variations on Russian folk dances, a “Soviet cycle,” as well as a dance “celebrating the success of collectivization in the Soviet Union” called “The Kolkhozniki,” and they performed at a Recognition Rally for the Soviet Union at Bronx Coliseum.52
But like Duncan herself, the New Duncan Dancers were controversial. Some critics complained that the dancers were “not quite militant enough,” or, worse, that they were “appallingly ungifted, untrained, and inert.” “What do the Duncans with their flowing lines have to offer in a world of sharp conflict?” asked a May 1933 review.53
The New Dancer of the Future
Pauline Koner was of the same generation as Segal, Sokolow, and other leading figures in the revolutionary dance movement, but she was only tangentially connected to it. She grew up in a generally socialist milieu of immigrant Jews in New York City. Though not specifically trained in Duncan-style dance, Koner recognized Duncan as an early influence. In addition to ballet training with the Russian émigré Michel Fokine, a great admirer of Duncan’s, Koner studied Spanish dance with Angel Casino, a well-known teacher. At seventeen she had toured with Michio Ito, a dancer from Japan who had himself had been influenced by Duncan and the Ballet Russes and by Dalcroze’s eurhythmics.54
Koner’s eclectic training, exotic looks (long, dark hair, olive skin, and high cheekbones), and tremendous adaptability launched her reputation as an “ethnographic” or “neoethnic” dancer who performed dances based on a variety of traditions; many of her performances had a Far Eastern flavor, such as her roles as an Indian priestess in Nalamani (1930) and a Javanese temple dancer in Altar Piece (1930). Koner performed such dances in order to demonstrate her own universality, “or her ability to represent a variety of Others.”55
In 1932 and 1933, Koner spent nine months studying and dancing in Egypt and Palestine; a year later she went to the Soviet Union. Koner’s itinerary thus encompassed two of the most popular sites of pilgrimage for Jews in the 1930s, the former a place to be proudly Jewish, the latter a place to shed the burdens associated with Jewishness, as anti-Semitism was now officially outlawed (though still prevalent). While in Tel Aviv, Koner saw “young settlers from the kibbutzim, energetic, sunburned, work-steeled bodies, and minds honed by the difficulties of survival—a look of life in their eyes and a warmth in their heart. . . . The atmosphere breathed enthusiasm, hope, and progress.” Koner “felt vibrantly free, as if I had shed an invisible layer of skin, and proud of my Jewishness.”56
Koner was invited to the USSR after her parents had gone there and presented her press book to the Soviet concert bureau, Gometz. Possibly because of Koner’s training with Fokine, officials were enthusiastic and almost immediately offered a round-trip ticket and two-month contract with excellent pay. In the midst of the Depression, it sounded too good to be true.57 Moreover, both the ethnic variety encompassed by the Soviet Union and the ostensible universality of Communist internationalism promised to take Koner’s work in exciting new directions.
She was thrilled by the very idea of being in Russia (“I have to pinch myself to really believe I’m here,” she wrote shortly after her arrival). In her diary, Koner’s enthusiasm for Moscow is palpable: “I’m mad about Moscow has become a normal phrase for me. . . . It is the place for work for creative thought and for happiness. Its beauty at times is unbelievable.”58
She arrived in Moscow in December of 1934, just in time for Sergei Kirov’s funeral, which she watched from her hotel window. Koner’s arrival in Moscow at the moment of Kirov’s funeral offers a chilling counterpoint to the funeral cortege that Duncan claimed to have witnessed in Saint Petersburg, for Kirov’s assassination would become the main pretext for Stalin’s launch of the Great Terror. If Duncan witnessed the dawn of the Russian Revolution, Koner, without realizing it, was there for the beginning of its demise. Catching glimpses of the “sad but beautiful spectacle” that was Kirov’s funeral, a five-hour procession in which thousands of people participated, she could only note, “Russia has lost a great person.”59
Of course, Koner had many other things to be excited about. Within the first few weeks of her visit, she had already been to the Meyerhold theatre: “He has the facility of making anything, no matter how simple, into good theatre,” she wrote afterward. “His sense of movement is uncanny and his synchronization is perfect.” At the Masters of Art Club, she met and performed for Meyerhold, the film director Vsevolod Pudovkin, and other luminaries. She was a great success.60
At her public premiere in Leningrad on January 1, 1935, Koner had another experience that echoed Duncan’s. The lights did not arrive, and she became hysterical, refusing to dance. After a half-hour delay, Koner was forced to begin. “I almost went insane,” she noted in her diary. “The only way I forced myself to go through with it is by telling myself it would be a new experiment. If I could be successful with all these difficulties it would mean that my dancing even without all the theatrical necessities was what was necessary and successful.” The experiment proved a worthy undertaking. “People yelled bravo and this till I was deaf. Encore after encore. Finally at the end I improvised and that too went marvelously.” She did not weep tears of joy as Duncan had on the night the lights went out (“I was too tired and aggravated to be happy about it”), but the experience quickly taught her to appreciate Soviet audiences.61
For her official Moscow premiere on January 17, Koner had everything she needed, and now she danced with confidence. That concert was also a great success: “I have become famous all Moscow has begun to talk,” she wrote in her diary. In Leningrad, she gave several more performances, all well received. At the Theatre Club, which was open by special invitation to artists only, half the would-be audience could not even get in, and “at the end there was such enthusiastic and insistent applause that I almost cried with joy,” Koner recalled. “When artists acclaim another artist the victory is indeed great.”62
She was attending theatre and dance performances whenever she could but was largely unimpressed by Soviet dance—fueling her sense that she had something unique and important to offer. She saw non-Russian minorities dance in their native styles and found dances such as “the hunter’s dance, the duck dance, and the shaman” to be “primitive but interesting.” In contrast, she saw Russian attempts at modern dance as “banal” and without “nuance.”63
In Leningrad, Koner saw The Flame of Paris, supposedly a revolutionary ballet, but was disappointed. One “cannot create a new emotional reaction when presented with an old decadent style,” she noted. By late January, she was thinking about a long-term future in Russia. Although she’d never experienced “such serious active interest in forwarding the dance art,” she nonetheless believed “Russia needs a new form in its dancing.” After a long conversation with Valia, the interpreter and tour manager who had been assigned to her, Koner reflected that Soviet dance “knows what it wants as far as theme is concerned but its form is outdated. It’s up to me to get those together and I shall. All the plans that I vaguely had have materialized of themselves and I hope they shall continue to. My life is taking a completely new turn.”64
She was invited to a party at the Astoria hotel and found herself seated with the director Vsevolod Pudovkin and the poet, playwright, and scenarist Natan Zarchi. Pudovkin spoke English, which offered a welcome respite from constant efforts to speak in Russian, and he and Koner danced together “all evening.” “Could hardly believe he is close to 50,” she noted. She was up until 6:00 a.m. “The days are simply too short,” she complained. Koner and Pudovkin would begin spending many evenings together, dancing, talking endlessly.65
The late-night talking, the dances, the cultural activities, and the teaching seemed to fill Koner with energy. She gave a class to about twenty-five dance teachers in “oriental style,” “Spanish style,” “Fokine style,” and her own style. “People were thrilled,” Koner remarked. “This is what I came to Russia to do. Before I leave I shall be creating ballet and having a school of my own. I’m determined to and this is the chance of my life.” At a ballet performance, the director of the theatre said he’d like her to give a course at the Marinsky Ballet School, where Pavlova had trained. She had not expected the opportunity to come so quickly.66
While she found Soviet dance less than inspiring, Koner was deeply affected by other aspects of life in Russia. She was entranced by her visit to a factory: by the immensity of the machines and the workers’ interest and enthusiasm. Her diary contains a long, excited description of blast furnaces: “This when completed is forming the new world of Soviet Russia.” The visit “was a thrilling experience.” Like Duncan, she was deeply moved by the spectacle of a May Day parade, by the “electric currents vibrat[ing] in the air” as Stalin passed and by the rhythmic movements of marchers through the square. She described Red Square as “awe inspiring,” and the parades, red flags, and bands as “a Utopia.”67
Her conversations with Pudovkin were also deeply inspiring. “He is a strange, hysterical, but brilliant person and I may be able to get much inspiration from him.” Two days later, she noted the “tremendous impression” she made on Pudovkin during a concert that evening, and with excitement, she recounted a discussion with him and Zarchi about “how to attack thematic material.” The conversation was electric. “I am inspired and thrilled with new impetus to work. I am beginning to orient myself to this mode and have a strong notion that I shall spend a much longer period in Russia than I originally planned perhaps I shall even make my headquarters here,” she noted. Pudovkin, who emerged as one of the leading filmmakers of the Stalin era, and whom scholars have since accused of “devot[ing] his great talent wholly to the service of the Party,” helped convince Koner that her work should forward the goals of the revolution.68
As her two months were nearing their end, Koner decided she wanted to stay in Russia long term: “I am being convinced slowly but surely that Russia is the place for me,” she wrote. “The place where I can mold my future. It has the inspiration I need the possibilities I need.” Yet she felt something was missing in her life: “One thing I must find here . . . is a companion. It is unnatural for me to go on much longer without anyone to focus my affections upon and without anyone to stimulate me.”69
In fact, by this time she had already fallen for Pudovkin, who was not only twice her age but also married. “He seems to be quite interested in me,” she reported cautiously to her diary after a day filled with “pure fun,” and “snow, country hills crisp air and gay spirits,” followed by dinner. “But how can one judge the sincerity of men? They are immediately attracted by a pliable body and just as quickly find another.” She promised herself she would “be wary and not play the fool as I have so long done.” She was kidding herself.70
If she was only tentatively wading into the waters of romance, professionally Koner was moving forward full force. A performance on February 19 was part of a program to consider dance trends in relation to “the training of mass dance in the USSR.” Koner’s Dance of Longing, “a modern dance work to percussion accompaniment using my Chinese gongs and bells,” was discussed and critiqued: “That I was a real artist and fine musician as well as excellently technically equipped was agreed by all.” The filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, a member of the committee, praised her privately. “I have all intentions of getting down to serious work and creating a group here,” Koner noted after this workshop. “I am beginning to see clearly my plan and procedure and etc.”71
It took weeks to negotiate a contract, but in the meantime Koner continued to perform, finally securing a deal that guaranteed her the highest possible salary. The work was exhausting, and working conditions were far from ideal. Still, she was performing regularly before enthusiastic audiences, maturing as an artist, and eager to see more of the Soviet Union and study its varied cultures.72
And she was in love, against her “better judgment.” However, there was much to recommend Pudovkin: “He is a person whom I can admire, respect, and learn from. I do not feel as though I am only a body only something to give sensation. I am a person am respected as such and an artist. To talk! To lose oneself in a wild enthusiasm! In the hot surging flame of creation! To exchange thoughts and inspiration.” She vowed that if she got hurt she could always “drown [the hurt] in the sweat of my work.” Indeed, a poor performance a week later reminded her that she needed to prioritize that work: “Love pleasure happiness all must be secondary and only an alternative never the main issue. . . . I have to work, work, work! And I want to work. I’m aching to create new things better things great things.”73
She began a month-long tour that took her to the outskirts of Siberia, with Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) as her base. She visited cities “where Russian dancers rarely went,” at one point performing in a circus arena in Chlyabinsk, where she worried that a lion in one of the cages backstage might roar during the performance. After a few weeks, Koner became weary. She complained about the inefficiency and stupidity of the people around her. “I’m going crazy, losing all control of my nerves,” she reflected. “I’m just a bundle of shivering quaking nerves. Oh! I can’t go on like this. It is impossible.” Even a long-awaited letter from Pudovkin did little to settle her. She was having trouble finding decent food, and she felt tired and weak. She had developed a carbuncle under her arm, making it hard to move. She felt lonely, lost, exhausted, and eager to return to Moscow.74
But once back, Koner felt a new clarity. Her feelings for Pudovkin had tempered a long–running and almost debilitating obsession with her former dance partner Yeichi Nimura. Finding herself laughing at “what might be called an ardent love letter” from Nimura, Koner suddenly felt she had found her way. She was determined to “create the first great soviet dance art.” Although there were continuing contract problems, conflicts with her pianist, and challenges to Koner’s somewhat fragile nerves, that May seems to have been a turning point both in Koner’s work and in her relationship with Pudovkin. “Days in the country! Sunlight, grass, trees, water and love!! Yes, days of unbelievable happiness with Kin [Pudovkin]. Without unhappy associations. Days of real beauty and languor. At last I have learned what physical love really is. Kin respects me as a person and as an individual not only as a lover. We share ideas and plans.”75
One night Pudovkin related to her the plot of the scenario he was working on (“he could have paid me no greater compliment than to have taken me into the midst of his work,” she noted). But Koner was not destined to merely play muse to Pudovkin: part of his attraction for her was that their connection fed her creatively, professionally, emotionally, and physically. As she became more secure in her relationship with Pudovkin, she also gained more confidence in her own vision:
As for work, my greatest dream, my desire beyond myself has almost been realized. I shall have a school subsidized by the Russian government. . . . The thing I primarily came to Russia for. To complete what Duncan began. To create a great new art. The “proletarian dance art.” To learn myself and help others learn. The school shall not only have dance but shall have courses in all the affiliated arts: music, painting, sculpture, and literature. We shall make from the red style Russian ballerina a creative intelligent person who shall know dancing not as a trick but as an art.76
She was invited to dinner at the home of Andrei Goncharov, a portraitist. Pudovkin was at the dinner, but so was his wife, Anna Nikolaevna Zemtsova, a prominent film critic and actress. Koner found her attractive and intelligent, but did not feel threatened. “Instead I was exceptionally gay, happy and confident in the matter of comparison.” Pudovkin hardly spoke all evening. “I compared youth against age—sparkle against dullness, litheness against bluntness, life against lethargy,” Koner noted in her diary.77
On June 26, in Sverlovsk, Koner turned twenty-three. “Years are adding up and yet for twenty three I have already seen and done a great deal,” she told herself. Koner’s youthful exuberance both heightened her hopes and may have softened the blow when she determined her Moscow dance school was not to be. While still waiting for word about it, Koner received an invitation to teach dance at the Lesgaft Physical Culture Institute in Leningrad, whose program had the closest thing to modern dance in Russia.78
“Physical culture” (fizkul’tura) in the Soviet Union was one of the only arenas for movements that in the United States might be classed as modern dance, especially as nearly all private dance studios (Duncan’s was one of the few exceptions) were closed in April 1924 as part of an effort to centralize instruction. Physical culture emphasized the cultural dimensions of movement, especially gymnastics, which “taught not only discipline and control but also synchronization through group exercises believed to be capable of integrating and uniting individuals.”79
Koner was torn for weeks about whether to take the position at Lesgaft, because it meant giving up or at least delaying plans for opening her own school; it also meant being apart from Pudovkin. One night she called Pudovkin for advice and he, feeling unwell, asked her to come to his house. She wound up spending the evening with Pudovkin and his wife, telling them about her troubles, ultimately finding herself laughing hysterically at the whole situation. “Anna Nikolaevna felt so sorry for me and didn’t know the half of it,” she remarked to her diary.80 She decided to accept the appointment in Leningrad because it would allow her to develop as a dancer and a teacher. In fact, Koner’s real development as a choreographer in the Soviet Union began only once she became involved with the Lesgaft Institute. What Koner didn’t realize was that the appointment put her squarely within the Stalinist project of militarizing Soviet youth.81
Physical Culture and the “New Soviet Dance”
The Lesgaft Institute was named for the father of physical education in Russia, Pyotr Lesgaft, a biologist, social reformer, and education theorist who gave special attention to sport as a vehicle for “women’s social emancipation.” The institute’s program embodied the hybrid projects of physical culture and women’s empowerment under Stalin. A principal aim of the institute was to determine ways to “utilize physical exercise rationally to improve productivity,” which evolved to encompass, by the mid-1930s, military preparation. Physical culture was simultaneously a tool for cultivating “an individual with the harmonious development of mental and bodily strengths,” an instrument for building workers’ labor capacity, and a means of inculcating discipline and fitness for battle.82
Dance taught under the rubric of physical culture was to be collective, vigorous, and easily intelligible to the masses; these ideas inspired elements of the revolutionary dance movement in the United States but also echoed the totalitarian mass dances of Nazi Germany, which converted ausdruckstanz (expressive dance) into political spectacles. In the Soviet Union, mass spectacles became increasingly commonplace as a “new outbreak of festivity” accompanied intensification of “the purges and political repression of the Soviet elite.”83
Especially by the mid-1930s, Stalinism fostered women’s identities in what Westerners might construe as two competing arenas. On the one hand, women were encouraged to embrace motherhood and marriage. On the other hand, stories of women’s successes—in such varied fields as “aviation, defense, agriculture, industry, and sports”—helped define the country’s modernity. Young women were widely celebrated in Stalinist culture as full partners in industrialization and mobilization for a war that seemed increasingly imminent. Women’s displays of strength, agility, flexibility, and rhythm in physical culture parades can be seen as scripted but deeply felt performances of the new Soviet woman.84 That is to say, massive demonstrations of collective unity under Stalin could have expressed genuine feelings, even as they were orchestrated by authorities. Koner’s own compositions for Lesgaft students are telling in this regard.
The work at Lesgaft was all-consuming and exhausting but also incredibly stimulating. Koner’s teaching incorporated film as well as excursions to museums and concerts. Students were paid a stipend and were thus not distracted by the need to work. They seemed fully present, energetic, and full of excitement. They seemed, indeed, like new people. “The pupils of Leningrad are young and fresh, a new type of youth, Soviet youth. Full of enthusiasm, life and energy, full of a desire to work and strength to accomplish. They are bubbling with ambition.” The women were especially inspiring. Koner, not much older than her students, was likely enthralled by the “cult of the heroine” that showcased the new Soviet woman “as an emancipated representative of progress and modernization.”85
A Russian newspaper describes Koner teaching Foregger-inspired machine dances, but photographs show that Koner also embraced a more organic vision for the “new Soviet dance.” Images from what appears to be a rehearsal on the Leningrad beach show young people in bathing suits moving in unison or posed in evocative tableaux vivants. Their collective gestures suggest freedom, joy, possibility, and dynamism, recalling the style cultivated by German Ausdruckstanz and also echoing Pudovkin’s shots of expansive spaces with grasses swaying in the wind.86 Formations incorporate a primitively fashioned bow and arrow, sheets, and a crown of flowers worn by Koner. Dancers reach toward the sky, their arms gesturally repeating the leafy branches that several students grasp. Koner also dances solo, improvising for her students or perhaps for the photographer: she stretches, reaches, lunges, twists, kicks, bends, leaps, and even spirals in midair. Here we see something like an accommodation between Duncan-style “plastic dance” and Soviet physical culture.
The Lesgaft students inspired Koner to choreograph her first “Soviet” dance: “The theme is the triumphant joy the victory and hope of the new Russian Soviet life. My subject is the red flag. I do not dance one who sees carries or feels the flag, no, I dance the flag itself. All its movement and all for which it stands,” she noted, in language reminiscent of the American Pledge of Allegiance. Years later, Koner remembered the composition as “awful,” complaining she was too busy stimulating others to be genuinely creative herself, but this memory may have been colored by recognition that she had become increasingly mired in the question of what the “new Soviet dance” would, or should, be.87
Her goal was to express “the quintessence of emotional realism” through dance. But her notes are choppy, confused: “Find the definite themes such as the hope the health the youth the happiness of Soviet form . . . feeling of vigor delight of the new generation their desire to learn to grow to go ever higher and accomplish more. Yes that is the proper line to take.” Koner’s momentary certitude seems to crumble as she admits, almost in the same breath, that her emotional state is “very bad.” The work at Lesgaft was not enough to distract Koner from realizing the “impossibility” of her love for Pudovkin.88
Fig. 5.3 Pauline Koner with her students from the Lesgaft Physical Culture Institute. Pauline Koner papers, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.
Fig. 5.4 Pauline Koner dancing on the beach in Leningrad. Pauline Koner papers, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations. This image was used on the cover of Koner’s dance textbook, Elements of Performance (1993).
Resigned to let go of their relationship, Koner threw herself into work with renewed vigor. She was invited to propose a program for a 70,000-person physical culture parade, a visible manifestation of youthful fitness and discipline. She spent two days and nights working on what was her first attempt at “group choreography,” and her plan was accepted. “Hurrah! It means working like the devil but it will be worth it. I’m set to work twenty hours a day.” She recognized that the chance to “show this work to the highest government officials” could mean “the beginning of an important phase in my career.” But more important, she told herself, “it means interesting work for myself.”89
Koner’s memoir says almost nothing about the actual performance of her “Dance of the New Youth,” and her Russia diary ends before the performance amid her struggle over the “ideological correctness” of having the dancers create a star formation. “I felt it symbolized the force [of] the new generation. . . . But everyone was extremely wary of chancing criticism,” she lamented years later. She came up with an alternative that consisted, she claimed, of “just some brilliant movement that would catch the eye.”90 But this description is not entirely credible, as evidenced by several newspaper clippings in a scrapbook that Koner kept.
The Leningrad sports newspaper, Spartak, features a photo of the Lesgaft students’ performance beneath Stalin’s famous words, now evoked only as an ironic reminder of his regime’s duplicity: “Life has become better comrades. Life has become joyful.” A clipping from Pravda goes into greater detail, describing dancers in white, blue, yellow, orange, and red jerseys whirling and then freezing in place on a giant Soviet emblem of unspecified shape. The performance is said to take on “new power” as “the famous American dancer Pauline Koner” joins the students: “On the square rose a border pole. Suddenly there arrives a detachment of defenders of the Soviet borders. Unexpectedly, from an enclosure jumps a saboteur unit. With baited breath, all of the square expressed, through bayonets, the fervent courage of Soviet border guards. Here already gathered a handful of brave souls. The saboteurs rush the Soviet territory, but the new detachment of border guards turns out to cruelly resist them. The enemy is beaten. His pathetic remnants flee, etc. The victorious thunder ‘Oora!’”91
A month before the most famous Moscow show trials, an idealistic young woman trying to build her career and discover her true self in a foreign land choreographed and participated in a militaristic spectacle showing defenders of the Soviet borders crushing supposed saboteurs. “I had heard rumors that there were political trials going on, but knew very little about them,” Koner writes in her memoir, which suggests dissociation from political machinations. Later, she mentions the “Stalin purge” but says almost nothing about it.92
In an article Koner wrote for the left-wing New Theatre shortly after her return to New York, she mentions the title of the dance and the size of the parade, but claims that she was “sure of my viewpoint” and “firm against all opposition.” She never mentions that Stalin himself was in the audience. She also says nothing about the actual dance other than that her students were full of “the joy of life” and that the success of the parade had led to government orders that Lesgaft continue its work, thereby eliminating “a great chunk in the wall of opposition to the modern dance.” In her memoir all she says is that “the performance on the great Palace Square was quite a spectacle, and the newspaper reviews were excellent.”93
Koner left the Soviet Union shortly after the physical culture parade. She had planned to return to Lesgaft after a two-month holiday with her family in the United States, but when it came time to go back, she was denied a visa. Fewer foreigners were being admitted to the Soviet Union, and the climate was rapidly changing. Koner was disappointed, but she recognized that the real draw for her was Pudovkin, who could never fully give himself to her.94
Koner is not usually remembered as having any affiliation with the Left. But her Russian days clearly made their mark on her. She is open in her memoir about having had positive experiences in the Soviet Union, and the cover of her popular dance technique textbook shows her dancing, seemingly hanging midair, on the Leningrad beach, implying that this place and this moment was the culmination of her technical development. The FBI kept a file on her, but it noted only a handful of performances she gave in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the United States supporting the Soviet Union or Spain.95
What, then, do we make of the massive performance for Stalin, or her desire to create the “new Soviet dance”? Perhaps this entire project was, for her, another ethnographic act, an experiment in performing another persona, undertaken not as an expression of faith but as a chance for “interesting work” that would advance her career. Or maybe she found actual inspiration in the Stalinist project. Koner’s gravity-defying leaps on the Leningrad beach seem to defy the weight of the history they embody.
Isadora Duncan and the American modern dancers who followed her to the Soviet Union went with tremendous hopes that in witnessing a new society they themselves would be transformed, and that they could share with this society, particularly its young women, movement and techniques attuned to a revolutionary new era. Despite very different successes and disappointments, both Duncan and Koner cited their time in Russia and the Soviet Union as crucial to their work and their social conscience. But neither woman publicly acknowledged the personal or ethical concessions that were necessary to finding love and dancing revolution in Soviet Russia.
In between Duncan’s and Koner’s Russian days, a group of African Americans, eight women among them, would likewise come to Moscow to perform. Although their planned performance was called off, sharing in the drama of Soviet life was a deeply moving experience for them.