St Petersburg полностью

Yuri Annenkov, a fine fellow, joined eccentricity, and our respect for him grew when he came to see us in striped pajamas (black and orange), in which he previously appeared in the circus, riding on the back of a donkey. Besides which, he can do handstands, tap dance, and draw smutty pictures. But that doesn’t matter! He wanted to get in on an exhibit of eccentric posters and we said: well, well, where were you before?110

But Kozintsev and Trauberg did invite Balanchine to teach dancing and acrobatics. Later one of the participants in FEKS, the talented actress Elena Kuzmina, recalled him as one of her favorite teachers. Other classes at FEKS included boxing, fencing, horseback riding, and “cinema gestures.” FEKS’s experimentation resembled (in some cases outstripped) the attempts by Meyerhold and the early Eisenstein. In a huge hall with marble figures in niches along the walls reflecting in a multitude of mirrors, students dressed in “feksosuits”—white shirts and black overalls with big breast pockets and wide shoulder straps—boxed, tumbled, and danced the foxtrot to piano accompaniment. Balanchine felt right at home.

Kozintsev declared in the FEKS manifesto: “The double soles of an American dancer are dearer to us than five hundred instruments of the Maryinsky Theater.” But for all that, Kozintsev and Trauberg were habitués of the Maryinsky. They were great fans of Lopukhov’s productions, including his revivals of the Tchaikovsky ballets, and they pressed Balanchine for the subtleties of classical dance. Balanchine, in his turn, shared the FEKS love of American movies.

It was then that Balanchine developed his taste for Westerns and American comedies with madcap chases. Even earlier, in the winter of 1920-1921, he was stunned by Griffiths’s film Intolerance, to which their progressive director, Andrei Oblakov, took the students of the ballet school. Long after the show, the young people continued to reenact scenes from the film. Balanchine would pretend to be King Balthasar and his partner, Lydia Ivanova, was “the girl from the mountains.”

At FEKS Balanchine learned as he trained the young artists; he became more casual, daring, and eccentric. There, he was assured that the love of supposedly “low” entertainment—music hall, circus, movies, and jazz—was not a sign of poor taste or aesthetic “backwardness.” On the contrary—that was the real avant-garde of the most audacious and potentially the most fruitful kind. The “Americanization” of Balanchine started at full speed at FEKS, long before he arrived in New York City.

Balanchine’s life, like that of Petrograd and all of Russia, changed sharply in the spring of 1921. After several years of total state control, Lenin—sobered by the explosion of anger and dissatisfaction in the country—decided to loosen the reins somewhat. He had been particularly shocked that when in March 1921 the sailors at Fort Kronstadt, not far from Petrograd, rose against the Bolsheviks, many people in the city supported them.

Petrograd was threatening to become the center of a new, anti-Bolshevik revolution. Lenin worried that a rebellion in that unpredictable city could once again change the fate of all Russia, so he decided to act first. On his orders, the Kronstadt uprising was cruelly suppressed, and then, using the carrot after the stick, he announced significant economic liberalization, which he called the New Economic Policy (NEP).

Retreating from his rigorous Communist ideals, Lenin once again allowed the existence of small private businesses. The effect of that decision was astonishing. Most food and fuel shortages evaporated. Many stores appeared, cafes and restaurants opened where, for the first time in almost four years, one could order a bottle of wine and have some pastry.

Numerous new private theaters, cabarets, and variety shows flung open their doors. Multicolored advertising reappeared on gray building walls. Currency speculators on Nevsky Prospect were selling dollars, pounds, and marks. There was something febrile in life under the NEP. Everyone sensed that this breathing spell could not last long, so people tried to get as much as possible out of it.

With their wives wrapped in expensive furs, the newly rich filled the casinos, restaurants, dance halls, and movie theaters springing up in the new environment. To amuse their clientele, the owners of these establishments needed floor shows—preferably with dancing, definitely made up of short numbers, and most certainly with an erotic motif.

One of the popular producers of this sort of entertainment in Petrograd under the NEP was Balanchine, who began choreographing short numbers for his friends while still in ballet school. As a dancer Balanchine was considered good but no one raved about him; some of his peers were much more popular with audiences. But as a choreographer, he gained a reputation very quickly.