S. Hurok Presents; A Memoir of the Dance WorldHurok, Sol
History
S. Hurok Presents; A Memoir of the Dance World
Hurok, Sol
Ballet -- History
Smart New York had adopted the “Isadorables.” The fashionable magazines
had taken them up and had spread Dr. Arnold Genthe’s photographs of
Anna, Lysel, Gretl, Thérése, Erica, and Irma over their pages. Frank
Crowninshield championed them. During a hot June they sold out a
half-dozen performances in Carnegie Hall, which takes some doing at any
time of the year. Following a successful tour, I presented them at the
Metropolitan Opera House, this time with an orchestra.
The girls, charming, delightful, fresh, were a direct product of
Isadora, for which she used herself as model. Theirs was a reproduction
of Isadora’s art. One of them functions actively today, Maria Thérésa,
giving out a fine, strong, sturdy reflection of Isadora’s training and
ideas. Basically, as an individualist, Isadora was a solo artist. She
made no great effort to build up group dances into a series of linked
dances that result in some form of dance drama. Such mass dances as she
arranged were in imitation of the Greek chorus. Broken down into simple
elements, they were nothing more than lines of girls, all of whom
repeated the same simple movements. Her own creative gifts, which were
magnificent, found their expression in her solo dances, and it is in
this respect Maria Thérésa splendidly carries on.
It was in Germany that Isadora’s ideas made the deepest impression, and
any legacy she may have left finds its expression in the “free” school
that comes out of that country. If she had no abiding place, Berlin saw
more of her when she was at her best than any other country. It was
there that the term “goddess” was attached to her. Even the sick were
brought to see the performances of the _Göttliche Heilige_ Isadora in
order that they might be cured. The serious German writers were greatly
impressed. Isadora expressed it thus: “The weekly receptions at our
house in Victoria Strasse became the centre of artistic and literary
enthusiasm. Here took place many learned discussions on the dance as a
fine art; for the Germans take every art discussion most seriously, and
give the deepest consideration to it. My dance became the subject of
violent and even fiery debates. Whole columns constantly appeared in all
the papers, sometimes hailing me as a genius of a newly discovered art,
sometimes denouncing me as a destroyer of the real classic dance, i.e.,
the ballet.”
In _Impresario_ I have written about Isadora’s last American tour,
under my management, in all its more lurid aspects. In February, 1923,
she returned to France, and in 1924 went back to Russia with her
poet-husband, Essenin. Not long after, Essenin hanged himself to a hook
on the wall of his room in the Hotel Angleterre, in Leningrad. In 1927,
Isadora returned to Paris, and on 8th July gave her last concert at the
Théâtre Mogador.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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