|
Book
Review I, Maya Plisetskaya By Maya Plisetskaya
Yale University Press, 386 pages, $54.95 Isadora: A Sensational Life By Peter
Kurth Little, Brown, 617 pages, $42.95 The Russian Revolution was still a bleeding presence in the streets of Maya Plisetskaya, the great Russian ballerina,
came into the world just four years after Isadora naively pronounced Lenin's She writes these words in I, Maya,an
autobiography that is also a searing indictment of Soviet Russia, of
communism and of the blinding naivete with which the Isadoras
of this world have often approached her country. She is a ballerina who, at
77, has emerged as a respected artist of the Russian state. Vladimir Putin himself pinned her with the medal of service in
2000, her country's highest honour. This is her dead father's sweetest
revenge. Plisetskaya's memoirs invariably describe a life
in dance. But the book's biggest value lies in being much more than that. I,
Maya is social history written by a dancer who transcends the mute language
of her art to tell a universal story of suffering and endurance. The thud of
irony continually disrupts the mellifluous strains of Tchaikovsky that sound
in the background of a career that spanned 50 years. "I would like to
talk about Sleeping Beauty and Isadora never lived to know Stalin. She died in 1927, tragically -- but
spectacularly -- when the 18-inch fringe of her red shawl caught in the
spokes of a sports car, snapping her neck when the wheels made their first
high-speed turn. She was 50. Who knows what she might have said of Plisetskaya's scourge -- that he was a handsome devil?
(She could never resist the charms of a man, any man, no matter his age,
station, ethics or sanity.) She may well have been benevolent. Peter Kurth's Isadora: A Sensational Life,the
first definitive biography written of the woman who did for movement what
Picasso did for visual art, presents an image of her as a kind of forgiving,
albeit earthy, Madonna. Meticulously researched, exhaustively detailed,
intelligently and bouncingly written, with an eye to the larger social and
historical trends that enabled a genius like Isadora to make such an
explosive impact on the development of 20th-century art, Kurth quotes source
after source who saw her as the reincarnation of the Great Mother figure. She
nurtured and she destroyed. Carnal urges drove her -- she lived toward the
end of her life on a diet of booze and boys. But she was awesome, sacred as a
cloud-ringed mountaintop. "I understood all these passions in her as I
could say I understood thunder, or a hurricane, or, in the case of her love
affairs, as I understood a great cosmic maternal urge," said Mercedes de
Acosta, the princess of American literary lesbians and one of Isadora's
conquests. "Isadora was always the great mother in all her expressions
of love." Her ecstasy and her agony were her own children, Deirdre ("Beloved of
Compounding her misery was a third child, conceived eight months after the
children's terrible death. The baby perished in her arms 20 minutes after its
birth, on the day Her art buoyed her, and several times saved her from absolute ruin. Dance
was, in her, alive as the flame of life. She was born in Her inspiration thoroughout her life was the
ancient Greeks, whose friezes of free-flowing dance she emulated, along with
the wearing of diaphanous chitons and bare feet on
the stage -- in her day a scandal. She even adopted their myths. She was
Iphigenia in performance, Aphrodite in real life: "I am a pagan." Yet she disliked being called simply a dancer. "I am an expressioniste of beauty. I use my body as my medium,
just as the writer uses his words. Do not call me a dancer." Kurth
quotes her in support of his declaration that his biography is not a dance
book: "Isadora needs rescuing from dancers -- more particularly from
dance scholars, whose ideas on her impact and contribution to the art rise
frequently to a brilliance of their own but who speak in a language she
didn't know, about a subject she dismissed out of hand." His aim is to show her instead as the Muse of Modernism (the title of a
1998 Isadora Duncan exhibition at the Plisetskaya's book, written independently of
Kurth's, of course (the original Russian version came out in 1994), is what
we read to find out what happens next, both in terms of Russia's ruination
under a series of brutal tyrants and Isadora's smouldering
legacy. Plisetskaya was too young to see Isadora
perform, but in her memoirs she speaks admiringly of her. (For all her
mistrust of the ballet, Isadora influenced it profoundly; she is responsible
for the the 20th-century dance awakening known as
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, as one example.) Plisetskaya says she read the dancer's 1927
autobiography, My Life,calling it "a fiery
book." She used it as research for a new ballet, created for her by
Maurice Bejart in 1979, and called simply Isadora.
Through contemporary choreography, the dance captures her time in
post-Revolutionary The ballet was a triumph for Plisetskaya, who
notes in her book the irony of her performing the premiere at the age of 50,
in Isadora might in theory have disliked the fact that her foe, the ballet,
was capitalizing on her life. But she was too grandiose in nature not to have
the generosity of spirit to appreciate the gesture (and the narcissist in her
would surely have loved it). As she said herself, "I have but opened a
door. This door must never be allowed to close." No matter that it is a
Soviet ballerina, with diametrically opposed political beliefs, who is doing
the holding. Dance is what unites them, as it has the arts throughout time in
sympathetic partnership. "She dances because she is full of the joy of life," Isadora
writes in her essay, A Child Dancing. "She dances because the waves are
dancing before her eyes, because the winds are dancing, because she can feel
the rhythm of dance throughout the whole of nature." Deirdre Kelly, The Globe and Mail
dance critic from 1985 through 2001, is now a features writer and fashion
reporter. |