The resurrection of a genius - Leonid Jacobson - Biography

This month's 100th birthday celebrations for George Balanchine have overshadowed the centenary of another path-breaking choreographer, another son of St. Petersburg. He was Leonid Jacobson and his story is one of the wonders and tragedies of the history of Russian ballet.

A recent visit to St. Petersburg revealed promising signs of a reemergence of Jacobson's work and legacy after decades of neglect. Jacobson discovered dance at the age of 16 when he glanced in the window of a small ballet school. He soon entered a special evening program for "older" dancers at this school, St. Petersburg State Ballet School (later the Leningrad State Ballet School) without ever having seen a dance performance.

By 1925, Jacobson had progressed to the point where his teacher, Alexander Chekrygin, arranged for him to transfer to daytime classes. He graduated the following year with another talented classmate, Georgi Melitonovich Balanchivadze, (whom Serge Diaghilev would later rename George Balanchine). Jacobson immediately joined the State Theater of Opera and Ballet, which became the Kirov in 1935. A compact and muscular youth, he excelled at grotesque and caractere roles with the Kirov but he was always more interested in choreographing than in performing. He worked as a choreographer at the Bolshoi Ballet from 1933-1942 and at the Kirov from 1942-1969.

Despite the popularity of his works, Soviet authorities consistently disapproved of Jacobson's stylistic innovations, which ranged from the neo-classically cool and plotless Exercises XX to the vivid realism of Spartacus, with its turned-in positions, naturalistic poses and avoidance of pointe work. Rather than full-evening dances, Jacobson's principal medium was the short ballet, or choreographic miniature, the name he later gave to a suite of dances as well as to the company he finally secured in 1970 after a twenty-year battle to gain permission from authorities.

Jacobson died in 1975, at the age of 71, and his company passed to a former dancer, Askold Makarov, who renamed it The State Ballet of Leningrad. Regretfully, Makarov demonstrated little regard for Jacobson's work. Two years ago, Yury Petukhov, 50, was named artistic director and today the company continues to rehearse in the studios Jacobson built on the site of a former stable for circus horses. With the assistance of two of Jacobson's former dancers, Petukhov, who never met Jacobson, is slowly restaging a few of Jacobson's ballets. Irina Jacobson, widow of the choreographer and a respected international ballet teacher and regisseur, has also been an important part of these revivals. An informal studio showing of Jewish Wedding and parts of Rodin suggested they are recapturing not just the musicality of Jacobson's steps but the deep poignancy and daring of the original work as well.

"I think he was a genius," Petukhov says of Jacobson. Initially he had some reservations about how contemporary Russians would receive these ballets, which were cutting edge thirty, years ago. "I wanted to be sure audiences today would still find his work interesting before I started to revive a lot of it," he said over late afternoon tea in his office above Jacobson's old studio. To test the ballets' durability, Petukhov arranged for several trial performances to gauge the public's reaction. The response was dramatic and unequivocally enthusiastic.

Americans will soon have the opportunity to discover Jacobson for themselves. Choreographic Miniatures will tour the United States in January 2005.

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