Remembering Galina Ulanova - Column

Dance Magazine, June, 1998 by Clive Barnes

As we wearily end the century, those lists will be drawn up, those assessments will be made--who was the greatest this, who was the greatest that. The world is about to be made a testing ground for that Great Guinness Book of Records in the Sky, so get ready all your judgments and superlatives. I am continually being asked who the greatest ballerina of the twentieth century was, and it's extraordinarily difficult to answer. For one thing, one is always trying to compare the apples of expression with the oranges of classic style. And then there are the grapes of technique and the bananas of imagination. How does one choose--how does one compare--amid the infinite varieties of genius, of accomplishment?

As far as ballerinas are concerned, I suppose that one can make a short list. It would have to include, I imagine, Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, and Olga Spessivtseva, all of whom I have only seen on film--although I did once see Karsavina perform mime scenes from Le Corsaire, among other ballets, and that was a dance lesson in itself. However, I have actually seen, with the exception of Marina Semyonova, all the other contestants for greatness in this century and although many appeal, particularly Alicia Markova, Alexandra Danilova, Yvette Chauvire, and Maya Plisetskaya, I think I would have to choose Margot Fonteyn and Galina Ulanova.

Fonteyn did more to popularize the art of ballet than anyone else in this century, except possibly Pavlova, and, thanks to the unique opportunity afforded by that movie The Red Shoes Moira Shearer. And Ulanova was Ulanova. Obviously Ulanova, who recently died in Moscow at the age of eighty-eight, was one of the greatest ballerinas of this century, whose ability to inject character and project humanity through the basic mechanics of the classic technique had an incalculable impact on world dance. Ulanova, best remembered in the West for her enduring and indelible characterizations of the doomed heroines Giselle and Juliet (the role she created in Leonid Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet), was the sensation of the Bolshoi Ballet's first appearances outside Russia, in London in 1956, and in New York City three years later.

Although she was nearly fifty when she first appeared in the West, the years slipped away when she danced, and the world stood still. This St. Petersburg ballerina--she was trained at the Vaganova school, and was originally with the Kirov Ballet before being moved to Moscow's Bolshoi on the express orders of Josef Stalin--had the gift of transfixing reality and submerging herself in the dance. Her heroic miniature of The Dying Swan was unforgettable, so different in feel, plastique, and emotion from the more lyrical interpretation (which surely followed Pavlova's original) of her Western contemporary and rival, Markova.

I saw her dance very little in person, and never after 1956. She retired from dancing in 1962, although she never left the Bolshoi, working as a teacher, and more particularly as a coach, until shortly before her death. I saw every performance she gave in London, and note from an old diary that this amounted to four performances as Juliet, two as Giselle, and three in The Dying Swan. Her Juliet can be glimpsed (not fairly but vaguely) in a 1954 Soviet movie, but a slightly better impression of her in the other two roles can be obtained from Paul Czinner's still-available The Bolshoi Ballet, actually filmed at these 1956 performances.

I can recall her dancing with great clarity, but rather than attempt to summon it from forty-year-old memories, let me quote a little of what I wrote at the time in the magazine Dance and Dancers. Of her Juliet: "Ulanova was everything I ever hoped she could be. One was hardly conscious of her dancing, while her acting was so completely without artifice that even to call it acting is somehow to disparage it. She was a young girl caught up in virginal passion."

Writing of her Giselle, I said: "Ulanova moves me as much as life itself. After nearly twenty years of watching plays, films, opera, and ballet and listening to music, I would say that her Giselle is the greatest performance by an interpretive artist within my experience. Her greatness lies not in what she does, but in what she is. Her dancing has lost the spring of youth, and one notices this fact with a sort of objective interest. Her art defies description because the analysis of it detracts from its naturalness. As Giselle, she showed every nuance of emotion--in her face, yes, but more than in her face, in her spirit. Everything the Russian critics have written about her is true. The impeccable technique, the expressive body, the intellect, the informed face--it is all true; yet somehow it could be equally true of a lesser artist. Ulanova has something criticism could never define, something you might look for in Shakespeare's sonnets."

Finally, of her Dying Swan, I wrote: "I found her immensely moving--the womanly swanlike grace, the weaving, fluttering arms, the never underlined pathos. Some found the abrupt collapse at the end inartistic. At first sight I was somewhat nonplussed, but seeing it later the heroism that was implied by this sudden final weakening seemed a nobler end than the more customary plaintive death agonies."