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Dance Lines: Articles
Child of Theatre Street
by Lara Ladre with Nancy Whyte
book originally published in 1993
All Rights Reserved *
"The very first ballet I ever saw was as a little girl before the Revolution. I was taken to see Kchessinskaya in "Don Quixote". She was the first of the Russians to turn 32 fouette turns like the Italians did, and she did them when I saw her. She was fantastic. I remember it very clearly. Unlike most little girls, I had no desire, upon seeing her, to be a ballerina myself. Not in my family. We only watched.
"It was all very long ago, so it's hard to bring it forth in an orderly way, because, strangely enough, life as I really remember it begins mostly with the Revolution. Maybe because it was such a shock. Before that, I can remember the beginnings of the war. Those are things that stay in a person's memory.
"The famous ballerina of the Maryinsky (now the Kirov ballet), Karsavina, was a beautiful woman. She became my fairy godmother. At the time of the Revolution, the schools were coed which was not at all as it had been before. I was tall, and there were many unfortunate things happening in the schools. Madame Karsavina said to my mother, a friend of hers, "Why don't you put her in the school?" That's how I became a dancer.
The day of the audition to get into the Maryinsky Theatre School there were well over a hundred who were there. I was one of the ones accepted. Altogether there were fourteen of us taken. In that time of famine, not all of them lived to graduate.
"Somehow, despite the hardships of the Revolution, at the Theatre Street School, we kept on. We had nothing because of the Revolution. The very first year we danced in felt slippers, but after that we had pointe shoes, and they were very terrible shoes, not at all like the Nicolini shoes we had later on with Diaghilev. The rooms were at zero because there was no fuel. Our ears would get frostbite. Our hands would be painfully swollen from the cold, but still we kept on. No matter what, we kept on dancing.
"We were the first class given to Vaganova. We were her guinea pigs, and we were the class she used to develop her teaching ideas. With her the school went up and up and up. She produced wonderful dancers from my class.
"The first Balanchine creation I remember seeing was in the summer of 1922 when he was still in school. It was his first creation which he danced with Olga Mungalova, to Rubenstein's "The Night". It was VERY DARING, and the head mistress forbad us to watch rehearsals. Of course we did! It was a sensation. The music was delightful, and I played it on the piano all the time after that..."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Lara Ladre, with the serendipitus luck which would be with her her whole life, left Russia in 1923, and joined the Diaghilev ballet in 1924. She danced with the de Basil Russe from it's inception in 1932 until she and her husband Marian Ladre left the company in 1946. They opened their school in Seattle in 1948, which closed in 1998 with the death of Illara Ladre.
Watch for future excerpts from this fascinating book!!!
*All Rights Reserved. All writings on these pages are copyright by Nancy Whyte, and may be reproduced whole or in part only with her written permission.
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Created: 01-29-07 Last Updated 12-20-07