(posted 7077 days ago)Times
December 02, 2004Alicia Markova: The Times obituary
Alicia Markova was still two months short of her twentieth birthday when British ballet effectively began in October 1930 with the foundation of the Ballet Club (which later became Ballet Rambert) and the first performances of the Camargo Society. This was a producing organisation which put on special programmes bringing together all available local talent, including Rambert's dancers and those of Ninette de Valois, who were soon to become the Vic-Wells Ballet although at that time still only supplementing the operas at the Old Vic.The teenage Markova already had experience in leading roles with Diaghilev's Russian Ballet; she was blessed with a phenomenal technique and beautiful style. Inevitably, she became the first ballerina of all these emerging ventures. Just as inevitably, they were unable, with their limited resources, to contain her talent for long and she left for international fame. Most of her career was spent touring the world at the head of various companies and later as a guest star. However, her presence at a critical time proved invaluable in founding a British ballet tradition, not only by attracting audiences to the early efforts of the young companies but by the inspiration she provided both to creative artists and to other dancers.
To a later generation, Markova's fame has been hidden by the universal admiration for Margot Fonteyn; but Fonteyn, a decade younger, was one of the dancers who learned much from Markova's example, and while they were both working there was no need for rivalry between them because their gifts were different and complementary.
Lilian Alicia Marks, born in Stoke Newington, north London, had as a child shown an early interest in theatre, music and dancing, encouraged by her Irish mother. But her first formal lessons in "fancy dancing" were taken on medical advice to correct weak feet and legs. She revealed an astonishing facility and at ten earned the considerable sum of £10 a week as principal dancer in the pantomime Dick Whittington at Kennington Theatre, billed as "Little Alicia, the Child Pavlova".
This unwise sobriquet caused Alicia and her mother to be angrily turned away when they first applied for her admission at the age of 11 as a pupil of Seraphine Astafieva, the leading teacher in London; but the child's tears led to an audition and acceptance. In Astafieva's studio in the King's Road, Chelsea, her serious education began; here too she first met Anton Dolin, with whom her career was to be closely linked, and she was shown off to Serge Diaghilev.
When the Marks family was in straitened circumstances following the sudden death of her father (a mining engineer of Polish ancestry), it was Astafieva who persuaded Diaghilev to consider the child, still only 14, for his Russian Ballet. After a long audition with his new choreographer, George Balanchine, she was accepted.
Diaghilev renamed her Markova and placed her at first in the care of Ninette de Valois, whose initial reluctance to be saddled with the little brat quickly turned to the beginning of a lifelong friendship and mutual admiration.
Markova was so tiny that it was difficult to cast her except in carefully chosen solos. In her first season, Balanchine created for her the role of the Nightingale in his Chant du Rossignol; he also made solos for her in the world premiere of Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges. There were child roles she could play in La Boutique Fantasque, Petrushka and Aurora's Wedding (as Red Riding Hood) and she was given Papillon's solo in Le Carnaval. Later she grew sufficiently to be put into the corps de ballet, which Diaghilev thought an essential step in her development, but she also danced leading parts for him in Balanchine's La Chatte , Massine's Cimarosiana and (laying the foundations of her future fame in classic roles) the "Bluebird" pas de deux and a single performance of Swan Lake Act II.
On Diaghilev's death in 1929 the company broke up. Markova returned to London and had no employment, except for a three-month opera season in Monte Carlo, until Frederick Ashton invited her to appear in dances he was doing for Nigel Playfair's production of Marriage à la Mode at the Lyric, Hammersmith. With the beginnings of regular ballet seasons by British dancers later that year, Markova was immediately in heavy demand, and she became Ashton's first muse. At the Ballet Club and for the Camargo Society he made a great many highly contrasted roles for her: among them the title part in his languorously poetic La Pen, the witty polka in Façade (ending with a double tour en l'air in point shoes which nobody attempts nowadays), a sexy Creole girl in Rio Grande, the insolently proud ballerina in Foyer de Danse, the immensely chic and naughty lady friend in Les Masques, and the tragic Marguerite in Mephisto Valse. Many of these and the other roles she took then and later brought out a gift for shrewd comic characterisation far removed from the pure classic perfection for which she was most widely celebrated.
The tiny fee which was all Rambert could afford was only enough to keep Markova in ballet shoes; to support herself while immersed in constant rehearsals and performances she also had to dance three times a day between films in a cinema at Marble Arch, the choreography again by Ashton. During 1932 Markova began dancing sometimes for de Valois's company at Sadler's Wells, too, and staged Les Sylphides for them (the first evidence of her exceptional memory for choreography, which was largely based on her great musicality). In 1933 Markova and Ashton both joined the Vic-Wells Ballet. The first role he made for her there was in Les Rendezvous, a triumphant display of her wit, charm, romantic lyricism and brilliant technique.
Markova's arrival as her regular ballerina enabled de Valois to begin mounting the old classics: The Nutcracker, Giselle and Swan Lake. These were to provide a staple of Markova's repertoire from then on. For many years her Giselle was acknowledged as the best in the western world, unrivalled for the tragic depth of her acting, her phrasing of the solo in Act I (which with lesser dancers could look blatantly superficial) or the illusion of ethereality she brought to the second act. But the apparently less profound ballerina role in The Nutcracker almost equally revealed her supreme artistry, with its crystalline delicacy and beautiful detail.
During this early period of her career Markova performed for other choreographers too, most notably in ballets by de Valois, who created for her the wickedly vulgar, riotously funny role of La Goulue in Bar aux Folies Bergères as well as the gullible pure young girl in The Rake's Progress.
In the summer of 1935 Mrs Laura Henderson, the owner of the Windmill Theatre with its undressed revues, underwrote a West End season and a provincial tour proposed and organised by her manager, Vivian van Dam, for the Vic-Wells Ballet with Markova and Dolin as its stars. This led to the idea of their starting the Markova-Dolin Ballet which toured successfully for two years with a repertoire including Nijinska's Les Biches, with Markova as the ambiguous person in blue, and what may have been the first murder-mystery ballet, Keith Lester's Death in Adagio, where, wearing a blonde wig, she was improbably but enjoyably cast as a homicidal typist. But the strain of eight performances a week prompted Markova in 1938 to accept Leonide Massine's invitation to join the new Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Her new roles there included creations in two of Massine's symphonic ballets, Seventh Symphony (Beethoven) and Rouge et Noir (Shostakovich No 1).
Markova's commitments with the Ballet Russe resulted in her finding herself in America during the Second World War and (with no obvious work for her at home) she joined Ballet Theatre in 1941, creating further roles including Princess Hermilia in Michel Fokine's last ballet, Bluebeard, the gypsy Zemphire in Massine's Aleko, and Juliet in Antony Tudor's hauntingly beautiful Romeo and Juliet to music by Delius. She also played Taglioni in Dolin's Pas de Quatre with a subtle mixture of charm and aloofness that eluded all successors, as did too her apparent ability to soar across the stage with no regard for the power of gravity. During her Ballet Theatre days, Markova took time off to dance with Dolin in the world premiere of Stravinsky's Scènes de Ballet for a revue, The Seven Lively Arts, and to tour central America with a new Markova-Dolin group. Further tours with this group followed, and guest appearances with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where John Taras created Camille for her (in beautiful costumes by Cecil Beaton), and de Basil's Original Ballet Russe, where she appeared in one of Jerome Robbins's early works, Pas de Trois.
These occupied her time until she and Dolin reintroduced themselves to British audiences through a guest season with the Sadler's Wells Ballet at Covent Garden, summer 1948, during which they both danced the full Sleeping Beauty for the first time. Next they pioneered the use of vast arenas for ballet (long before similar opera presentations) with seasons at the Empress Hall and at Harringay; these were followed by long tours with a supporting group as a forerunner of Festival Ballet which they founded (and Markova named) in 1950. Injuries forced Markova to leave the company in 1952 and subsequently she worked entirely as a guest artist and in concert performances, continuing however to take on new roles including Bournonville's La Sylphide which she danced with the de Cuevas company. Among her wide-ranging appearances at this time were programmes with the Indian dancer Ram Gopal, others with Pilar Lopez and her Spanish company, an Italian opera season at Drury Lane, and Ruth Page's ballets The Merry Widow and Revanche (based on Il Trovatore ) in Chicago.
Markova's last stage appearance was in 1962, but even she did not realise that until, interviewed at Heathrow on January 1, 1963, en route for New York while recovery from a tonsillectomy, she said without premeditation that her new year resolution would be to stop dancing. Following this decision, Markova became from 1963 to 1970 the director of ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, and subsequently lectured at the University of Cincinnati. Even in later retirement she still staged ballets (especially Les Sylphides, which she had studied with its choreographer, Fokine) and coached dancers in some of the roles specially associated with her. Her enthusiasm remained undimmed, especially for the many activities she undertook to help the progress of young pupils studying ballet.
She was appointed CBE in 1958 and DBE in 1963. Her book Giselle and I, published in 1960, records her thoughts and experiences of her best-known part, and her reminiscences Markova Remembers (published 1986) provide a remarkably frank, informal account of her career, written with a lively humour surprising to those who knew her only in more formal circumstances. Her oft-time partner Dolin also interrupted his own stream of autobiographies for a book on her: Markova, Her Life and Work.
A dancer's work is ephemeral and no worthy record of Markova's dancing remains on film, although some of her masterclasses were shown on television. But her performances all over the world brought pleasure to innumerable spectators, and her example fired many young dancers to follow the career she herself irradiated with such lustre.
Dame Alicia Markova, ballerina, was born on December 1, 1910. She died on December 2, 2004, aged 94.