"It Must Be Preserved": Adolph Bolm's Revival of Le Coq d'Or

Upon the death of the impresario Serge Diaghilev in 1929, the Russian dancer-choreographer Adolph Bolm (1884–1951) penned a retrospective for an American publication, The Dance Magazine. Drawing from his tenure as premier danseur with the Ballets Russes from 1909 to 1917, he wrote of the late impresario's character, accomplishments, and influence on the art world at large. The now-familiar tropes were rehearsed: Diaghilev was an autocratic "genius of the theater," whose persistence and unfailing taste reinvigorated ballet in the West; Diaghilev mobilized Europe's leading artistic figures for ballet, revolutionizing music and the scenic arts along the way; Diaghilev shone the spotlight on the male dancer and fostered the careers of the era's leading Russian choreographers. Bolm ended his tribute with a simple, but imperative, appeal to his readers: "Diaghileff left a great legacy to the world of art, and it must be preserved."¹

How does one preserve a legacy? More crucially for Bolm, how does one preserve the legacy of a figure celebrated for his monumental impact on ballet, an artform notorious for its ephemerality? This question has long troubled dance-makers, old and new, from the fields of concert dance to folk dance.² Diaghilev himself set up obstacles to these efforts by refusing to allow Ballets Russes productions to be filmed and failing to have the company's choreographic works routinely notated. Nevertheless, the impresario's trace remains in the vast array of musical scores, artworks, and photographs he commissioned during his career. The impressions he left on dancers, musicians, artists, and other contemporaries remain in the myriad memoirs written by those in his circle. More recently, the plethora of material in these sources, as well as countless archival collections around the globe, have been unpacked by diligent scholars, critics, librarians, museum curators, festival organizers, filmmakers, ballet directors, and balletomanes. Several Ballets Russes works have also reappeared on stages, reconstructed with archival materials by the self-described "dance detectives" Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer and creatively reimagined by choreographers such as Alexi Ratmansky. Today Diaghilev's legacy is palpable, his influence on arts and culture widely acknowledged.³

For the grieving Bolm, the matter was more urgent. In his essay, he shared a hope that the Ballets Russes enterprise would carry on in the absence of its impresario, so the productions created under Diaghilev's watchful eye could survive through institutional and embodied memory. "Let us hope," he wrote, "that his organization will continue to work and to show the latest ballets to those who have not yet had the opportunity of seeing them."⁴ This, of course, did not happen. Diaghilev was the glue that held the Ballets Russes together, and without his shrewd management, his circle of dancers scattered across the globe in search of new work. This did not lead to the immediate disappearance of the company's choreographic output, nor did it blunt Diaghilev's influence, as Bolm feared. Rather, it initiated the diffusion of both. With the geographic movement of dancers' bodies, each imprinted with his or her own unique experience and relationship to Diaghilev and his company, there was a migration of a legacy, fractured and in various forms, translated and reinterpreted for its new contexts.

Bolm's own preservation work started long before the impresario's death. A graduate of Saint Petersburg's Imperial Ballet School, he had been the lead character dancer with the Ballets Russes for eight years, during which time he took such iconic (and sometimes racially and ethnically troubling) roles as Prince Ivan Tsarevich in Firebird (Fokine/Stravinsky), the Moor in Petrushka (Fokine/Stravinsky), Pierrot in Carnaval (Fokine/Schumann), and Darcon in Daphnis and Chloe (Fokine/Ravel). His most celebrated character was the virile Chief Warrior in the Polovtsian Dances from Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor (choreographed by Fokine); a performance of this work at the Châtelet Theater in 1909 reportedly whipped Parisian audiences into such a frenzy that they ripped out the orchestra rail. It was Bolm, not his better-known colleague Vaslav Nijinsky, who was the...