Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

The Last Conversation

In 1947 Sergei Eisenstein choreographed a miniature ballet. Since Eisenstein was a man of the theater and a visual artist as well as a filmmaker , it should not surprise us that he also ventured into the world of dance, although he had no formal dance training. That he should do so, however, while suffering from acute heart disease, about a year before his death, is rather surprising. This miniature ballet was a duet created for and with the Bolshoi dancers Susana Zviagina and Konstantin Rikhter (Rikhter had appeared in the Dance of the Oprichniki in the film Ivan the Terrible, Part Two). Entitled The Last Conversation, the dance was set to a musical pastiche (apparently created by Eisenstein himself) and was based on the final scene of the Bizet-Mérimée opera Carmen. The Last Conversation was a ballet in the general sense—that is, a theatrical dance. A brief variety show duet—what dance people call a “concert number”—rather than a full-scale ballet, it made use of typical 186 k The Last Conversation Eisenstein’s Carmen Ballet : Paper presented at the “Eisenstein: Texts and Contexts” conference, Oxford, England, 1998 Spanish-style character dancing from the ballet repertory, but removed from the usual three-act ballet framework in which those steps are usually embedded as a contrast to the classical ballet dancing. The dance embodies Eisenstein’s abiding interest both in Spanish culture and in popular entertainments as a source for movement in both theater and film. According to Zviagina, who described her work with Eisenstein in a 1979 article in Sovietskaya Musika, during the shooting of the Dance of the Oprichniki in Ivan, “[Rikhter] . . . began to catch [Eisenstein’s] attention .”1 She tells us that after Eisenstein had a heart attack in February 1946, she and Rikhter visited him often at the Kremlin Hospital, and he began to plan a dance for them. During the summer of 1946, when Eisenstein moved to his dacha in Barvikha, Zviagina and Rikhter called on him regularly. They spoke often about art, and Zviagina recalls that “[he] made us look around with more perceptive eyes and find something new everywhere. He made us understand people and events differently.” By the fall, Eisenstein was back in Moscow, where he often went to the Bolshoi Theatre (at which theater he had, in 1940, directed a production of Wagner’s The Valkyrie). Apparently Eisenstein was an avid ballet spectator. According to Zviagina, he considered Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, to music by Prokofiev, with Galina Ulanova as Juliet, a work of genius. When Zviagina danced the role of the Basque heroine Thérèse in Vainonen ’s Flames of Paris, about the French revolution, Eisenstein summoned the dancer to his apartment, criticized everything about her performance , and then coached her on her makeup, hairstyle, costume, and onstage behavior. It was at the Bolshoi Theatre, seeing his two young friends in a Spanish gypsy dance in the ballet Don Quixote, that the idea for The Last Conversation began to germinate. The ballet Don Quixote is a staple of the Russian ballet repertory. A nineteenth-century classic based on an episode in Cervantes’s novel, set to music by Minkus, it had been rechoreographed by Rostislav Zakharov in 1940. (It was Zakharov who worked on the dances and movements in Ivan the Terrible.) After seeing Don Quixote, Eisenstein was inspired to make his own Spanish ballet, based on Carmen. The Last Conversation 187 Rehearsals for The Last Conversation began. The dancers borrowed a ballet studio at the Moscow Choreographic Institute, working at midnight (after official Bolshoi rehearsals ended) with Eisenstein and the musical director Solomon Bricker. Eisenstein’s film students came to observe. At the first rehearsal, Zviagina remembers, Eisenstein sat down at the piano and “began shredding the score to pieces.” Though Zviagina claims that the musical director was horrified by this sacrilege, in fact what Eisenstein created was a Carmen pastiche. A pastiche, also known as pasticcio, is a technical term in music that refers to a medley, especially of operatic themes. Carmen pastiches were an extremely popular musical trend in the mid-twentieth century; indeed, the tradition of pastiches of this opera date all the way back to the nineteenth century, to Bizet’s own Carmen Suite. Eisenstein had, in fact, created a musical montage, according to his own principles of contrast and counterpoint in film montage. As Zviagina describes the rehearsals, she and Rikhter danced to the music and also to...