Abstract
Much was written about Lillian Alicia Marks, the little girl from Muswell Hill, North London, during a long life in which she was better known by her stage name Alicia Markova (made DBE in 1963). This included a memoir by her long-standing stage partner Anton Dolin, Markova: Her Life and Art (London: W. H. Allen, 1953), an authorized biography by Maurice Leonard, Markova: The Legend (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), and two books by Markova herself, Giselle and I (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960) and Markova Remembers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986). As these things go, the texts probably observed a degree of discretion because the Markova that emerged remained a largely sphinx-like figure. When she died in 2004, one day after her ninety-fourth birthday, she left a quantity of papers, 137 boxes of which were donated to Boston University. It is here that Tina Sutton, an arts and fashion journalist, came into the picture. She had volunteered to help with the cataloguing and became the first to use the materials.
Britain’s first ballerina had a remarkable life, even by the high standards of theatre people. Her mother had taken her to ballet lessons to strengthen weak legs, but by the age of 10 she was appearing on the professional stage and dubbed the ‘Child Pavlova’. At just 14, she was taken into the Ballets Russes and Diaghilev, intimidating to most people but ‘Sergipops’ to her, became her surrogate father. (Her own father, Arthur, a wealthy mining engineer had died suddenly, the victim of a swindle, which left the family destitute.) With the Ballets Russes she encountered the greatest artists and teachers of her time and, although unusually quiet, she was an intelligent, observant child who absorbed her lessons well. Her first created role was as the Nightingale in Le Chant du Rossignol, choreographed by a young George Balanchine, with music by Stravinsky and designs by Matisse. It was Stravinsky who taught her always to listen to the music, not count like most dancers, and memorize it.
After Diaghilev’s death in 1929, she played an important part in the birth of British ballet. She was the star dancer of the fledgling companies started by Marie Rambert (the Ballet Rambert) and Ninette de Valois (the Royal Ballet) and collaborated with young choreographers, such as Frederick Ashton who benefitted greatly from her sophisticated experience. She was also remarkably willing to appear in unconventional spaces, such as cinemas and stadiums, and embraced immediately the new technology of television. This, and most importantly her launch with Dolin of several touring companies – the Markova–Dolin Ballet in 1935, the Festival Ballet (now the English National Ballet) in 1950 – democratized ballet, taking it beyond elitist and London-centric circles. When in 1938 she moved to the United States, dancing first with the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, then with Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), she achieved the same broad popularity, criss-crossing the continent on whistle-stop tours. In 1940 she became the highest paid ballet dancer in America and, in 1948, the world.
Although tiny, skinny and not conventionally pretty – the choreographer Agnes de Mille called her ‘the stringiest girl I ever saw, a darting little skeleton’ – she was an extraordinary technician, able to do anything, while concealing all effort behind an unforced, airy lightness and simplicity, so that, as one American critic observed, the spectator would not think ‘how difficult’ but ‘how beautiful’ (p. 355). Sutton gives a detailed impression of what Markova’s dancing looked like, thanks to a large quantity of quoted testimonies. However, this is a double-sided resource in Sutton’s arsenal, a part of her inability to be selective, so that where one quote would be enough she includes three or four. This, together with much repetitiveness and a tendency to bury important facts in confusing piles of detail, results in a distended book which would have been immeasurably better at two-thirds its length.
The style is also disconcerting: breathy hyperbole is combined with a conversational breeziness and laxity. (What must be a missing ‘from’ at the start of the book’s subtitle feels like a warning signal.) By her own admission, Sutton has little knowledge of ballet, but a specialist consultant could have helped avoid the off-target adjectives: for example, the couples in Ashton’s Les Rendezvous are romantic and playful, not ‘frivolous’ and ‘philandering’ (p. 226), while the poetic pas de deux in Les Sylphides is surely not ‘gasp-inducing’ (p. 412). There are also many factual and spelling mistakes. Carlotta Grisi was the first Giselle, not ‘one of the first’ (p. 478); ‘battements de gages’ should read ‘battements dégagés’ (p. 441); and it is just plain wrong to assert that the Stepanov notations are the ‘Rosetta stone’ of ‘ballet repertory notes’, or to claim that they contain ‘analysis and deconstruction of every step and movement’ (p. 243).
Most damaging, though, is Sutton’s blatant side-taking, breaking the cardinal rule that biographers should maintain at least some appearance of objectivity. This undermines faith in her reliability far more than misspellings and factual errors. It is not just that Markova’s variegated talents and qualities are gushingly enumerated, but that her perceived enemies are attributed motives which are more often suppositional. Dolin comes off particularly badly, as do the influential Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova and her husband Maynard Keynes. Sutton makes much of Markova’s Jewishness and blames the anti-Semitism displayed in the Keyneses’ correspondence for the neglect allegedly shown to Markova in the earliest days of British ballet. This might have been a fresh revelation, were it not so unconvincing. The so-called neglect only lasted a few months, with Markova soon offered roles, and may well have had other causes.
Apart from the identity of an admirer, most of the ground covered is already familiar, despite the new source materials. Markova deserves a better biography. Margot Fonteyn may have had the more familiar name, carefully spotlit during her life-long association with the Royal Ballet, but Markova, through her tireless achievements, was the more important dancer.