Sampling the Delouche Series

This week at the Walter Reade Theater, the Film Society of Lincoln Center offers a rare opportunity to sample Dominique Delouche’s remarkable series of films about dance and dancers.In some of them, Mr. Delouche allows the subject to take us along on a visit to the past. In “Maia,” Maia Plisetskaya stands on the site of the house in Moscow where she lived as a 12-year-old when, in 1937, her father was arrested, vanishing into the black hole of Stalin’s purges. In “Les Cahiers retrouvés de Nina Vyroubova (The Rediscovered Notebooks of Nina Vyroubova),” Nina Vyroubova, forced to flee her native Crimea with her family during the 1920s, now visits what had been her grandfather’s country estate, and is currently a public school.Mr. Delouche is fortunate to be working in an era where some formerly monolithic boundaries have been eliminated. Ms. Vyroubova once studied in Paris with the ex-Imperial ballerinas who fled Russia after the revolution. They could never go home again but, in 1995, Mr. Delouche accompanied Ms. Vyroubova to the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg. There, she watched and addressed a class of teenaged girls being taught by her contemporary Inna Zubkovskaya. Ms. Vyroubova recalled the different personalities of her teachers, who had once studied in these same studios, from which a new generation is, as always, emerging: Svetlana Ivanova and Veronika Part are among the students who sit on the floor listening.Mr. Delouche’s special connection to Ms. Vyroubova allows him to revisit his own past in his “Les Cahiers retrouvés de Nina Vyroubova.” It includes excerpts from 1961’s “Le Spectre de la Danse,” the first film he directed. In it, he used Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” as the soundtrack to a scene in which Ms. Vyroubova and Atillo Labis rehearse “Giselle.” Back then, Mr. Delouche enjoyed taking these kinds of aural and visual liberties; by contrast, he is more and more the vérité documentarian as his career progresses.Mr. Delouche’s subjects are invariably concerned with developing stylistic and expressive fine points in their students, who have often become a casualty of today’s over-quantified, over-contorted, and aerobicized technical milieu. A very important marker is laid down with the inclusion of “La Fille mal gardée,” a record of a production in Nantes for which Mr. Delouche designed sets and costumes. The ballet was first performed in 1789 and, for this production, Ivo Cramér re-choreographed it in the style of the 18th century — a movement language employing radically more pantomime than we see nowadays, as well as radically fewer and less complicated balletic steps. And the production is altogether delightful.Perhaps the most astonishing of the films on view, by virtue of its unlikelihood, is “Markova, la legende.” This records the rare event of the Paris Opera opening its doors to a foreigner, British no less (Alicia Markova was born Alice Marks), to coach some of her roles in the classics, which the company is seemingly happy to perform in the sweepingly revised versions that Nureyev introduced when he was director in the 1980s. Certainly, Dame Alicia could hold her own with anyone. Working with Nolwenn Daniel on Princess Florine’s variation from the Bluebird pas de deux in “The Sleeping Beauty,” Markova resets some of the choreography, before telling Ms. Daniel that “my version could be much further back with Mme. Egorova,” one of the fabled Mariinsky ballerinas who fled to Europe after the Russian Revolution.Throughout Markova’s work in Paris, her companion is senior opera ballerina Elisabeth Platel. We watch a remarkable scene in which Ms. Platel dances for Markova the Prelude from Fokine’s “Les Sylphides.” Markova, who had danced this herself many times in her career, compliments Ms. Platel’s beautiful performance and then gives her corrections, which Ms. Platel accepts with humility. Indeed, in all the films on view, retired stars and current interpreters work together in an atmosphere of mutual respect and cordiality that itself could be a command performance.At the same time, we are aware that these are divas at work, not high priestesses. They’re not infallible. Yvette Chauviré recalls that for her debut in “Sleeping Beauty” at the opera, the production’s director, Serge Lifar, sent her to Egorova for coaching. “It was she who created Aurora,” Ms. Chauviré mistakenly comments. (It was of course Carlotta Brianza.) In “Katia et Volodia,” Vladimir Vasiliev teaches an interpolated solo that he performed in “Giselle.” Mr. Vasiliev demonstrates it splendidly, but it is nevertheless jarring and superfluous in the ballet.Each Living National Treasure believes that he or she is transmitting the true text, but when it comes to choreography, it is a fact that even dancers who worked with the same choreographer may have different recollections and different variants to impart. Balanchine was hardly the first choreographer to make continual changes to his work over the course of a lifetime, sometimes tweaking steps to suit the abilities of a particular dancer. But watching these great performers teach, you surrender to the inarguable artistic truth generated by their own conviction and eloquence. Extraordinarily rare and instructive archival footage is included throughout these documentaries, allowing us to see that these dancers once could do as authoritatively as they now show.

Sampling the Delouche Series

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