Yes.
Okay.
Stand by for a second.
I'm going to drop some bars here before I forget.
Five seconds more.
Let us help her celebrate her 85th birthday in a way she truly loves, entertaining and educating.
Please join me in welcoming a great lady that I have had the privilege of being associated with for some 30 years.
A woman I respect, admire and love very much is Ruth Hader.
Thank you.
And so plugged in here, I don't dare move.
If I move that way, something will fall off.
If I move this way, something will fall off.
I'm stuck here.
Can you hear me without the microphone? Or would you prefer I use it? What would you prefer? Use it.
What? Use it.
Use it.
All right, I'll use it.
Well, I'll start then.
When I was a teenager in Indianapolis, where I was born, my mother took me to see Anna Pavlova.
Now you're all maybe too young to even have heard of Anna Pavlova, but she was a great genius.
And this changed my whole life.
It changed everybody's life who saw her.
I think she was the one that made O 'Freddie Esten and Agustin Mille, everybody, started to dance on account of her because she was so extraordinary.
And I'm going to show you a few pictures of her.
I would like to spend the whole time talking about her, but I won't because she used to tour.
Like Indianapolis was just a little town, she came there and she went every place all over the world.
Just touring by train was there in Boak.
And finally I danced for her when she was in Indianapolis.
And she told me to come up to Midway Gardens.
There was a place here called Midway Gardens to study with her, so I did.
And then I joined her company.
And for a whole year we toured in South America.
And we went every place.
I can name every one place we went to from Manaus, which is the Amazon River, top of the Amazon River, Pernambuco by Ia, Rio de São Paulo, Buenos Aires of course, Andes by train, Concepcion, Valparaiso, Talca, and then up to Lima.
And then we crossed the Panama Canal.
We crossed by boat and then ended up in Cuba.
And this took a whole year.
And this was, I didn't have any education at all because I went on that trip.
So my mother went with me and she said we got badges and now we have to go back to school.
So I did.
I think I learned more on that trip than I did in school.
Well anyway, I'm going to show you today, I'm going to talk to you mainly about choreography.
Because that's what always interested me most.
I was very happy to dance.
I loved to dance.
But I was always more interested really in making up dances.
That's what choreography is.
We make up dances.
And different people are inspired by different things.
George Balanchy, who was of course a very, very great, greatest choreographer of our era.
He was entirely inspired by music.
He'd listen to a piece of music and then you'd immediately have to make a ballet to it.
Now, Maurice Cunningham, who's also a very, very fine choreographer, he doesn't care what the music is.
He said, how do you think you want to do it? It doesn't matter.
So you see how free we are.
Some people will be inspired by say the sculpture of the artist of Tuesday or reading a book, getting ideas from a book.
So many people say to me, where do ideas come from? Well actually, they just sort of come and sit on your shoulder until you have to do them.
So I of course did all the dances on myself because I didn't have a company at that time.
So I'm going to show you pictures of myself and tell you a little bit about the different dances.
Now maybe, do you want to turn those lights off? Let's see if you can see.
Oh, wait a minute.
That's on the top of them.
Well what's happening? Now there's, yes, you can see that, can't you? This was your most famous dance.
It was called the Dying Swan.
And I tell you, well even the thing about it, it was the shivered son, my gosh.
She was so poetic and so exquisite.
And this is when she finally dies again.
She sort of trembles and bends back.
I can't really describe it.
Okay.
Right.
Now that's the first one.
Yeah, now this is on the cob book.
And the dragonfly, that was another famous dance of hers.
Now she wasn't a great technician at all.
She was always completely expressive.
And just recently I watched a class in Paris, a class of the upper valley there.
And they were the most tall, beautiful girls and they danced just perfectly.
But they were all exactly alike.
Now Pablo was not like anybody in the world.
And this is her famous dragonfly dance.
And this is another famous dance of hers called the Pavlova Gavotte.
And she was so elegant.
That dress was bright yellow and it was very, very simple.
But she did it so elegantly.
Now, I don't know if you know who he, do you know who Gaglet is was? Well anyway, he was the great impresario who brought the valley out of Russia.
And she was with them for a while.
But she was too much of an individual to be, to stay with them.
She wanted to do things her way.
And to be frank, she liked all the cheap music.
With him you had to use the very best music.
But she used the Pavlova Gavotte, which was a cheap little piece of nothing music.
So was the dragonfly.
The swan was better music.
That was by Saint -Saens.
Oh, that's me.
This is me, I guess we've gotten off to me now.
I'm going to leave Pablo, but I really would like to talk about her all afternoon.
I could talk about her forever.
But anyway, I'll start now.
This was one of the very first things I ever did.
It was called the Birthday of Santa.
And we did it in Chicago in 1919.
And it was about a little girl, and this was a dwarf, this was an old woman, he was madly in love with her.
And it was a very beautiful ballet.
I don't know what ever happened to it.
The music was written by John Alden Carpenter, who was a very well -known Chicago compulter at that time.
And Adolf Baum was here.
He was a rival to Naginski.
He was a great juggler, you know, and he was a great choreographer too.
He did the labyrinthine foam where he had the dancers walking in profile.
And Baum was, he danced Prince Igor, in which he jumped up and it was a marvelous, marvelous ballet.
When Nureyev came here, I brought Nureyev to this country, oh, quite a while ago.
And the first place he danced was with the Lyric Opera, and he danced the Prince Igor.
And he was as good as Baum, frankly.
What he would do, I don't know if you understand this or not, But Falkin was a great choreographer, and Falkin was the first one who made all the dances flow together.
They didn't stop for applause and everything.
And Nureyev was, what the men usually do, they go back to the corner and then they do some leaps or some big stunts.
And then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and then they do a little jump and so if you want to see a perfect arabesque there it is and I tell you one thing that's the only time I've ever been in a perfect arabesque.
So the position is correct and it's all tilted right.
So that's the perfect arabesque.
That's a butterfly dance.
I can't see it.
So I was remembering.
That was with the ball in Canada.
I was always very Peter Pan -ish.
I was a Peter Pan character if you know what that means.
And I love to be Peter Pan.
So I spent all my youth doing Peter Pan dances.
This is a picture of one of them.
That's Peter Pan too.
Oh this is something else.
I finally got out of my Peter Pan.
And at that time all of us were trying to be extremely American.
We had to be American at any cost.
And this was my first attempt at trying to be American.
And this is called the flapper and the quarterback.
And I did it in 1926.
And this dance was kind of an innovation because nobody did the dances like this in those days.
They all wanted to be that type of classical.
Now we had to change.
It wouldn't be classical anymore.
So this is my flapper and the quarterback.
I can't see it too well actually.
That's a flapper and the quarterback also.
This is also a flapper and the quarterback.
That's a little sweet.
I forget the name.
I was a little nickel boy.
That was cute.
I remember a baby that was a circus member on a tightrope.
And this is Gershwin's blues.
Of course Gershwin was great American poet.
He still is I think.
One of the best we've ever produced.
And this was his prelude.
It was beautiful music.
And I danced all of them.
That's the same thing.
That's the blues.
That's the blues.
Oh this is the Japanese print.
I went to Japan in 1928.
And it was the coronation of Emperor Hirohiko.
And I was very flattered to be able to dance.
He asked to dance at that coronation.
It was a wonderful experience.
I love the Japanese art.
The Japanese theater is so marvelous.
Really marvelous.
So many different kinds of dancing.
And this is a dance that I learned there.
You can't see it very well.
It was a beautiful black kimono against gold screens.
And this is a dance.
I went to the island of Bali.
Have any of you ever been to Bali? Well all of you better go.
As soon as you can.
It's one of the most beautiful places in the whole world.
And the dancing there is well it looks like that.
Only they do it better than I do.
And everybody dances there in Bali.
I don't know.
The island is so beautiful.
The rice fields are beautiful.
And there were two little girls who did a wonderful dance called the lagoon.
They had to stop dancing when they were 12 years old.
And I remember those dances with such pleasure.
And finally, the island was ruled by the Dutch at that time.
And they said it was immoral for little girls under 12 years old to dance.
So they made them stop doing the lagoon dance.
So maybe I'm doing one of the world's down the noses.
It's a beautiful dance.
And that's it.
Can you see how stylized the motion is? How distorted? That's Cinderella.
That was a dance I did when I first came to Chicago at Ravinea Park.
They had an opera company.
And I was there for seven years.
I'm ashamed to say I don't know the dates.
That was a long time ago.
And I did this ballet about Cinderella there.
I think it was pretty.
That's Bali scaffolding.
That's made me interested in me on how costumes.
Of course, I love costumes.
I'm so tired of saying dancers dance just tight.
I like costumes.
And this is a very interesting costume.
And I sort of did a dance which showed the structure of the ballet, the basic structure of ballet.
It wasn't very good, I would think.
That's the same costume.
Anyway, it was interesting.
And that one was a say.
That one was called glass.
So nothing much.
This was very good dance.
This was called possessed.
And it had music by Little Lovis.
It was wonderful music.
And that costume I have on was made from a Fortuny dress.
Have you ever heard of a Fortuny? Well, you should have.
Fortuny used to make dresses for women that were pleated.
The pleats never came out.
And I shouldn't have torn it up to make a costume out of it.
I wish I had it today, but I don't.
And that's an interesting dance.
That's, I think, my best dance.
That one was called tropic.
And I tried to be in a heavy mood on the floor, you know.
I like the tropic snake.
It feels sort of lazy.
It's a beautiful mask made by Nicholas Remesov.
You maybe don't know him.
He lived here for quite a while.
He was a very, very artist.
And that's the same dance, tropic.
That was called body and sunlight.
You know, it's a mistake, after you've had one successful idea, to then try to repeat it.
Because when you try to do a different version of something that's been a success, it usually isn't quite so good.
So if you make a success out of something, believe it at that.
And oh, this is by the Buci Samu Nobuci.
He's a very great sculptor.
And he designed these dirty sacks.
You got inside the sack and you can make all kinds of interesting positions in there.
I did a whole lot of them.
I think they were fascinating.
That's another one.
That's the Buci.
Those are drawings of me in the sack.
Now, this is one really in the sack.
You see how it looks? It looks interesting.
If you want to ask any questions, please don't hesitate.
I may be talking over your heads.
That's in that sack too.
You see how interesting the body looks there.
It's like modern sculpture.
I wish we could see this one better because this is the best picture we have.
Why is this one so dark? What did he do? Maybe you can see it.
But that is...
It still isn't very good.
I still can't see it.
Well, anyway.
That's a dance.
I was in red tights and had the lab sticks that were stretched up and down and you could do all kinds of things with them.
That's an only interesting picture.
What I finally did with these, I put all these dances together, the sacks and the strings.
There's one with long sticks.
It made a fascinating ballet.
But you see how ballets grow out of what you do yourself.
Nowadays, of course, you can have a group that you can choreograph on.
But in my day, you had to do it all yourself.
That's the same in red tights with those elastic.
That's a little comedy.
You can't see that very well.
Five humor fests it was called.
That patriotic girl.
Oh, I don't know if any of you have ever heard of how Kreutzberg? Nobody's heard of him.
Well, he was a great genius.
Next to Anihar, he's the only genius I have ever worked with.
I was lucky enough to be his partner.
For a long time we went to Japan together.
And he was different from anybody in the world.
Nobody's ever danced like him before nor since.
And I wish you could have seen.
I'm going to show you a few pictures of him.
That was called country dance.
Do you see how charming he was?
