NEWS
irina baronova HANGS UP HER DANCING SHOES

Livingston, Paul. Irina Baronova, Canberra, 2007
Irina Baronova, the last of the "baby ballerinas" who became overnight stars during the 1932-3 season of Col. De Basil's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, died peacefully at her home near Byron Bay in June. She was 89. Just three weeks earlier she had been joyously celebrated at the Ballets Russes Symposium at the University of Adelaide and recorded for a television documentary on the Ballets Russes in Australia. The National Library is very lucky to have recorded two oral history interviews with Mme Baronova in February 2007, talking about her life, the great artists she worked with, and the contribution she continued to make to the dance profession since her retirement in 1945. The Irina Baronova Gallery of images from her visit is a fitting testament to her vital, sunny personality, and her wonderful gift for story telling.
COVENT GARDEN rUSSIAN BALLET TOUR PICTURES GALLERY

Cape, Patricia Mary. Kira Abriccosova and the gazell, Aden, 1938
Australian balletomane Patricia Mary Cape befriended the dancers of the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, shown here on the Maloja travelling to Australia in 1938. Cape photographed the dancers at play on deck, sunbathing and rehearsing Leonide Massine’s ballet Symponie Fantastique. An unexpected passenger is a tiny gazelle named “Aden” after the Yemini port where the ship stopped. Kira Abricossova and Irina Baronova went ashore to stroll along the docks. There amongst the sheds they observed with horror two boys dragging a small gazelle on its side, her legs tied together with a rope. Baronova records the encounter in her memoir, Irina – ballet, life and love.
'Kira and I were appalled by the sighted and ran towards the kids. Having no language in common, we mimed our displeare at such cruelty. The kids promptly mimed back that for half a crown, the gazelle was ours.' (p.275)
They smuggled the gazelle, wrapped in Abricossova's blowse, on to the Maloja. Inevitably, they confessed their irregular act, which the ship’s captain told the embarrassed dancers was smuggling. Nonetheless, the entire company adopted “Aden." More official consternation greeted them on arrival in Australia, but the situation was resolved happily: “Aden” was found a home at the Melbourne Zoo. The last photographs were taken as the dancers disembarked the Maloja in Adelaide.
For all 19 pictures in this collection see http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3792077, or use this link to see the Covent Garden Russian Ballet Tour Gallery
Reminiscences of Leonide Massine’s ‘symphonic ballets’ by his ballerinas

Seymour, Maurice. Anna Volkova in Francesca da Rimini
When Leonide Massine created his first symphonic ballet Les Presages to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony in 1933, his radical approach inspired the Ballets Russes dancers. Rich, flowing movement, speed, athletically challenging solos and massed choric groupings gave them a freedom they had never experienced on stage before. When Massine announced his second ballet in this style, Choreartium, to Brahms’s Fourth Symphony later that year, they were ecstatic. Three years later he used Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique with great success. All three ballets were triumphs for the company and individual dances and audiences clamoured for them year after year as the company toured Australia from 1938 to 1940.
Three of Massine’s ballerinas – Irina Baronova, Valrene Tweedie and Anna Volkova, who all live in Australia – share reminiscences of their experiences of Massine’s innovative use of symphonies for these radically modern ballets in the latest edition of Brolga – an Australian journal about dance*. They are reproduced here by kind permission of the publisher, the Australian Dance Council – Ausdance.
In this Brolga issue Dr Mark Carroll, Senior Lecture in Music, University of Adelaide, investigates critical and popular responses to Massine’s daring and, to some people, almost blasphemous use of symphonies for new and modern choreography.
* Brolga is available by subscription. Enquiries can be made by telephone on 02.6248 8992, or via the organisation’s website: http://www.ausdance.org.au/outside/resources/journals/brolga/brolga.html
Hugh P. Hall collection of photographs, 1939-1940

Tatiana Riabouchinska and Paul Petroff in Paganini
Late in 2006, the National Library purchased a magnificent collection of 1182 photographs by Melbourne solicitor Hugh P Hall. He took them at His Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, during Col. Wassily de Basil’s Ballets Russes company performances from 1938 to 1940. Hall’s passion for ballet was revealed in his famously coveted 1948 book, Ballet in Australia: From Pavlova to Rambert, filled with dynamic and atmospheric action shots taken during performances. Hall remained enamoured of the ballet and went on to photograph every international visiting dance artist and company, from Anna Pavlova in 1929 to the Ballet Rambert in 1948. He also photographed Australia’s early professional companies established by Helene Kirsova and Eduoard Borovansky.
The images from the book, and a thousand more, have undergone preservation and cataloguing and are progressively being digitised, ballet by ballet - all 28 of them. This stunning and richly detailed collection will be invaluable to researchers, writers, artists and balletomanes alike.
Currently on-line are images from two of the Ballets Russes’s most popular ballets, Leonide Massine’s so-called “symphonic ballets” Les Presages (1933) to Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony and Symphonie Fantastique (1936) written by Berlioz.





