In March, 1926, a company of around 45 dancers hailing from Britain, Europe and Russia, plus their ballet masters, dressers, music director and manager, not to mention their sets, costumes, luggage, pointe shoes and an aviary, disembarked from the SS Ceramic at Princes Pier, Melbourne. It had been a three-week sea voyage from Cape Town, South Africa, where they had already completed a whirlwind tour.
One hundred years ago, Anna Pavlova, “The Greatest Dancer of All Time”, and her company finally arrived in Australia to the joy and excitement of promotion-primed audiences.
“Pavlova, the embodiment of exquisite pathos, of unaffected joy, of poetic movement, of enchanting grace,” read the publicity. Not least, she was said to express “the twittering of elves and the passion of sex!”
The promoters, the Tait brothers at the helm of J.C. Williamson Ltd, knew how to seed the ground. They had been shipping European theatrical celebrities to far-flung corners of the colonies since the earliest years of the twentieth century, including the trailblazing 1913 Australian tour of Adeline Genée, whetting local appetites for ballerina stardom.
And well whet they were. Two thousand people packed His Majesty’s Theatre for the opening night gala, paying top-tier prices of 10 shillings and 9 pence a seat to see a program including The Fairy Doll, Chopiniana and a series of divertissements in which Pavlova danced her signature Le Cygne, The Dying Swan. People travelled from far and wide over the course of the Melbourne season, some from as far as Hobart and the Riverina district of New South Wales.
Audiences cheered and critics raved. Melbourne’s three major newspapers devoted columns to the ballerina and her offerings. Everything was superlatives. An Age critic spoke of her “infinitude of intermingling lines of loveliness,” before conceding that words ultimately fell back baffled before such experiences.
Over the month-long season in Melbourne there were constantly changing programs comprising short ballet abridgments, character dances, excerpts and solos, giving audiences something different to come back and experience. On top of this were social engagements and press appearances where Pavlova would argue for the importance of state-supported theatres and arts education. An early arts ambassador!
It is with some relief that we learn of their Sundays off. On one, Pavlova and her closest colleagues, her manager and de facto husband Victor Dandré, musical director Lucien Wurmser, dancing partner Laurent Novikoff, dresser Manya Charchevenikova and ballet master M. Pianowski, were photographed picnicking at Ferntree Gully in the foothills of the Dandenongs with billy tea and lamb chops. Otherwise, it was noted, Pavlova limited her consumption largely to tea and toast, with corned beef and salad after the show at night.
Melbourne was just the beginning.
After that came the five-week Sydney season from April 17 to May 20. Then the company toured New Zealand, 38 shows in 39 days in Auckland, Whanganui, Hastings, Napier, Palmerston North, Wellington, Christchurch, Timaru and Dunedin. Returning to Sydney, they took the train to Brisbane for a July season plus charity appearances, Pavlova regularly performed to raise funds for the orphanage she supported in Paris, and then, finally, a three-week engagement in Adelaide from July 24 to August 14.
Throughout the gruelling five-month tour, the 45-year-old Pavlova was contracted to appear at least twice in each performance for a minimum of thirty minutes. She quite literally carried the show. Even though she was surrounded by highly capable dancers, Pavlova’s company served essentially as a frame, choreographer Michel Fokine once remarked. Her partner Laurent Novikoff later spoke of the extent to which the company sometimes felt relegated to merely that, an extreme example of the old Marius Petipa tradition of framing the ballerina. Dandré, for his part, was unapologetic. The audience, he said simply, came to see Pavlova.
Valerie Lawson, in her excellent book Dancing Under the Southern Skies, notes that the relentless schedule was often dictated by Dandré, sometimes portrayed as a coldly pedantic manager relentlessly driving the enterprise forward. Yet it is just as possible that Pavlova wanted it that way. The American impresario Sol Hurok described Dandré as an excellent manager. Touring companies ran on tight margins, and dense planning was often simply the reality of making such ventures financially possible. Show business, after all, is not “show hobby”, as they say in Hollywood.
Everywhere she went was met with celebrity hysteria as crowds gathered at railway platforms to greet her arrival. Some of it was undoubtedly promotion engineered by the Taits. But reports suggest there were as many as ten thousand people at Sydney’s Central Station when Pavlova’s train pulled in. Out she stepped in her carefully composed, chic style, ready for photographers before being whisked to the Australia Hotel for interviews.
Perhaps today we might cautiously compare her to a figure like Taylor Swift, a woman in charge of her art and her touring enterprise, carrying the entire show on her shoulders. She attracted an enormous following, particularly among young women, who saw in Pavlova a career woman of her time, in control of her own artistic identity and public persona. Yet interpretations differ. Lawson sees Pavlova as to some degree a puppet in the hands of Dandré, a familiar Svengali-type figure in the histories of female performers.
Writer Rupert Christiansen casts her more as an ambitious opportunist, willing to dance her “trite little numbers set to rubbishy music” anywhere and everywhere and for anyone who would come. He attributes her premature death at the age of 49 in 1931 in part to her relentless, non-stop schedule. Still, from Pavlova’s own words it seems clear that she possessed a missionary zeal for her art and the ambitions very much her own.
Her company, meanwhile, simply had to keep up, and anyone who has ever been part of a touring company will know how that feels, carrying their luggage, maintaining technique and avoiding illness or injury lest their pay be docked or they be sent home.
While Pavlova is sometimes credited with seeding the interest in ballet in Australia, this is not entirely accurate. Australian audiences had had opportunities to see various forms of balletic entertainment since at least the 1830s. Touring artists had drawn crowds before, and Genée’s 1913 visit had already introduced local audiences to the classical style of the late nineteenth century.
Yet Pavlova’s arrival seems to have made a different kind of impact. Something in Pavlova’s presence and her dancing lifted ballet to another sphere. A reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald spoke of the incredible rapidity of her dancing and the spontaneity of every movement. Every part of her body seemed involved in the art—even the curves and lines of her hands.
Perhaps it was a combination of press hype, public readiness in the aftermath of the First World War and Pavlova’s own vulnerability and artistry, her instinctive understanding of how to make the most of her unusual body and expressive sensibility. Cynics might say she knew how to exploit those qualities. As her dancing partner Laurent Novikoff later noted, her Russian ballets were mutilated beyond recognition and the musical scores chopped and changed, suggesting a forced concoction to emphasise her strong points.
Whatever the explanation, Pavlova’s 1926 visit had an immediate impact on Australian artists, particularly the young ones watching from the audience. A 17-year-old Bobbie Helpmann later recalled after seeing Pavlova dance: “I saw a great personality, a great dancer who could act as well as dance. She represented everything I wanted to be. She was the most important single influence on my life.”
Twenty-one-year-old dance teacher Marjorie Hollinshed was equally bewitched, saying Pavlova “gave the impression of shedding her human form and reincarnating into whatever she represented.”
Many of these young artists would also benefit from direct contact with Pavlova’s dancers, including Harcourt Algeranoff and Novikoff himself, who gave lessons to aspiring students in the cities they visited and mingled with local artists and bohemians along the way.
Then there were the dancers who stayed behind. Alexis Dolinoff started a school in Sydney at which Hollinshed and Helpmann became pupils, while dancers Thurza Rogers and Robert Lascelles were contracted to perform in the J.C. Williamson production of the musical Tip-Toes.
Nine-year-old dance student Laurel Gill was more circumspect. “Was it tremendous?” the adults asked her. “No”, she replied. It was simply what she expected, and as it should be. Later, this frank young girl, seeing Pavlova departing at the train station, said the great ballerina looked tired and old. “I just broke my heart for her.”
Pavlova was undoubtedly one of a kind. She made it her mission to spread her passion for dance around the world. And Australia, perhaps more than most places, feels the effects of that to this day.
She returned in 1929 with one Edouard Borovansky, and the rest, as they say, is history. 
Emma Sandall
This article originally featured in the April print edition of Dance Australia