Chapter One The Background to the Project But who was I to care or know enough to get involved? In 1965 I was one of a small group of producers who were making programmes for BBC Television in the field of music and the arts. The department, a new one, was headed by Humphrey Burton, who had left the BBC1 arts magazine Monitor to create a new unit when BBC2 began in 1964. Monitor had been part of the old Talks Department, which had been run for years by Grace Wyndham Goldie, a fearsome dragon whose influence was then considerable, but who ultimately can be seen to have backed a group of people who proved less able than herself. By the time I was in a position to suggest programme ideas an alternative group had emerged in which the key figure was Huw Wheldon, with whom I enjoyed (if that is the word) a tiresomely abrasive relationship. Having turned me down for a job on Monitor , he always behaved as if he resented my knowledge, which frankly, in a number of areas, outran his own. No opportunity was ever lost to put me down, and I found it very difficult to discuss anything with him. But Humphrey Burton was nearer my own age, and a helpful and gifted editor. I learned a great deal from him. He liked the idea that new areas could be opened up. We did not so much make music programmes, as programmes about music. I made my mark very happily with the first series of television master-classes in the United Kingdom. Humphrey's choice had fallen on the French cellist Paul Tortelier. I had been living and working in France in the early 1960s, and it seemed a pleasant continuation of my involvement with the arts in Paris. During my time there I had become very close to a number of dancers, through my friendship with the Danish premier danseur of the Paris Opéra, Flemming Flindt, whom I had first met when he had been with Festival Ballet in London. Always interested in dance, I found the Paris scene more lively than London, and was fascinated by Flemming and his partner and girlfriend, Josette Amiel, a quintessential Parisian, of great wit and allure. Their daily accounts of the battles which went on in the artistic direction of the Paris Opéra were almost unbelievable. Through them I had met Harald Lander, who was living in Paris, having been removed from his post as director of the Royal Danish Ballet, and by then divorced from his brilliant ballerina wife, Toni. I also got to know Erik Bruhn, for me, quite simply, the best male dancer of my time. I sensed something extraordinary about the tradition of these Danish dancers and choreographers. It was not just Bournonville in the nineteenth century, though that was excitingly different, but also something about the whole role of the male dancer in their tradition. So much male dancing in Britain was limp-wristed, and, as Flemming used to say, `I don't care what they are offstage -- on-stage they are men.' As a historian by training and attitude, I wondered if there were not lessons to be learned in Copenhagen, which I had then never visited. In Paris, on one memorably drunken evening, we spent four hours with Balanchine -- he was there to supervise the final rehearsals of one of his ballets, which was going into the repertory of the Opéra Ballet. Flemming, Josette and I collected him from his hotel, took him to a small but very good restaurant, where he somewhat shocked me by drinking large whiskies throughout the meal, and then he insisted on a nightcap. `We must go to that place that Tchaikovsky liked so much,' he said. We looked blank. It turned out to be Fouquet, on the Champs-Élysées. There he ordered two bottles of Roederer Cristal, and unbuttoned. The chilly, remote Balanchine, who usually refused interviews (and later did to me), who seemed at ease only with his own dancers, was nowhere to be seen. We asked him all the questions, why this, why not that, why this music, why never narrative? `I will not do narrative ballets until it is possible in purely choreographic terms to say "this is my brother-in-law".' I know he said it often, but he said it that evening to us, and Flemming and I spent the next two weeks devising endless sibling scenarios. Flemming had introduced me to Eugène Ionesco, whose play The Lesson he had got permission to adapt as a ballet. In the summer of 1963 I went to Copenhagen to see it being produced in the studios of Danish Television. Watching class at the Royal Danish Ballet and exploring the magical Theatre Museum in the disused Court Theatre confirmed my belief that this is where what I cared about started. Paris may have had spectacle, Milan bravura, but Copenhagen had a tradition, which was the key to the origins of the school that fascinated us all, and had produced Balanchine: the school of St Petersburg. I had at that time not been to Leningrad, but I had spent several weeks in Moscow in 1961, and had seen not only the Bolshoi as often as I could, but other dance companies as well. Of course, to see Swan Lake on the stage of the Bolshoi where it started, albeit unsuccessfully, was unforgettable. But I saw the whole range of the Bolshoi output, old and new, from Giselle to Flames of Paris and from older dancers such as Semyonova to the very young Kondratieva, and I started to reflect on another problem, that of a great tradition that continued but seemed to be creatively blocked. Was it only politics -- was there a deeper malaise? Much as I admired Romeo and Juliet , Lavrovsky was no Petipa when it came to steps. By the time I returned to England in late 1963 I knew that I wanted to look at ballet in England again. The first company I had seen was the Anglo-Polish Ballet in, I suppose, 1940. I was five. I can only recall Les Sylphides , because the male dancer, the memorably named Rovi Pavinoff, wore a carrot-coloured wig which I thought hilarious. But there was Chopin, and moonlight, and amazing women suspended in mid-air. I can still remember a sense of wonder. Lydia Sokolova told me years later that she had produced that version for the company, and that the revival was very sound. Long before I was born, my mother had become friendly in Australia with an English dancer in Pavlova's company, Harcourt Essex, known to dance as Algeranoff. After he joined Mona Inglesby's International Ballet, towards the end of the war, Algie and his young French wife, Claudie, stayed with us whenever the company came to Bournemouth. I went to as many performances as possible, often standing. I came to know Coppélia, Swan Lake and Giselle , in versions reproduced by Sergeyev, who had been regisseur at the Mariinsky Theatre in Petersburg. I bought Arnold Haskell's King Penguin Ballet for two shillings, and rather shocked my prep school teachers by delivering a short talk on the history of ballet. Camargo, Taglioni, Pavlova -- I knew it all. After the war I went to Paris and saw Roland Petit's company with Zizi Jeanmaire as Carmen , the very young John Gilpin with Colette Marchand doing classical pas de deux . I was profoundly affected by dramatic new works, among them Le Jeune Homme et la Mort , with Jean Babilée and Nathalie Philippart. Of course, I saw the Sadler's Wells Ballet as well, but without a great deal of enthusiasm. I found Helpmann grotesque, and Fonteyn, with her limited dramatic range and fixed smile at that time, efficient but unremarkable, especially after seeing Danilova, and then the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, and later the Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas, with Vyroubova, Hightower, Skibine and Skouratoff, not to mention Yvette Chauviré and Alicia Alonso. I had become a balletomane. Then in 1953, when I was in the navy, and studying Russian at London University, the Martha Graham company came to the Saville. I no longer know how often I went, but in retrospect it feels like every night for weeks. The theatre was almost empty -- there were so few of us that one got to know the rest of the audience by sight. The regulars included such critics as Richard Buckle and Peter Williams and such enthusiasts as Lord Harewood and Robin Howard. For several years I found the idea of Coppélia almost intolerable compared with Klytemnestra or Cave of the Heart or Errand into the Maze . Here was dance for our time, out of the museum. I ceased to be a balletomane, and became a lover of dance. All that baggage was in my head in 1965 when I approached Humphrey Burton with a few ideas about dance for television. It was quite clear that documentary was to be my field, rather than directing dancing itself. This was for two reasons, one good and one ultimately unacceptable. The good reason was that, though I knew a great deal about dance and its history, and had by then got to know and occasionally work with a number of dancers, I had no training, and no status in a field that was jealously guarded. The second and unacceptable reason was BBC Television's only full-time dance producer, Margaret Dale. I cannot really remember her as a dancer with Sadler's Wells, though programmes tell me I saw her quite often, but she had achieved a very powerful position in the BBC, in charge of all dance except the occasional pas de deux that appeared in Patricia Foy's Music for You , or a few programmes made by Charles Rogers, usually with Festival Ballet. Anything strictly classical, and anything to do with what had become the Royal Ballet, was hers, and hers alone. Maggie was extremely good at one thing, and that not negligible. She took into the studio existing stage productions and reproduced them for television. Ludicrous union rules meant that the sets had to be redesigned by BBC designers, but to all intents and purposes they were the productions that could be seen at Covent Garden or on tour. In my first months in the BBC her big production was Giselle with Nadia Nerina. Fadeyechev was imported from Moscow, and I was allowed to sit at the back of the gallery and watch camera rehearsals. I realized for the first time how very difficult it is to achieve a sense of space, movement and pattern on the small screen, still then in black and white. Margaret Dale had a powerful protector in Huw Wheldon. He flirted outrageously with her, constantly embracing her publicly, and set her up as a cynosure of production expertise for us `new boys'. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. I soon realized that Margaret Dale had absolutely no creative imagination, however good she was at literal transposition. She was totally opposed to any of us getting involved in dance, and, of course, Wheldon backed her. Later Peter Wright came to work in the department, and quite rightly was given the chances that I, and one or two others, had hoped for. Peter brought John Cranko and Kurt Jooss to the studios, and with characteristic generosity encouraged us to sit in and learn. I was, however, largely confined to music documentaries, not without enjoyment, but still very determined to broaden the base. I was not a trained musician in the accepted sense either, though I had always played the piano and had taken composition lessons for several years. But I found and still find music insufficient if it is the only thing I am involved in. I want a wider context. Dance documentaries seemed, despite Miss Dale, a possible way forward. Eventually I made two proposals to Humphrey Burton. One was that I should make a film about Flemming Flindt, who by now had been appointed director of the Royal Danish Ballet, and whose version of The Lesson had won the Italia Prize and been shown successfully all over the world. The second was that I might research the possibility of doing something about Diaghilev, given that so many leading members of his company were not only alive, but living in London. Humphrey agreed that I should have a small amount of money to explore the willingness of these people to become involved. If I could get agreement from half a dozen key figures, then it might be considered. But two things were essential: I needed the support of a recognized expert, and clear decisions had to be taken as to whether the resulting programme would contain dance sequences. I was fairly hostile both to an outside expert and the idea of a historical documentary containing sequences of dance by living dancers. I was not interested in trying to explain Nijinsky by having the newly arrived Rudolf Nureyev, however exciting, dance his roles. It seemed to me a nonsense. This was to have a long-lasting effect on the outcome of the project. As to the expert, despite my reservations, I was practical enough to recognize that if I could find a shortcut to the survivors, all of whom were old, some reclusive and many suspicious of people they did not know, then I might make quicker headway. So, at Humphrey's suggestion, I contacted Richard Buckle. We had a brief meeting at his flat in Henrietta Street, high above Covent Garden Market, then a not very good lunch at a restaurant in Southampton Street, the nearest to his flat. Later meetings took place in ritzier surroundings. He asked for a fee of £200 to act as artistic consultant to the project. In terms of 1965 it was a large sum, but it was the price of Humphrey Button's support. My subsequent relations with Dicky were for a time so frosty that I have to force myself to recall that at the beginning he was quite helpful and trusting. He quizzed me pretty thoroughly on my knowledge of the period, and was surprised to find that I had done my homework and also spoke both French and Russian. He undertook on my behalf to write a number of letters of introduction, and got out his address book. He warned me that some people were unlikely to help, others to overstate their role. He left me largely alone. Increasingly, after I had made the initial contact, I found less need for him. I think it was an unsatisfactory situation for both of us. Although he had not yet written his two massive volumes on Nijinksy and Diaghilev, he was an acknowledged expert in the field, but no one had asked him to write the programme, just to advise someone whose credentials he probably questioned. My reservations were twofold. In the first place there were a number of aspects of his famous Diaghilev exhibition, which I had seen in London at Forbes House, that I had not liked. Despite the marvellous and revelatory things it contained, I found the decorative context and the juxtaposition of historical material with newly created settings bizarre. I recall with particular distaste a Sleeping Beauty tableau of the Awakening designed by Leonard Rosoman, rather a good painter and designer; but what on earth was it doing alongside genuine Bakst costumes, which evoked one of the most extraordinary episodes in the entire Diaghilev story, that moment when the great innovator turned back to the past? For all its success, I found parts of the Diaghilev exhibition in questionable taste. I also have to say that I was not much taken with Dicky as a person, and to tell the truth, I do not think he cared much for me either. Somehow the chemistry was not right and it never became a comfortable relationship. I found that in spite of his observant eye, and his flair for the telling phrase, he lacked warmth. During the two years, on and off, that I worked on the Diaghilev project, we drifted apart. At one cool session in a very costly restaurant at my expense he referred to someone and, perhaps too quickly, I said, `Yes, I know about her.' He said glacially, `You know it all, don't you?' I could not see any point in future reference to him. By this time Humphrey had moved on to London Weekend Television and no one checked up on whether I was using my consultant. Eventually I made two films, and in the week in 1968 when the first was to be transmitted in the Omnibus series on BBC1 I met Dicky on the stairs at Covent Garden, and said, `Hope you'll watch.' `Watch?' he said. `What do you mean? I thought it was on the radio.' Now older and perhaps wiser, I am grateful to Dicky, for one thing in particular -- he let me get on with it, and did not block my way, which he could easily have done. His £200 was easily earned, and was four times as much as almost everyone who featured in the programmes got. Copyright © 1997 John Drummond. All rights reserved.
