For the Ballet

Girandoles and red plush, champagne and rich grey caviar, pretty Moscow women and gay music--it is a long way from all that to a lonely flat in Cleveland, Ohio. So it seemed to Nikolai Semenoff. Born in Russia some 50 years ago. he had entered the Imperial Ballet School at 8. In the Imperial Ballet, and in the triumphally trouping Sergei Diaghilev Ballet Russe--with its decors by Bakst, Picasso, Derain; its music by Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky; its surging choreography--Dancer Semenoff had taken part, close friend and assistant of Director Michel Fokine. When the Revolution changed things, Semenoff escaped through Poland, settled like many other emigres in Paris. He went to the U. S. as ballet master with Nikita Balieff's Chauve-Souris in 1923, opened a dance studio in Cleveland seven years ago. Thereafter he saw few of his oldtime friends. Unmarried, he lived alone. . . .

Cleveland is in the main stream of things modern and smart. Cleveland applauded importantly two years ago when Doris Humphrey of Manhattan's Dance Repertory Theatre, lecturing at the art museum, called the ballet "an artificial type of toe-dancing." German Dancer Mary Wigman brought to Cleveland her stark rhythms, her "rich speech of the body." Semenoff, intensely devoted to the oldtime ballet-school style, muttered that she was "devoid of grace, devoid of soul." He at least would make his pupils worthy of the old Imperial School. But his pupils, who had once included many a rich man's daughter, and such stars as Actress Olga Baclanova, began to dwindle. He began to brood, long and darkly. Last June he gave a recital in his studio. Then he began giving away old books, keepsakes, treasured souvenirs.

In Manhattan last week Michel Fokine received a ten-page letter, in pencil and ink, much of it undecipherable. It came from Niagara Falls--a place taken for granted by many an American but vastly impressive to Europeans. Translated from Russian by Dancer Fokine, part of it read:

"My dear friend Fokine: I am ending my life by suicide because I cannot bear any longer the slander and persecution of the ballet. It may be that my jump into Niagara Falls will sufficiently disturb you and others to set back the self-inflated modernists. A greater charlatan article in Plain Dealer of Sept. 13, 1931, I have never seen. . . .* This will kill me. . . . The time will come when [Doris Humphrey's statements] will be recollected with bitter shame. . . . Now Ruth St. Denis is dreaming about a religious dance and does not see that the classical ballad dance is the most fine, elevated, and is the most close to the hopes of Heaven. . . .

"I am lonesome for Moscow, the Grand Theatre, the Art Theatre, and for the Little Theatre there. There was enthusiasm and here is only business. . . . They have taken my furniture away, and I have no pen. . . .

"I ask the heads of cultural organizations, educational schools and colleges, whom do they invite as dance instructors? Persons who have graduated from charlatan schools in New York, who have received gold medals and diplomas for a few weeks or months of work? What do they know? These people must hate the ballet, for it requires many and many years of study, and one should begin at an early age and one must have talent.

"I would like to send you a kiss but there is no pleasure in a kiss from a dead person."

Dancer Fokine telegraphed the Police in Cleveland and Niagara Falls: "FIND SEMENOFF. . . ." But Nikolai Semenoff had already spent a night at the Temperance House in Niagara Falls, walked out next morning, doffed hat, top coat and stick, laid them neatly on the shore. Helpless witnesses saw him plunge off Table Rock, go over the brink in his last and bravest pirouette.

* The article announced a new modern dance department in the Cleveland Institute of Music, under the direction of Modernists Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. Recommended to housewives, stenographers et al., it advertised that long, hard work and a musical background are not necessary; "all you need is a body."

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