FOKINE GRANDDAUGHTER KEEPS HIS DANCES ALIVE

Isabelle Fokine was not happy. The granddaughter of renowned choreographer Mikhail Fokine was watching two UC Irvine students rehearse Fokine’s celebrated “Le Spectre de la rose,” a work first danced by Nijinsky and Karsavina in 1911 and famous for the most spectacular leap in ballet history.

The ballet tells of a young girl who brings home a rose from a ball, falls asleep in a chair and dreams that the spirit of the rose dances with her until it finally disappears with a leap through a window.

Isabelle, who holds copyrights to her grandfather’s ballets, had been invited by the university’s dance department to stage both “Spectre” and Fokine’s “The Dying Swan” for concerts held during the Society of Dance History Scholars’ 10th annual conference at UCI last weekend.

Kevin Engle and Francesca Tiberi, the two hard-working student dancers in “Spectre,” had enough problems with Fokine’s virtuosic choreography--virtually non-stop movement for the boy in the role of the rose.

But what concerned the youthful Isabelle at the moment was the kiss--”the all-important kiss, the dramatic climax of the piece”--he planted on the girl’s cheek before vanishing.

“You’re doing it as if it has nothing to do with you,” she told Engle. “Gently caress her cheek from the side. Linger with that. Make something happen here as opposed to your celebrated leap out of the window.”

Engle’s problem reflected a major difficulty in preserving Fokine’s legacy.

“Today’s dancers are trained physically and can execute amazing things in terms of technique,” Isabelle said. “But it seems to be at the expense of the art. They’re not trained in how to have an inner life, as opposed to executing steps and positions. . . . No dancer should not be able to hold the (audience) in a kiss.”

Isabelle, an actress and former dancer, seems unhappy with a lot of what she has seen in the reconstructions of Fokine’s ballets.

“My grandfather’s work suffers a great deal from poor productions. American Ballet Theatre set a horrendous ‘Firebird.’ Whole bars (of music) would go by with no one moving--or they would fill in bars with walking and standing around. My grandfather had tremendous musicality and set something to every beat. Their doing nothing was ludicrous.”

Fokine had written extensively about “Firebird” in his memoirs, she added.

“Anyone who read through those passages would be very conscious that (ABT’s production) was way off the mark. I can understand some little regional company not getting it right, but one would hope ABT, a major company, would be accurate.”

She did praise ABT’s “Petrouchka,” however, which was re-staged by dancers who had worked with her grandfather when he revived the work for ABT in 1942.

“What one person didn’t remember, others did,” she said. “And they did a great deal of research. They ended up with a marvelous production, which shows that it’s possible.”

Fokine was famous for expressively integrating dance, music and scenic design in works such as “Les Sylphides,” “Firebird,” “Spectre” and “Petrouchka” choreographed for the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev prior to World War I.

His artistic manifesto called for creating a new form of movement for every ballet according to its subject matter and music, Isabelle said.

“In ‘Spectre,’ there is a difference between (the man’s) lyricism and (the woman’s)--or there should be. His arm positions are no longer those in classical dance. The movement is constantly circular, like a rose opening its petals. He’s the essence of the rose.”

Isabelle danced all the major Fokine roles (“I was brought up with this knowledge”) until she suffered a tendon injury 3 1/2 years ago. Her father tutored her.

“My father was considerably older than me, and we knew that time was working against us. I wanted to tap into his knowledge and learn as much as I could.

“Fortunately, both my father and grandfather kept everything. I have (my grandfather’s) notations for his ballets, and he wrote a great deal about his intentions. There also is a tremendous amount of archival material not yet seen.

“We have a tremendous collection of films of productions and home movies, including a competition between my father and grandfather over who could do more pirouettes.

“The film is 16-millimeter and very old. So it’s very tricky to work with it. But we’re hoping to restore it.”

Two independent New York producers, Deborah Zalkind and Christina Haskins (associated with the Talking Dance Foundation), are restoring these films for a documentary on Fokine for public television. But because of funding problems, their work is progressing slowly.

Isabelle called the Fokine legacy a tremendous responsibility that “sometimes is a burden.”

“I feel it shrunk (my father’s) identity. He spent his career doing this, and many of his gifts were put aside because he believed that my grandfather’s work would, of course, always be more important. I don’t want that to happen to me. I want to leave my own footsteps in the sand.”