Anna Pavlova Dances for Charity
March is Women’s History Month. Our site always centers women’s history; this month we’ll do so a bit more emphatically.
One hundred years ago today … Anna Pavlova (sometimes Pavlowa), considered the world’s leading prima ballerina, performed at the Hippodrome, located on 6th Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets.
Photograph.of Anna Pavlova by Eugene Hutchinson in Shadowland, May 1921. E.V. Brewster Publications Inc. Wikicommons.
Pavlova, a Russian citizen, toured the world extensively between 1910 and 1921, making numerous prolongued stops in New York. She had put down roots in NYC in 1919 while working in support of Camp Fire Girls, a charity that supported orphaned children (now called Camp Fire USA)
New York Herald, 6 March 1921, p. 64. Library of Congress.
New York Times, 14 March 1921, p. 2. The New York Times.
Her Hippodrome appearance as part of a benefit performance in support of the Boys Club, a philanthropic organization based at 10th Street and Avenue A.
Note: we have covered the Hippodrome in several previous posts, most thoroughly in Sunny Stalter-Pace’s guest post about December 19, 1920.
The event raised $12,000 for needy children.
The show one of numerous benefit appearances Pavlova and her troupemade in 1921. Just three days earlier, they performed at the Metropolitan Opera House (where they were otherwise in the midst of a ten-show stretch to benefit the Camp Fire Girls, an event partly organized by philanthropist Grace Harriman (née Carley). Harriman’s late stepfather was the philanthropist who had started the Boys Club.
New York Daily News, 9 March 1921, p. 13. Library of Congress.
Pavlova and her Ballet Russes had recently returned to New York City after performing in Mexico. According to James Whittaker of the News, the troupe had developed several Mexican-style dances to add to their act. These were, Whitaker writes, the “artistic crest” of the show. The rest of his review is unsurprisingly racist:
The unquenchable gayety of Mexico is in these folk dances. The Mexicans murder with the same devil-and-the-gringo-maycare hilarity with which they dance. Pavlowa's ardent laughter splashed toeing of the "Jarabe Tapatia" will acquaint you with the irresponsible childish obstreperousness which animates the Mexican when he raids the border and kills. The Mexican will have his fling. Pavlowa in the Mex dances gave us the Mexican fling in all its lightheaded vividness.
Pavlowa does not attempt to portray the locale of these dances in her stage set, which is simply a rose-garlanded black curtain before which the leaping figures of the dance are bright silhouettes. But for one who has been south of the border the Mexican dance halls from which she gathered the steps of her dances are reincarnated in the folds of that curtain by the dynamic conjury of her art. She dances, and you have rubbed the magie lamp which gives you vision. The flower-festooned lagoons of Xochimilcho, in the valley of Mexico City, with its perfumed cargoes of dancing girls and strumming musicians, lived in a memory which was a pang as she stamped her little feet on the pulsing beat of the orchestra's rhythms.
“Mexican Rhythm Pulses in Rhythm of Pavlova’s Toes.” New York Daily News, 11 March 1921, p. 15.
– Jonathan Goldman, March 13, 2021
TAGS: Women’s History Month, dance, entertainment, children, charity, philanthropy, fundraiser, Russia, Mexico