Creative Person; 9; The Sleeping Ballerina: Olga Spessivtzeva

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At Niac, 30 miles from New York, the inmates of the Tolstoy Farm for Russian refugees go to Sunday Church. I noticed by many of them is a woman who was once one of the world's greatest classical dancers, but who for the last 20 years has been dead to the world. It's here in Republican America that her story ends. It begins in Tsarist Russia just 50 years ago.

At the Imperial Ballet School at St. Petersburg, where in 1913, the 18-year-old Olga took the first steps along the road of her brilliant but tragic career. From the beginning, she was an outstanding pupil. She will remember her then, say as others often said later, that she was painfully shy, very beautiful, and absolutely dedicated to her work. After graduation Olga joined the Marinsky Theatre Company. She became a soloist straight away, and less than two years later, she was taking the lead in one of the Marinsky's most famous ballets, Petipa's Daughter of Ferra. In 1916, the Great Diagalef would already attracted so many Russian dancers to the West persuaded her to join his company on a tour of America. They opened at the Manhattan Opera House.

The partner was the famous Nijinsky, and they danced Specs de la Rose. For Alga, unknown to audiences who even then were turning the Nijinsky into a legend, the tour was not a happy one. She never danced in America again. At Sier at the Marinsky, Alga was promoted to ballerina, a title then bestowed less lavishly than it is today. During the next three seasons, she triumphed in ballets, such as Esmeralda. They still feed, which always remained one of her favorite ballets. And Giselle. So nervous was she of not getting Giselle's mad scene right, that she went to an asylum to see how mad people behaved. It was a strangely prophetic journey.

In 1921, she went to London to dance the title role in Diagalef's English Premier of the Sleeping Beauty. It was the first time she'd ever danced the Sleeping Beauty, and though the critics had reservations about the production, she herself won instant acclaim. And Tom Delin was also dancing in the Diagalef Company as a member of the court of ballet. Well, she was the most beautiful dancer I think I'd ever seen. I was very young, perhaps very impressionable. But to me, well, Spisitra had the beauty of Kasavana, the wonderful ethereal quality of Anapadlova, who I'd seen in my youth also at that time, but nothing came anywhere near the perfection. The technique, the line, and the extraordinary quality of the August Spisitra had. In 1924, she was appointed a twal or star of the Paris Opera House.

The first Russian ballerina ever to hold this distinction. In honor of the event, the opera revived a ballet that hadn't been danced there since 1868. It was Giselle, the ballet that Olga had made her own. After the next seven years Olga made her home in France, sometimes dancing with the Diagalef ballet more often with the Paris Opera. She appeared in many new ballets, as well as most of the old ones. In

She visited Buenos Aires to dance Travinsky's father. Her partner was Keith Lester. The memory of Buenos Aires was one of enormous suffering. Olga decided that I needed a great deal of training to be her partner. And she took me and gave me all her own exercises. These we worked at every day and it was like going through fire.

I stood on the bar and wept while she merely went on working and smiled. These were, in my opinion, the most marvelous exercises I've ever done. But they are without doubt. So terrifying the human body. That one can only think that through these sufferings, Olga transmuted her human body into the magnificent vehicle for the dance that it became. The next year she came to London again to dance Gizelle. De Marirondere, founder of the Ballet Rombaire, remembers the visit well. We were involved together with the Balois Ballet. And so I only saw her at rehearsals. And it was during one of those rehearsals that a great friend of mine took a film of her. Of course it's an amateur film on a 16 millimeter, but yet it is a perfect record.

You realize her ever short film is and it's not in perfect order. You can seek the quality of her dancing and the quality of her dramatic acting, which were absolutely uncomfortable. There is Darlene, that is Albre, and she's very shy. She says, no, I will go back to the cottage, do a little bit, go away. And he percage her. And then they dance together. This is when he tries to catch her.

But again, you can see this extraordinarily pointed foot, beautiful arch, quite rare. Her arch was like a path like a sponge. That's the bit together. You see, she jumps almost as high as Darlene felt. A lovely hair that was her own beautiful black sleeping. Again, her height and her lightness are quite remarkable in this. So it keeps us to each other.

And it comes to the bit of the finale, which is very quick. And you feel all through this perfection of mind with wonderful care and innocence of that care. That's already the matter. Now to see, she has already thrown the necklace at him.

And she forwards her mother time to come to her. You see, he lay behind her. Okay. And she shifts so it all started in such a quiet way. She's speaking with Daisy again, he loves me, he loves me not. She thinks it's a real Daisy. She found it a big round there. She takes a sword. And they are frightened that she might hurt her. And then she's getting a lot more agitated. Her mother wants to take her to persuade her to go back into the cottage.

But she doesn't want it. Now she remembers the dance that she had danced in the first act of humour, to begin the opening up the end. And she imagines that she's holding his hand in the mountains of humour. And her step natural becomes more and more faltering. And her step begins to feel already cold, looks at her hand in the middle. And then the last paraxes her. Her mother's support of the other. She was a fanatical dancer. Dancing was for her.

It was really a religion. One here is that it's a phrase that one's used many times, but for her it really was her religion. I remember going into her dressing room before a two-up belly, such as Giselle. She'd be in her woolen tights, woolen pullover. And lightly holding onto a chair, not onto a supported bar, which one can hold on to type just as little light chair in her dressing room. And she would practice there for half an hour, forty minutes, three quarts of an hour, dripping, absolutely dripping red, her face perspiring, her hair wet. And this would be about half an hour before perhaps the performance of Giselle. It was about this time that the great Anna Pavlava here in her garden in North London died. Her husband, Victor Dondre, had long been planning a ballet tour of Australia, and now he asked Olga to take Pavlava's place. Her partner was to be Vilsak, who were danced with her in the old modern ski days.

She accepted joyfully, thankful to get away from an atmosphere at the Paris Opera House, which she no longer found congenial. The company opened in Sydney and were given a two-multures welcome. Critics were lavish in their praise, and those who knew Olga well said she had never danced so superbly. And never looked so beautiful. Perhaps one reason for this was the presence on the tour of her friend Mr. Brown, an American businessman. He saw to it that whenever possible Olga got away from the somewhat constricted world of the ballet to relax and recharge the energies on which she made such fierce demands. But this was the calm before the storm. Olga was approaching one of the climaxes of her life. She was carrying out a killing schedule of often as many as ten performances a week. Moreover, she was nearly 40 unmarried and childless.

The strain began to tell, not only at rehearsals with Vilsak, but at performances. Not even the applause of the audience could wash the pain from her face. And afterwards in her dressing room, alone with her beauty and her flowers, she imagined that people were trying to strangle her or poison her food. The climax came when she was found wandering hopelessly along a road, temporarily out of her mind. Next year, she'd recovered sufficiently to give what turned out to be a farewell performance in Paris. And those who saw it said she was as good as ever. In 1939, when war threatened, she went with Mr. Brown to New York. Olga had escaped from the war, but there was no escaping from herself. She scurried from her tell to her tell, from apartment to apartment,

in a frantic effort to avoid the fiends whom she believed were pursuing her. It was in a room in one of Manhattan's most famous hotels that her fate finally caught up with her. And Tom Derlin was in New York at the time. Well, it was the end of 1940, New York, and I shall never forget that day, as long as I live. I was dying with a very great friend of mine, Constance Collier, actually, when a voice came over the phone, as I do Mr. Derlin, could you come here to the hotel? I'd like to see you. I think you can help me. I have a Russian lady here, and, well, she's asking for you. I instinctively knew what had happened. I've been realising for some months under what a great mental stress poor August procedure was living under. Well, I went to the hotel and up in the elevator.

And there in the room was Alga sitting on the bed, looking extremely distraught. No other word I can put for it. In fact, that's a kind word. The doctor by the telephone, one end of the bed, the other side of the bed, was a man from the ambulance, I think downstairs, sitting in the window on the ledge of the window. The window was open, was Dr. Mr. Brown, who was her great friend, but it devoted friend and her manager. Alga had created its stems in the hotel, state law, demands that you do create a disturbance, and you call the doctor. They have the right to commit you for observation for three or four days. She would not leave quite a with me. He begged her to, or I begged her to, and the doctor was very kind, so that if she would leave quite a with you, I will commit it or find it home. She wouldn't leave. She was the Queen of the Swan. She was Giselle. She was the criminal owner, the opera parish. This was her home, her palace, and nothing, nothing was going to make a leave that room. All those words made sense to me, but very little sense of the doctor.

Well, cut the long story short, after an hour and a half of trying to, coerce her to go, begging her to go, crying at one moment, laughing at the next. Oh, they're laughing and crying. We were asked to leave the room, and she was taken by force, by the doctor, of Eastman, and the ambulance men. And to my dying day, I will always hear the cries of that poor woman as she cried out to me. Save me, Anton. You are my partner. You are my dancing partner. Save me. We could do nothing. She was taken to New York's famous Bellevue Hospital on the East Side. They kept her there three days. Then the doctors decided she was no longer capable of running her own affairs, and there was no alternative but to commit her to an institution. With Mr. Brown's approval and largely at his expense, she was taken to Bloomingdale Mental Hospital just outside New York. Here, in spacious park-like surroundings, she lived out of strange dream life in which she imagined she was everybody except herself.

She withdrew more and more into herself and spent long hours wandering alone in the gardens. Then, in 1941, Mr. Brown suddenly died. There was no provision for Augur in his will, and no funds for her to continue at Bloomingdale. Augur immediately became a charge on the state of New York, and she was taken to the huge Hudson River State Hospital at Poughkeepsie with its 5,000 patients and 2,000 staff. The director there today, his doctor Herman B. Snow. When she arrived at this hospital in 1942, we found that she was suffering from delusions, hallucinations,

and all sorts of fantasies. She was quite excited at times. She was very resentful, little belligerent. What we didn't realize at that time was that many of her delusions and fantasies were really a reenactment and a reliving of her roles. For instance, at one time, she thought she was a queen of Egypt. That is, it was described this way in the notes. In retrospect, now, we realized that this was a role that she was playing. At another time, she tried to influence everybody to be her subjects. This was another role, the queen of the swans that she was playing. The important part is that she was suffering from a condition called schizophrenia, which is marked by these hallucinations and delusions, in which the patient cannot separate reality from their own fantasies. After some eight years under close supervision,

Olga had improved sufficient gear to be moved into one of the estate cartridges set aside for the more cooperative patients. Here, games are organized to while away the interminable hours, but Olga herself did not play them. Here, people live in their own private worlds, worlds which bear little relation to reality. For the victors at Bingo, there's always a piece of candy as prize.

And so the seasons and the years went by, in which the once beautiful Olga grew old and lonely, for there were few people to visit her. She was alone with her memories and her fantasies, and her tragedy was she could not tell the difference between them. With the help of new drugs, Olga gradually improved, and finally in the spring of 1963, she waved goodbye to the hospital after a stay of 21 years.

For Olga, the Tolstoy Farm was like sighting land again after a long voyage at sea, like coming to life again after an eternity of sleep. For the first time in 30 years, she was with her fellow countrymen, in touch with sights and sounds that were comforting and familiar. Chief amongst these was the farm's guiding spirit, Alexandra Tolstoy, younger daughter of the author of War and Peace, and in her own right, a truly remarkable woman. To Olga, ever since her arrival, she has been a true friend. Other friends come out from New York to visit her. This young dancer from the New York City Ballet has just been on a tour of Russia, and she brings Olga news of her sister in Leningrad. Sometimes Olga goes visiting herself on this occasion to the nearby house of the actress Helen Hayes. She was taken there by her old partner Dolan,

who reminds her of the steps they dance together 30 years ago. Her life has a new sense of purpose. Alone in her room, she occupies herself in writing a booklet on the famous exercises which caused Keith Lester and indeed herself so much suffering. Here at Niac, Olga's troubled spirit has found peace at last, and the phantoms which haunted her for so long are now at bay. The supreme paradox of her life is that she excelled at an art for which she was temperamentally quite unsuited, and in her efforts to achieve perfection at it,

she drove herself beyond the edge of reason. As for history's verdict on her, let the last word be left with Diaghilef. An apple he said came into being of which one half was Pavlava and the other specifts of her. Then he added, for me specifts of her was the half, turned towards the sun. Thank you, friends. Thank you, everybody.

This is N-E-T, the National Educational Television Network. This is N-E-T, the National Educational Television Network. This is N-E-T, the National Educational Television Network.