Pavlova’s First Triumph

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6631, 9 June 1928, Page 4 (Supplement)

Pavlova’s First Triumph

Her eighth birthday saw the turning point . . . the guide-post that pointed so straightly towards the long steep road of artistry. On that day she was taken as a treat on her first visit to the theatre where wa piayed the ballet of “The Sleeping Beauty." It was a strangely silent littlo girl who trudged home that night through the snow-bound streets of St. Petersburg. It was as they were on tS.o point of entering their small house that finally she could contain herself no longer. “I know now, mother, what I am going to be," she burst out. “I am going to be a dancer." That with Pavlova the child was mother to the woman is evident from •the tenacity with which in spite of all opposition she maintained her resolution. She gained her point at last. When she was sixteen Pavlova joined the Corps de Ballet of the Opera House. Hero hard work was as continuous as had been the case at school, though now so much of it was voluntary. But hour by hour, day by day, Pavlova spent her time in practising. •Dancing—always dancing—while other girls found time for pleasure. And then one day a manager agreed to take her to Sweden, and in Stockholm it was that Pavlova reached the first milestone of an international career which in her own art has been bne long progress from triumph to triumph. At the close of her first performance there ahe was utterly and completely bewildered at the behaviour of the audience. Even in her own country she had not known the enthusiasm that was displayed in Stockholm. When she came to enter her carriage to return to. her hotel she found that the horses had been replaced in the shafts by those whose tribute it was to drive her through the streets. The carriage was followed the whole way to the hotel by a crowd who roared their applause of her. “I could not understand it" she said to me. “In Russia I did not think about myself at all. Where there were so many of us it did not seem possible that this thing could happen. Also I had heard that though in Russia the ballet was taken serious-

ly in other parts of Europe it was .. . only a graceful annexe or complement, to opera. “So that you can judge of my state when the next morning the manager of my hotel came to mo in great agitation to inform me that an equerry from the Eoyal Palace desired the honour of an

interview. That gentleman told me that outside there was a royal carriage to taka me to the Palace for the favour of audience with His Majesty the King, so that he might pin upon my breast the gold medal for Art and Sciences." —Theodore Stier, in “With Pavlova Bound the World."