Albertina Rasch: The concert career and the concept of the American ballet

Abstract

The general public has always had difficulty in accepting ballet as an American art form; this prejudice was even more prevalent during the 1920s and 1930s, when the most popular ballet dancers were usually foreign: Anna Pavlova, Mikhail Mordkin, Adolph Bolm, and later the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which began touring America in 1933. Albertina Rasch (1891-1967), although foreign born and trained in Vienna, was concerned with making ballet American from the time that she first came to this country in 1910 to appear at the New York Hippodrome. Over the next thirty years she adapted her teaching, her technique, and her choreographic ideas to what she felt were American idioms-without rejecting the discipline, training, and form of the European ballet traditions she was born and bred to. She was not always successful in equating her theories with the realization of American ballet, but she was a pioneer in expanding the horizons for the ballet dancer from the concert stage to Broadway musicals and, finally, motion pictures. To gain an understanding of Rasch's approach to ballet in America, her work should be investigated in three areas: her theories as they appeared in print between 1927 and 1931;