ワールドレポート／ニューヨーク

ミンディ・アロフ Mindy Aloff（米・舞踊評論家、著述家）
＜英文も掲載＞
訳：辻香織　

タチアナ・レガートは日本ではよく知られるかもしれないが、アメリカのダンス界ではそれほど知られておらず、彼女がキーロフ・バレエ（現マリインスキー・バレエ）に在籍した約30年間に活躍した時代の同僚（イリーナ・コルパコワやナタリア・マカロワなど）の方がよく知られる。にも関わらず、タチアナはアメリカのダンサーたちに影響を与えた。1960年代初期にソル・ヒューロックがキーロフ・バレエのアメリカ公演を行ったこともあり、当時ソリストであったタチアナの公演を実際に目にした人もいる。また、1992年から2003年までボストン・バレエスクールで指導にあたったとされるほか、アメリカン・バレエ・シアターで上演された２つの19世紀全幕作品をアンナ=マリー・ホームズが演出した際にアシスタントとして関わったという記録も見られる。英国ロイヤル・バレエの名花サラ・ラムは、タチアナが指導したアメリカ生まれのダンサーの中でも著名であろう。タチアナはサラがボストン・バレエに在籍していたほとんどの期間にレッスンやリハーサルのメインで担当していた。しかし、ボストン・バレエの体制が変わった混乱期にタチアナがスタッフから外れた。当時、次のスターと期待されていたサラは、憤ってボストン・バレエを去り英国ロイヤル・バレエへと移籍した。実際に、サラは当時受けた新聞のインタビューで移籍の理由を明言している。

それでもまだ、ロシア語を話せないニューヨークに在住の研究者にとって、タチアナ・レガートのキャリアの全貌を掴むには、様々な情報源から得たピースを繋ぎ合わせる必要がある。筆者は、キーロフ・バレエ在籍時代のタチアナが踊るジゼルの公演映像 （1950-1960年と予測）が8mmフィルムで残っているのを発見した。(The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsのThe Jerome Robbins Dance DivisionにあるMikhail Baryshnikov Archiveより)
タチアナの踊りは、貴族のように抑制された、教科書的には非の打ちどころのない踊りを披露し、少なくともこの映像の中では愛想を振りまくような様は見られない。しかし、彼女の真剣さには心惹かれるものがある。ピルエットは軸もぶれずに完璧なポジションに位置され、アームスの使い方はとても美しく彫刻のような精密さを持ちながらも生き生きとしていた。教師やコーチそしてボストン・バレエのバレエミストレスとして、指導を受けたダンサーたちの中には公に彼女を讃えるコメントを残している人もいる。その一方で、レッスンでの厳しさやリハーサルの辛さに関する意見も同様に見られる。

タチアナ自身を記した英語の文献の1つに、2010年に刊行されたBallet Review に掲載されたロングインタビューがある （バレエ評論家Joel Lobenthal、ロシア語通訳Lisa Whitakerによる）。これは、彼らが行った１冊の本を出版できるほどの長さのリサーチプロジェクトの一部とみられる (Red Star, White Nights: The Life and Death of Yuri Soloviev, published in 2021）。
しかしながら、やはりタチアナ自身のキャリアに関する質疑は、あくまで彼らの主題であったユーリ・ソロヴィヨフ （1940-1977）の人生と彼の早すぎる死を問う中で補足的な質問として行われたものとみられる。ソロヴィヨフはタチアナの夫であり、彼女の子供たちの父親でもある。キーロフ・バレエでも傑出したダンサーと言われたソロヴィヨフは、素晴らしいテクニックを誇り、とりわけ圧倒的なジャンプの高さに熱烈な喝采が寄せられ、ニジンスキーとも比肩されるほどであった。彼の技量と突然の死去（自殺とされる）が重なり、ジャーナリストの興味関心を書き立て続ける存在であった。タチアナは、インタビュー中で楽しかったことも辛い体験も包み隠さずに話している。辛いとされる出来事の中には、タチアナがキーロフ・バレエの同僚から、ソロヴィヨフの自殺はタチアナにも責任があると迫られたことも含まれる。タチアナは、ソロヴィヨフ自身は気が進んでいなかったとされる共産党への参加を止めたとされるが、キーロフ・バレエの中には、共産党に在籍していればソロヴィヨフの劇場での過労は軽減できたかもしれないと狂ったように主張した人物もいたと言われる。このインタビューからは、タチアナ自身が共産党に所属していたか否かは判断できないが、彼女のソロヴィヨフに対する愛情は深く確かなものであったと伝わってくる。ソロヴィヨフがいかに釣りが好きだったか、と言ったことも語られている。
インタビュー中、タチアナは結婚、政治、子供時代にまで遡るソロヴィヨフとの関係、彼が好んで組んでいたアラ・シゾーワ （1939-2014）などについて語っているが、彼女の口調は話題が何であっても一貫して率直かつ堅実であった。シゾーワのことに少しだけ触れると、彼女は前述の記録映像のジゼルにも映っている。シゾーワは流れるような身体の使い方、あふれんばかりの活発さ、予測を裏切るような動きから、まさに愛らしさを体現したかのようなダンサーであった。思慮深く真面目なタチアナとは対照的である。

イギリスで月刊で発行されていたDance & Dancers誌の中で、唯一、英語で書かれたタチアナの踊りに関する評価を見つけることができた。それはNatalia Roslavleva というソ連の舞踊歴史家によって書かれたもので（pp. 14-15, 34/筆者名記載はNatalia Rene、1961年3月発行）、内容は当時の新作 に関するロングインタビュー。その新作は、ユーリ・スロニムスキー作 "a fairytale about truth"（真実に関するおとぎ話）のプロットに基づき、アンドレイ・ペトロフの音楽にのせて、イゴーリ・ベリスキーによって振付けられた。海辺という場面設定で、舞台上はブルーのサイクロラマ（ホリゾントライト）で覆いつくされていた。タチアナは、"愛する人を失った少女"という役を演じ、次のように書かれている
「この悲劇的かつ感情をゆさぶる役柄が残した強い印象は、タチアナ・レガート（ニコライ・レガートの最初＜誤＞の妻であるダンサー、アントニア・チュマコワと間の孫娘）の類稀なる才能が成し遂げたことである。1948年、筆者はタチアナが『ラ・バヤデール』の壺の踊りの子役パートを踊っていたところを観劇し、この子は将来伸びていくだろうと思った。その予想通り、受け継いだ才能が素晴らしい教育と組み合わさって、今では彼女は若いながらに成熟したアーティストとなった。彼女が創りあげた役柄は、短くしか登場しない名もなきキャラクターであったが、深い悲劇性や哀れみを印象づけ、このアクト全体の振付スタイルに協調しながらもシャープなラインを印象づけていた。その少女は、ソ連の若い漁師を救おうとするも力及ばず、彼は警官に連行されてしまうのだった。」
往々にしてバレエでは、不思議なことに、個々のダンサーが踊る役は舞台以外の生活で直面する経験を予言するとも言われる。タチアナ・レガートはその1人であったのだろう。
（編注：Legat Ballet Schoolはレガートの死後、サセックスに移り続いたが今日では活動していない）

Mindy Aloff （ミンディ・アロフ）

米国ペンシルベニア州フィラデルフィアに生まれる。幼少期よりバレエやタップ、マーサ・グラハム系のクラスなどのダンス教育を受ける。キーロフ・バレエやボリショイ・バレエの初のアメリカ公演、ヌレエフとフォンティーンが主演する英国ロイヤル・バレエ公演や、バランシン版『真夏の夜の夢』のNYCB初演など数多くの歴史的公演を目にした。
大学では英文学 (専攻)、哲学・芸術史（副専攻）、修士号は英文学（中世文学）で取得した後、アメリカにて舞踊評論家として活動。Dance Critics Associationのチーフを務める他、Willamette Week, Dance Magazine, The Nation, The New Republicなどに数多くの媒体で活躍。受賞歴にWhiting Writers Award (1987年) 、 Guggenheim Fellowship (1990年)など。教壇にも立ち、ニューヨーク州の大学バーナード・カレッジでは舞踊評論や舞踊史を教えた。(今回の訳者にも生徒の一人として出会う)
著書にThe Legat Legacy (編・著) 、Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation など。長編エッセイWhy Dance MattersはYale University Press より2023年1月に出版予定。2020年には、George Balanchine Foundation とThe Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Artsが手掛けたFrederic Franklin(Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo のスター)の生涯に関するMonica Moseleyへのインタビュープロジェクトに共同取材者として参加するなど、活躍の場を広げている。

"A Backward Glance at Tatiana Legat"

Mindy Aloff, U.S. Dance Critic and Author

Tatiana Legat's name may be well-known in Japan; however, it is not as familiar in the American dance world as those of Irina Kolpakova, Natalia Makarova, and other colleagues of hers at the Kirov Ballet in the three decades during which she performed in the spotlight with that company. And yet, she had an effect on dancers in the U.S. Some audiences did see her dance in person, as Madame Legat was a soloist with the Kirov when impresario Sol Hurok brought the company to America in the early 1960s. Also, she taught at the Boston Ballet school from 1992 to 2003 and was credited with assisting in the stagings for American Ballet Theatre, by Anna-Marie Holmes, of two evening-length nineteenth-century works. Her outstanding American-born student is Sarah Lamb, now a prominent ballerina with Britain's Royal Ballet. Madame Legat was her main teacher and coach for much of her training at the Boston Ballet school, and when the company, in a state of disorganized transition, let Madame Legat go from its staff, Ms Lamb--a star in the making at Boston--left for the Royal in protest, going on the record in newspaper interviews to explain exactly why she was jumping ship.

Still, for a New York researcher who does not speak Russian, the overall shape of Tatiana Legat's career has to be tessellated from fragments of information, from a variety of resources. In bits of 8-mm films of her in the title role of Giselle with the Kirov during, I'd guess, the late 1950s or early '60s (part of the Mikhail Baryshnikov Archive at The Jerome Robbins Dance Division in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), one can see that she was aristocratically restrained and academically impeccable in her own dancing, although, at least in this footage, without a projection of outgoing charm. Nevertheless, her seriousness could be magnetic in its way, her pirouettes were perfectly placed and centered, and her hands as a dancer were quite beautiful, both sculptural and alive. As a teacher, coach, and ballet mistress in Boston, she earned public statements of admiration by some students, mixed in with reported protests by those who did not respond to her intensity in the classroom and challenges in rehearsal.

An intimate portrait of Madame Legat in English is provided in a long interview with her conducted by dance critic Joel Lobenthal and Russian speaker Lisa Whitaker, published in a 2010 issue of Ballet Review--part of what appears to have been their research for a longer book project. (Red Star, White Nights: The Life and Death of Yuri Soloviev, published in 2021). However, understandably, Madame Legat's own career was only a collateral topic to the interview's main subject, which was the life and premature death of Kirov virtuoso Yuri Soloviev (1940--1977), Madame Legat's husband and the father of their daughter. Soloviev's brilliant dancing, especially applauded for its remarkable elevation, led to comparisons of him with Nijinsky, and his physical prowess as a dancer, coupled with his untimely death (it seems by his own hand), continue to stimulate curiosity among reporters and critics. During the interview, Madame Legat speaks openly about joyous and also painful moments, among which was the charge levelled against her by a Kirov colleague that Soloviev's suicide was her fault because she did not try to get him to join the Communist Party, which he didn't want to do, even though, as the colleague cruelly argued, Party membership might have eased Soloviev's overwork at the theater. From the interview, it is not clear if Madame Legat herself was a member of the Party; however, her love for Soloviev, down to the details of his fascination with fishing, seems profoundly real. Her tone throughout the interview transcript is candid and steady, regardless of whether she is speaking of her marriage, politics, or the affection (going back to their childhood) between Soloviev and his favorite dancing partner, the Kirov ballerina Alla Sizova (1939--2014). Indeed, the Giselle footage at the Library includes scenes of Sizova also in the title role--physically fluent, exuberant, dramatically unpredictable, a living exemplar of charm--which provide an illuminating contrast to Madame Legat's thoughtful and comparatively sober account of the character.

Tatiana Legat seems to have been called upon by luck or fate to bank her fires from the time she was quite small. Her parents divorced early in her life; she never saw her father again once he left, and her mother died during the Siege of Leningrad. In the English text of an online interview that Madame Legat gave late in her life to the web site of the Mikhailovsky Ballet, where she was a teacher and coach in her last years, she explains that she was reared by her grandmother, who was also a dancer and a previous wife of the Imperial Ballet's esteemed danseur noble and pedagogue Nicholas Legat. Tatiana graduated from the Vaganova Academy of Dance, in St. Petersburg, where her teachers and coaches included Agrippina Vaganova, Konstantin Sergeyev, Vladimir Vasiliev, and Yuri Grigorovich. She was part of the Kirov Ballet from 1953 to 1984, becoming a principal dancer there and eventually a ballet mistress and teacher. Her stage partners included her husband, Yuri Soloviev (in Swan Lake), Rudolf Nureyev (in Laurencia), and Mikhail Baryshnikov (in The Creation of the World). In 1960, she was awarded the title of Honored Artist of Russia, which was not only prestigious but helped her and her husband secure a larger apartment. After she retired from dancing, she staged ballets by Petipa in Europe and several former Soviet republics, and she taught and staged at the Stanislavsky Opera and Ballet Theatre, in Moscow (1985--1989) as well as in several schools in England, among them the Legat Ballet School established by her maternal grandfather and his third wife, Nadine Nicolaeva-Legat. Madame Legat also coached some of the most illustrious Russian ballerinas of the twentieth century. Yet she herself was illustrious, too. Just about every one of her forebearers, going back well into the nineteenth century, were classical dancers, as were her daughter and her son-in-law. Only her grandchildren chose other paths.

The sole assessment of her dancing I could find in English was in the British monthly Dance & Dancers. It was written by the Soviet dance historian Natalia Roslavleva (called Natalia Rene in the byline; March 1961, pp. 14-15, 34). The context is a long review of a then-new ballet by Igor Belsky, with a book by Yuri Slonimsky ("a fairytale about truth"), and music by Andrei Petrov. The action took place by the sea, and the décor consisted entirely of a blue cyclorama. Tatiana Legat played a figure known as "The Girl Who Lost Her Beloved One." Roslavleva wrote:

"The great impact made by this tragic and moving episodical character is due to a very considerable extent to the talent of Tatiana Legat (Nikolai Legat's granddaughter by his first marriage [sic] to the dancer Antonina Chumakova). In 1948, I saw her in the child part of the famous 'danse Manu' from La Bayadère and predicted she would go far. And now I saw her as a young but fully matured artist, possessing that precious gift of projection coupled with an excellent school[ing]. The character created by her remains nameless and appears but briefly, yet leaves an impression of great tragedy, compassion, and plastically sharp line in harmony with the general choreographic style of this act. The girl is helpless in her attempts at saving the young Soviet fisherman. He is marched away by the patrol."

In ballet, every so often, an individual comes along whose repertoire uncannily prophesizes the person's offstage experience. Tatiana Legat appears to have been one of those individuals.

Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where her parents made it possible for her to see every ballet company performing there and many performing in New York, including the Kirov and the Bolshoi on their first U.S. tours, The Royal Ballet with Rudolf Nureyev in his first tour with Margot Fonteyn, and the New York City Ballet's first season of George Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Aloff attended the illustrious all-academic public school The Philadelphia High School for Girls and earned an A.B. from Vassar College, where she majored in English and minored in philosophy and art history; she also holds an M.A. (and an ABD--"all but dissertation") in English, with emphasis on Medieval literature, from The State University of New York at Buffalo. She has served as a masthead dance critic on Willamette Week, Dance Magazine, The Nation, and The New Republic, as the president of the Dance Critics Association, as a nominator for several major foundations, and, for seventeen years, as an adjunct faculty member in dance criticism, dance history, and First-Year Seminar (literature) at Barnard College. It was at Barnard where one of her most brilliant and knowledgeable dance history students was Kaori Tsuji, the translator of the article here. Aloff's honors include a Whiting Writers Award (1987) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1990). Her books include The Legat Legacy, which she edited, and a research volume: Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation. Her book-length essay Why Dance Matters will be published by Yale University Press in January 2023. In the 1960s and '70s, Aloff's dance teachers included Pete Conlow (ballet, tap), Barbara Fallis (ballet), Richard Thomas (ballet), Mary-Jean Cowell (modern dance), Cristyne Lawson (Martha Graham technique), Graham Smith (ballet), and Kathleen Crofton (ballet). By her own lights, her most important contribution to dance literature was her year (2000) as a co-interviewer, with Monica Moseley, of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo star Frederic Franklin, for his forty-one-transcript oral history, co-sponsored by The George Balanchine Foundation and The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

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