Remember when I wrote about the 1916 flick The Dancer’s Peril for City Arts? That silent let then-Broadway star Alice Brady do her best to make us believe she was a ballerina. And it also gave a lot of screen time to dancer/choreographer/ballet master Alexis Kosloff.
Alexis and his brother Theodore were Russian emigres who became for a time indispensable to American popular entertainment. (Was amused, when I re-read Karsavina’s Theatre Street, to read about her crush on Theodore, who transferred to Petersburg’s Imperial ballet academy from its Moscow counterpart.)
Well, on March 15 at the Egyptian theater in Los Angeles, Debra Levine will give a talk on “Theodore Kosloff & Cecil B. DeMille Meet Madam Satan.” Then you’ll get to enjoy a screening of that self-same cinematic oddity directed by DeMille, in which Theodore stars in his own choreography.
Later this year, Levine’s essay of the same name will be published by the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at University of Southern California in its journal Experiment.