DOCUMENTS

In the Diaghilev exhibit at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, the presence of first-hand documents makes the past breathe all but audibly. As dance is always a buyer’s market, one lesson learned — perhaps too frequently — by the performer is the ways of propitiating powerful people. Included here is a hand-written letter written in 1928 to Diaghilev by danseur Anton Dolin ostensibly asking for a meeting to discuss some third-party business, but obviously fishing for an invitation to return to the company. Dolin had left Diaghilev four years earlier, bridling under the impresario’s aesthetic as well as sexual despotism. Reading Dolin’s letter, I experienced a slight rustle of déjà vu, for his handwriting was much the same when he wrote me, fifty years later, saying that he hoped I hadn’t yet left London because yes, by all means, he would love to discuss his friend and fellow icon of 1920s London Tallulah Bankhead.