Ludmila Alexeeva’s School of Movement
Материал из HEPTACHOR.
L.N. ALEXEEVA’S SCHOOL OF MOVEMENT
Inessa Kulagina
Ludmila Nikolaevna Alexeeva (1890-1964) was a famous pedagogue and an outstanding figure in the art of movement and dance. Her work had great impact on the development of dance, on its variety, and on physical training in Russia. She was a distinguished person with delicate taste, emotional responsiveness, erudition. She had a lot of students, and her classes went beyond usual training in artistic movement; a joyful attitude towards life (ability to perceive beauty and the dignity of personality, spiritual freedom, active and creative position) was an equally important component of her training system and a focus of her personal and professional attention. Alexeeva was tireless in seeking ways to improve her system and methods of work, which reveals some major principles of her attitude towards work – firmness, openness and creativity.
Alexeeva’s School of Movement appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is still alive. Why is it so viable? What makes it so attractive?
The secret is not only in the personality of Alexeeva but also in the practice itself. It is a natural form of movement, which promotes inner freedom both bodily and spiritual, creatíng the feeling of power over one’s body movements. Body and spirit are closely interwoven in this practice. Another basic link is the unity between music and movement. Music fills the dancer, leads her or him, and in the words of Bodet (the follower and theoretician of Dalcroze’s system) rises to the spheres, rises to a nature which us beyond sensual borders.
Unity with music is one of the main peculiarities of the Alexeeva system. It is so natural that music becomes not just a well-chosen accompaniment, but the very base, which defines the pattern of movements, and not a single thread can be taken away from the pattern without disturbing the whole tissue of the etude (Alexeeva “Thought on women’s gymnastics”, 1953).
Analytic elements are transformed into etudes in Alexeeva gymnastics. Each exercise is created based on an especially chosen etude or musical fragment, which turns music into an active participant, not just a supplementary addition or occasional passer-by. Alexeeva called this unity of music and movement a “rhythmical harmony”, and considered it to be an essential principle of turning gymnastic exercises into arts. Movements follow music, spring from it, take their sources in it. And as all the training material consists of simple and complex etudes, pieces of art, each participant, each dancer, becomes a performer of a small piece of art.
Alexeeva was a follower of a new school of movement having its roots in Delsarte’s school, Demeni’s gymnastics and Isadora Duncan’s dance.
Delsarte’s ideas brought to life several gymnastic schools, which formulated their aim as natural and harmonious development of the human body. Delsarte’s work opened a new page in the history of the art of movement, appealing to natural movement.
G. Demeni (1850-1917) contributed much to the scientific analysis of gymnastics. In 1880 he founded a Club of Rational Gymnastics in Paris. He replaced the analytic approach of Sweden and German schools by a system of synthetic exercises, where one movement was naturally followed by another.
Jaques Dalcroze (1865-1950) and his system of rhythmical gymnastics had an equally important influence on these schools. This gymnastics promoted both the development of a musical ear and muscular rhythmical sensitivity. A motion, a movement, turns into art owing to rhythm, for “only music influences our nervous centers in that swift and immediate way, which is necessary to give impulses to a moving body”. Dalcroze claimed rhythm to be the grounds for everything; therefore development of the feeling and culture of rhythm was distinguished as essential. In 1911 he established his own school in Hellerau in the suburbs of Dresden.
One of the most gifted followers of Duncan in Russia was Ella Ivanovna Rabenek (nee Bartels, stage-name – Ellen Tells). After Duncan’s concert tour in Russia, Rabenek went to study with Duncan’s sister Elizabeth in Germany. In 1906, invited by Stanislavsky, she taught plastic arts in the Drama School of MXAT (Moscow). In 1910 she opened her own studio, “Moscow classes of plastic arts”. Voskresenskaya, T. Savvinskaya, N. Belisheva, M. Ivakina, N. Kastalskaya, E. Muratova (Khodasevich’s mistress) and many others attended this studio. L. N. Alexeeva was among them. She came to the Rabenek School in 1911 and participated in several performances (Ellen Tells – Tanz Idyllen) both in Russia and abroad (in London, Berlin, Munich, Budapest, Nuremberg). In 1913 Alexeeva left the Rabenek studio and started her own pedagogic and artistic career.
She was diligent and persistent in creating and searching for new forms of training, which could correspond to a new era in the art of motion. “Alexeeva studio of dance”, “Workshop of the arts of movement”, “Studio of harmonious gymnastics and dance”, or “School-laboratory of artistic gymnastics” – the organizational forms and studio names changed, yet, the pivotal axis persisted. Alexeeva devoted all her life to this work. Her first grand performance was “Darkness, impulse, and the Marseillaise”, staged when she worked in Proletkult (proletarian culture). “There were about 20 ballet studios in Moscow at that time”, wrote S. Serova in “Anna Redel’ and Michael Khrustalev”, “and one of the most famous was Alexeeva’s. It brought together plastic dance and physical culture. Like the studios of Francheska Beata, Lidia Redega, Inna Tchernetskaya, Valeria Tsvetaeva, Inna Bystrenina, and Vera Maya, it developed the principles of the free, natural dance of Isadora Duncan.”
Alexeeva’s route to dance started from gymnastics, i.e. developing the system of exercises and working out a special training. It became the basis of her school. Alexeeva chose her own way and followed it despite criticism and misunderstanding. It helped to preserve the individuality and originality of her direction of dance and movement.
Free dance requires special body training. What could this system be, what could the methodology for such training be? – that was an important question. Many studios were quick to appear but couldn’t get rooted in order to live and to survive – in the majority of cases they didn’t have their own technique (as in ballet, for example) which would have given them both shape and impetus for further development.
Alexeeva’s esthetics was formed over more than half a century. Her way of dance absorbs the whole of the person and brings joy and feelings of beauty. It met the needs of women then, nearly a century ago, and nowadays, and that is why it is still so attractive and flourishing.
