Ballet dancers rehearsing (1963)
Posts tagged ballet.
Anna Pavlova as The Dying Swan (1910)
While touring in The Hague, Netherlands, Pavlova was told that she had pneumonia and required an operation. She was also told that she would never be able to dance again if she went ahead with it. She refused to have the surgery, saying “If I can’t dance then I’d rather be dead.” She died of pleurisy, three weeks short of her 50th birthday. She was holding her costume from The Dying Swan when she spoke her last words, “Play the last measure very softly.”
Members of the Metropolitan Opera’s ballet practicing, by Alfred Eisenstaedt (1936)
Tamara Karsavina rehearsing with Margot Fonteyn for “Le Spectre de la Rose”
I love Retro
Posting everything from the 1900s to the 1990s.
