Music: Feather Feud

In a flurry of ruffled tutu feathers, a battle was joined last week. At the Metropolitan Opera House the Original Ballet Russe opened to a predominantly male first-night audience (including a young man with sequin dust in his hair). The next night Manhattanites scurried to the Broadway Theater for the opening of the American-style Ballet Theater.

The two ballet companies were dancing out a personal feud between two former partners: American Ballerina Lucia Chase and Russian-born Sol Hurok, the Little White Father of ballet in America. Last spring Miss Chase canceled her contract with Hurok and took her troupe to London, where they packed Covent Garden for two months. Thereupon Manager Hurok imported the Russian troupe from South America and bolstered it up with the peerless Alicia Markova (born Alice Marks of London) and other favorites. Then the two companies booked parallel autumn seasons, and the battle was on.

First Round. With few exceptions critics gave the first round to the sprightly young Ballet Theater. Its Les Patineurs was the one hit among the week’s three new ballets (new to the U.S.). The three:

Camille (Ballet Russe), a turgid fancy-dress charade by New York City-born John Taras to a potpourri of Schubert piano pieces. Even Markova could not breathe life into Dumas’ consumptive heroine.

Cain and Abel (Ballet Russe), by Hollywood’s David Lichine. Adam’s two husky sons, wearing swimming trunks, writhe on the floor in sweating ecstasy before Cain heaves Abel from a cliff, then drags Mother Eve across the set by her hair.

Les Patineurs (Ballet Theater), a slithery skating party arranged by British Choreographer Frederick Ashton. Dancers (without skates) mime ice skaters just as ice skaters have been miming ballet dancers for years.

Couple Concerts. For serious balletomanes the event of the week was the return of Igor Youskevitch, a gaunt, fierce-eyed, 34-year-old Slav, the greatest contemporary male classic dancer.

At the University of Belgrade Kiev-born Igor Youskevitch studied chemical engineering and played soccer. “It was my second year when a ballerina there made a proposition for me to be her partner in an acrobatic dance,” says Youskevitch. They were a success in Yugoslavia, so they went to Paris. “We did couple concerts. There we’re flop. Then the ballerina had to go home. I think it was her husband or something.”

Youskevitch toured Australia and New Zealand with an itinerant company, then Leonide Massine made him the leading dancer in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. That brought him to America, where he was drafted and became a Navy physical-education instructor. He is married to ex-Ballerina Anna Scarpova. Their ten-month-old daughter Maria, Youskevitch says, “stays on her pointes very good.” During his first week with the new Ballet Theater company Youskevitch appeared only in three short pas de deux with Ballerinas Alicia Alonso and Nora Kaye. For the rest of the season he will dance leads in the classic ballets: Swan Lake, Giselle and Les Sylphides.

The artistic odds might be all with Ballet Theater, but canny Sol Hurok was not worrying. The name Hurok in combination with Metropolitan Opera House is still box office. Hurok’s old-fashioned Ballet Russe was drawing crowds twice as big as its rival’s.