Desiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, Carina (1922)

“Colour Display”, Stockholm Olympic Stadium, 1929
 

In her feud with Rolf de Maré, Carina Ari was supported by his music director and senior conductor, Desiré-Émile Inghelbrecht. He was Debussy’s favourite student and was to become one of the greatest French conductors of the 20th century. 

Inghelbrecht was married to the daughter of the famous painter Steinlen (who did the stage sets for Ballets Suédois’s production of Iberia). The marriage had dried up, and Carina took the place of Mme Inghelbrecht. 

In the autumn of 1924, Inghelbrecht became the music director of Opéra Comique, the second state-run lyrical theatre in Paris, which specialised in dramatic, medium-sized operas, such as Carmen. French taste demanded that each opera featured a ballet, but pure ballets were reserved for the Paris Opera at that time. For many years, Carina Ari worked on a risky plan of setting up a full evening programme, featuring herself, not only as sole choreographer but also as the only performer.

Although this was common practice in the new genre of Modern Dance (also called Free Dance, i.e., free from classical rules), no classical dancer had dared to do this before Carina Ari. In common with the “free dancers”, Carina’s opportunities to perform were few and far between. She only had steady contracts during a few relatively short periods in her career.

Despite her faithful performances of Jean Börlin’s innovative works, which were far ahead of their time (they have not been fully understood in a historical perspective until now, in the days of Pina Bausch and Alvin Nikolai) Carina Ari was not at all interested in going against the classical tradition.

She was a devout disciple of Fokine in every respect, including the more practical aspect of his reforms – to create a programme with such variation that it would satisfy the new 20th century restlessness. The long performances of the previous century, such as La Bayadere, Le Corsaire, even Sleeping Beauty, were stories with complicated plots that were told with literary meticulousness. Only a few were sufficiently poetic or psychological to be captivating or even entirely comprehensible (like Swan Lake and Giselle).

Fokine’s concept was ingenious in its simplicity: a ballet should not be longer than necessary. One act usually suffices to express what needs to be said. A bouquet of short ballets enables more variation. The Ballets Russes programme usually comprised several short pieces, and so did the Börlin repertoire for Ballets Suédois. A large portion of the success of these artistic innovators is also attributable to their imposing stage sets, a new one for each piece. The audience did not have time to grow weary of one setting, before it had given way to a new one.

Carina Ari made note of this. Instead of the unadorned stage draped in dark curtains favoured by modern dancers, according to the style launched by Isadora Duncan, she had large scenographies painted for each of her solo dances. She had befriended several prominent painters, and Grünewald, Moreau and Dethomas painted her sets free of charge. Inghelbrecht’s circle of friends included the composers Honneger, Reynaldo Hahn and Florent Schmitt. These composers and her husband delivered the music. Carina danced to a 40-piece orchestra conducted by Inghelbrecht – not to a solo piano, which was what most of her colleagues had to make do with. Carina Ari presented her eight “dance scenes” in 1925 at the Opéra Comique.

The first piece is Rêve, a poetic idealisation that expressed a longing to become a tree in nature. This is followed by Sous-marine, an underwater scene with billowing seaweed fighting for survival. The next ballet is Le Retour Interrompu, set outside an inn in a Spanish village. A girl passes by, but stops when she hears music through a window, dances by herself and then continues on her way in the night. Degas is a humorous rendering of the life of a classical dancer, barre exercise, flirting with admirers, precious dancing – a satire on the airs and mannerisms of a ballerina. Carina herself made the sets for La danse pour les oiseaux, in which she used the classical style in earnest, illustrating birds and their flight. Musique sur l’eau comprises both the sea waves and a mermaid swimming with her winged sisters, the swallows. La danse d’Abisag tells a biblical anecdote. The figure of a virgin emerges from a Byzantine wall and dances for the aged King David, with cubist, angular movements, restrained and archaic – the most original piece in the series, in terms of style. A more light-hearted finale is afforded by Kajsa et Britta a bagatelle about how “the clothes maketh the girl”. A poor girl borrows an outfit from a rich girl and is suddenly pursued by every boy.

A complex programme – and Carina did not take the easy way out with regard to practical matters. She did not want to fill out the pauses between dances with music. Therefore, each set had to be changed with lightning speed. She had a maximum of two minutes in which to change costumes. Every detail was worked out meticulously, and costumes were constructed after extensive experiments. But the most demanding part was the enormous concentration required to shift immediately from one state of mind to another. The audience was in raptures over Carina Ari. She continued to perform her dance scenes in Paris and made guest performances in the rest of Europe, including Stockholm, as a “one-woman tour” together with Inghelbrecht, who rehearsed with a new orchestra at each new venue.

Ode à la Rose

In connection with celebrations at the Presidential Palace in Paris in 1927, Carina Ari was honourably commissioned to produce a choreography for a temporary dance troupe. She wrote Ode à la Rose, based on a poem by Ronsard. It is an ode to the flower that is such an essential symbol in the emotional world of troubadour poetry. Carina Ari was drawn to such subtle, almost abstract emotional renderings.

Following her acclaimed Rose ballet, Carina Ari was commissioned to create a ballet for the Paris Opera itself – Palais Garnier, as the Parisians call it, in commemoration of the architect (how many Stockholmers know who built the Royal Opera in Stockholm?). The Paris Opera ballet had fallen into decline at the turn of the century. It had been outshone first by the Russians, and then by the Swedes, it had stagnated, was out of touch with the times, and was looked down upon both by the theatre management and the audience. Therefore, it was no longer allowed to produce its own programmes but was merely used to fill out the gaps when an opera was too short. It was not until 1930, when Serge Lifar was engaged as ballet director, that the Paris Ballet was substantially regenerated and achieved a new greatness that has lasted until our days.

The first ray of hope was delivered by Carina Ari, with her ballet The Moonbeam from 1928. She arrived at the right time. These dancers were trained to perfection in classical dance technique. What they needed was an injection of new life, with a suitable choreography. Carina Ari described The Moonbeam as “a choreographic poem”. To be on the safe side, she painted the sets herself. Masses of her small sketches still exist. She prepared the composition and painted virtually in detail every change in the dancers’ movement and distribution across the stage. In other words, she created her own notation system. If Börlin had taken the time to do this, we could have studied his pioneering works and recreated them with greater authenticity today!.

With impeccable taste, Inghelbrecht chose music by Gabriel Fauré and orchestrated it himself. The ballet has the vestiges of a “narrative”, but it is highly abstract, consisting of visions, allusions and ideas, rather than a clear story – a mild rivalry between the Moonbeam, who wins the Youth from the Daughter of the Blue Mountains, but has second thoughts and returns him to the one who best deserves him. Winds, skies in paler or darker nuances, glide over the stage with exquisitely shifting lights (composed by the opera director Rouché himself). The Moonbeam is related to Fokine’s Sylphides, but is much more subtle – and with an undercurrent of sensuality.

There are remarkably few women choreographers in the history of French classical ballet. Among the few, two were born in Stockholm: Marie Taglioni, who created her only ballet, Le Papillon, in 1860, and Carina Ari with her Moonbeam in 1928. I have not seen the former, but descriptions of it give the impression that there are similarities – both are lyrical phantasms, both are illuminated by the “mysterious” moonlight.

The Moonbeam was yet another lauded success in Carina Ari’s row of similar triumphs. It was produced again in 1934. She had created the leading part for Spessivtseva (one of the greatest dancers of the time), but she had an accident, and there was very little time to find another dancer who was capable of dancing the highly original part. Therefore, Carina Ari had to do it herself in 1928, and she also performed the part when the performance reopened in 1934.

Short guest performance in Algiers

The Opera in Algiers was in dire need of substantial artistic regeneration. By this time, Carina had earned a good reputation among professionals, and she was taken on as ballet director, with Inghelbrecht as director of the Opera. 

In Algiers, the opera pandered to a wealthy, conservative, French bourgeoisie. Inghelbrecht, a passionate enemy to any form of racism, succeeded in almost immediately antagonising most of the community, and returned in a fury to Paris. Carina had already invested a great deal of work in regenerating the ballet and had recruited new dancers from Den Kongelige Ballet in Copenhagen, where her former colleague from Ballets Suédois, Kaj Smitt, was the ballet master. In the first season alone, Carina produced six of her own ballets, in addition to new choreographies for all the operas on the repertoire.

After a year, she grew ill with exhaustion and returned to Inghelbrecht in Paris. They were both contracted in 1932 to the Opéra Comique, he as music director, and Carina Ari as an “étoile” (i.e. a star ballerina on a par with those of the Paris Opera), and director of the Ballet. She had the enormous task of revising all the dance pieces for the opera, which in effect meant composing new ones. She was praised in the press for these “masterpieces of taste and wit”. The Opéra Comique still regarded independent ballets to be superfluous. Carina managed to get permission to do a ballet based on Brahms waltzes in a more or less abstract style (that Balanchine was later to devote himself to).

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