Background
Adolph Bolm was born on September 25, 1884, in St. Petersburg, Russia, the son of Rudolph Bolm, concertmaster and assistant conductor of the Mikhailovsky imperial theater, who was of Swedish ancestry.
Adolph Bolm was born on September 25, 1884, in St. Petersburg, Russia, the son of Rudolph Bolm, concertmaster and assistant conductor of the Mikhailovsky imperial theater, who was of Swedish ancestry.
One of his father's closest friends was Platon Karsavin, father of Tamara Karsavina and a teacher in the Imperial Ballet School; it was Karsavin who suggested that one of the five Bolm sons should study ballet, and Adolph was the somewhat unlikely choice - he was called "Little Bear" because of his clumsiness - since he was the proper age to begin training. He was not an immediately outstanding student, but by the time of his graduation from the Russian Imperial Ballet School on May 1, 1903, he had distinguished himself in both academic studies and dancing and received first-class honors in all categories.
Bolm became a member of the Maryinsky company in 1903. Anna Pavlova received ballerina status there in 1905 and the following year, at her urging, Bolm went to Turin to try to persuade Enrico Cecchetti to come back to Russia. He was successful in his mission and began private study, particularly of mime, with Cecchetti while still in Italy. During the Maryinsky's Lenten recess of 1908, Bolm was allowed to take a group of dancers to perform in Riga. In 1909 he supervised another troupe, headed by Pavlova and composed of dancers from both the St. Petersburg and Moscow ballets, that traveled throughout Scandinavia and also visited Prague. The same company performed in Berlin later the same year. Sergei Diaghilev presented a Paris season of Russian ballet shortly thereafter, featuring, among others drawn from the imperial companies, Pavlova, Bolm, Karsavina, and Vaslav Nijinsky. Bolm achieved a great success as the Chief Warrior in Fokine's setting of the Polovetsian dances from Borodin's Prince Igor; contemporary reviews give testimony to the ferocity and virility of his performance. His acting of the part established him as the leading character dancer of the time. In 1910 he was promoted to second soloist at the Maryinsky.
Bolm resigned from the Imperial Ballet in 1911 to cast his lot with Diaghilev. That year he created the part of Pierrot in Fokine's Carnaval and created or performed a number of other principal roles in Fokine ballets, including the Moor in Petrouchka and King Dodon in Le Coq d'Or. The Ballets Russes performed in Paris and in London. In 1912 Bolm provided the choreography for a gala in Monte Carlo, when the Monte Carlo Opera Ballet presented Rameau's La Fête d'Hébé, in which Bolm partnered Carlotta Zambelli. The following year he did the dances for some of Diaghilev's opera productions, including the Persian dances for Moussorgsky's Khovantchina.
In 1916 Otto Kahn invited Diaghilev to bring the Ballets Russes to the United States. The company was scattered and Bolm, then resident in Switzerland, accepted the task of rehearsing a virtually new group of dancers in the twenty ballets that made up the repertoire. The company first appeared in New York, where it received somewhat mixed notices, due in large part to the absence of Nijinsky. The second American tour, the following year, had Nijinsky and Bolm as codirectors. During a performance in Salt Lake City, Bolm, who was appearing in Nijinsky's stead, was injured in an onstage accident (engineered, it has been suggested, by the jealous and certainly unstable Nijinsky). When the company reached Los Angeles, it was discovered that Bolm had cracked three vertebrae; he therefore remained behind, in a full body cast, while the others returned to Europe.
While still hospitalized, Bolm met the Japanese dancer Michio Ito and his Danish wife and partner, Tulle Lindahl. These, together with Rita Zalmani, who had been in Pavlova's company, formed the nucleus of Bolm's Ballet Intime, which gave a New York season, then temporarily disbanded in August 1917. The program consisted of "Russian, Japanese, Hindu, and Assyrian dances, " an eclectic collection that was to typify subsequent Ballet Intime repertoires. Otto Kahn then asked Bolm to recreate Le Coq d'Or for the Metropolitan Opera and Bolm restaged Fokine's dances and again appeared as King Dodon. The same year he also did the choreography for a Dillingham and Ziegfeld show, Miss 1917, in which he danced the Wind in an extravaganza called Autumn Leaves. During his seven-season association with the Metropolitan Opera, Bolm worked concurrently with the Chicago Opera company. It was at about the same time that he met the midwestern dancer Ruth Page, who was his partner for the Ballet Intime tours of 1919-1927.
In 1919 he also accepted a commission from Hugo Riesenfeld, the owner of a chain of movie theaters, to do balletic prologues for feature films; Bolm regarded this, like his tours, as a means of bringing ballet to American audiences, while Page, who danced in a number of these ten-minute, four-a-day miniatures, recalled that they paid well, and "we always did them when we were hard up. " Page had a rather better part as the Infanta in Bolm's The Birthday of the Infanta, which was given by the Chicago Grand Opera Company in 1919. Bolm danced Pedro the Grotesque in this adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story, which was set to music by John Alden Carpenter. In 1920 Bolm did Krazy Kat, a ballet based upon the travails of George Herriman's cartoon character, again to Carpenter's music. He was soon thereafter appointed ballet master and principal dancer of the Chicago Civic Opera. He established a school in Chicago, and in 1924 was one of the founders of Chicago Allied Arts. Under those auspices, he created at least a dozen major works, including El Amor Brujo (1925) and Parnassus au Montmartre (1926).
Bolm's own company, then called the Adolph Bolm Ballet, made its last tour in 1928. Page did not appear; instead Agnes De Mille performed her "dances in character" De Mille's memoir of the tour is depressing - no money, no audiences, and an occasionally sulking Bolm. But there can be no doubt that Bolm and his companies were effective in bringing ballet to places that had never seen ballet before. On April 27, 1928, his Apollon Musagète was performed at the Library of Congress under the sponsorship of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who had also commissioned Igor Stravinsky's music. Bolm's Apollon was staged as a French court dance, hampered by Louis XIV costumes, and Stravinsky's music was not fully realized until George Balanchine created his Apollo some months later.
In 1931 Bolm moved to California. John Barrymore, a friend of long standing, had suggested to Warner Brothers that Bolm do the choreography for Barrymore's film The Mad Genius. Bolm arranged dances to the Soviet composer Alexander Mossolov's Steel Foundry; they appeared on screen much abbreviated, to a completely unfamiliar score, since the director had not wanted to negotiate with Mossolov. The dances were restaged, to the Mossolov music, at the Hollywood Bowl in 1932. The work was then called Ballet Mécanique. The dancers represented, among other things, Dynamos, Switches, Gears, Piston Rods, and Fly Wheels. It was an instant success.
In 1932 Bolm also accepted the post of ballet master of the San Francisco Opera, on the condition that he be allowed to maintain his own school, endowed by the San Francisco Opera Association. He gave the first all-ballet evening the following year; the program included Ballet Mécanique. In 1935 he did Bach Cycle; it was performed at the Hollywood Bowl later in the season. Bolm returned to New York in 1939 to participate in the first Ballet Theatre season. Fokine had been asked to restage Carnaval for the new company, and he agreed to do so, provided that Bolm would again dance Pierrot, the role that he had created in 1911. Bolm also choreographed a new ballet, Peter and the Wolf, to the Sergei Prokofiev score, for the season, which opened in January 1940. Ballet Mécanique was also performed. Bolm was Ballet Theatre's ballet master and regisseur general for 1942-1943; in the summer of the latter year he gave his last performance, as the Moor in Petrouchka. His last choreography was the two-scene Mephisto, to music by Liszt, that he set on the San Francisco Ballet in 1947. He died in Los Angeles, California.
Bolm was married to Beatrix (Beata) Krebs Alanova, the daughter of a Tashkent land-owning family. She had been married to a dentist and had two children; they had one son.