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Poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke described the dancing couple, Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff, as “Poeten des Tanzes,” which translates to “Poets of Dance” in English.
The dancers represented a revolutionary link between painting and dance that was a crucial contribution to the renewal of art through a style that featured poses from fine art, antiquity, the Renaissance, role-playing and self-designed costumes, according to The Sakharoff Research Project.
In contrast to Rilke’s description of the Sakharoffs, some other writers seemed to be a bit awkward or redundant in their writing, as if they didn’t know how to grapple with a pair who didn’t fit preconceived notions of masculinity and femininity.
Here’s how a New York Times articles from the 1920s describes the Sakharoffs’ dance at the Metropolitan:
“As for the Sakharoff’s dancing, it is an art not infrequently divorced from both grace and inspiration and wedded to affectation. Both the woman and the man, when they dance to the simpler and more obvious rhythms, do it prettily. Even the man’s Spanish dancing is prettily done, the bull-ring being set up in a chiffon shop with a pink chiffon toreador. And when he does what he calls a golliwog cakewalk to music by Debussy he does that prettily also -- only Bessie McCoy Davis does it very much better.”
It’s interesting to compare what may be an over-cautiousness around gender in the above lines, with the ease and honesty that Sakharoff describes expressing oneself through and with dance and music:
“Clotilde Sakharoff and I did not dance with music or accompanied by music: we danced music. We made the music visual, expressing by means of movements what the composer has expressed by means of sounds... Our aim was to transpose the sense expressed by the music of the sounds, to the music of the movements,” Sakharoff wrote in their book, Reflections on Dance and Music.