Jeanne Renaud - Dance Collection Danse

Boris Volkoff
The Beginnings
BY JOHN AYRE
Mushka Fanova
and Boris Volkoff in
a Charleston number
at the Carlton
Café, Shanghai
Photo: From Boris
Volkoff Collection,
Toronto Public Library (TRL)
When Boris Volkoff arrived in Toronto
from Chicago in September 1929, he
gave every appearance of being just
another rootless White Russian on his
way to somewhere else. For the past
five years, he had wandered over east
Asia and then the United States performing
wherever and however he
could. Dancing with a touring company
of the Moscow State Ballet in eastern
Siberia in 1924, he defected in
China and danced the Charleston in
tuxedo and slicked hair in Shanghai’s
famous nightclub, the Carlton Cafe.
He got back into ballet with the tiny
Stavrinaki Ballet, which performed
6 Dance Collection Danse
throughout eastern Asia. He arrived in
Hawaii with another troupe, the Royal
Russian Sextette, perhaps the remains
of the Stavrinaki. Once the sextette
arrived in the continental United
States, it didn’t last very long. To put
food on the table Volkoff ended up
dancing as Baskakoff, “whirlwind of
motion”, on the Orpheum vaudeville
circuit in the mid-West. He wore a
peasant costume and leapt and brandished
a narrow sword. Audiences
loved his act. Volkoff did not.
Mercifully he soon caught up with
Adolph Bolm’s ballet troupe in
Chicago in 1928 at the time when
dancers Agnes de Mille and Berenice
Holmes were performing with Bolm.
Volkoff had come to Toronto to
replace Leon Leonidoff as dancer and
choreographer for live intermission
shows at the Uptown cinema palace.
He also ran a ballet school for impresario
Jack Arthur. The Depression
quickly put an end to live shows in
the cinemas and Volkoff set up his
own school at 771 Yonge Street just
north of Bloor, with Evelyn Geary and
Jack Lemen teaching musical comedy
and tap dancing. There was nothing
unusual about this. Even during the
Depression, the middle class was still
dance mad and willing to fork out
money to learn. Still, the studio barely
survived at first. Volkoff himself lived
in a small space behind a curtain in
the studio.
Despite his nightclub career,
Volkoff’s true obsession was now the
ballet. He quickly developed the idea
that if he could attract some of the
best students in Toronto, he could
build a repertory company. In a 1932
issue of Mayfair magazine, his photo
appeared featuring him wearing just
silken dance briefs and extending a
large Eurhythmics hoop to make a
pattern of light. The photo showed
why he had never been a ballet prince
and why, besides strong affinity for
pantomime, he had to specialize in
character roles. His body was a bit on
the blocky side and neither his chest
nor his head were particularly elegant.
But the caption was interesting. Here
was Volkoff who “hopes to establish a
permanent Canadian ballet”.
He had already been working to
improve the image of ballet in Toronto
through his school. His first recital
was in Hart House Theatre on May 16,
1931. When he mounted two performances
in 1932, local newspaper critics
started reviewing them as serious
entertainment. In May 1934, critics
were noticing “large audiences” for
his two performances. The Star commented:
“The dancing was splendid,
and Boris Volkoff’s numbers were met
with cheers.”
In his search for audiences,
Volkoff received a real break in 1934
when the Promenade Concerts at
Varsity Arena were instituted under