Jeanne Renaud - Dance Collection Danse

conductor Reginald Stewart. In the
summer and early fall the concerts ran
every week offering orchestral music
with affordable ticket prices. While
these performances were usually popular,
it was the single concert of the
year featuring the Volkoff dancers that
not only sold out but attracted hordes
of people. With 4,800 seats, Varsity
Arena actually held 7,580 people at
Volkoff’s first Promenade Concert
appearance on October 18, 1934.
Although scheduled for 8:30 p.m., the
arena was completely full by 8:00 p.m.
Once the seats ran out, people sat on
the floor of the arena. No one seemed
to care about the discomfort. The
Telegram reported, “The audience
wanted more and yet more of this
characteristic and beautiful work of
Boris Volkoff and his students.” This
instant popularity clearly contradicted
the later myth that Toronto audiences
were so stodgy and puritanical that
interest in dance had to be painfully
developed over years if not decades.
Admittedly, one of the major reasons
people flocked to see the Volkoff
dancers was to see Volkoff himself. In
early years, his photos as a boisterous
Russian peasant appeared in Toronto
newspapers. Volkoff strutted in his
embroidered ethnic costumes and soft
boots and thrilled audiences all the way
from the Russian Charity Ball to Sir
Ernest MacMillan’s
children’s concerts.
His specialty was
the gopak, the
Ukrainian men’s
dance which featured
wild leaps
and spins. It was a
chronic crowd
pleaser and usually
ended in cheers
and calls for an
encore. He also
shamelessly dabbled
in schlock. In
a June 1935 Prom
concert, he took
Russian sentimentality
to its limits
in a dance comedy
with “the Shirley
Temple of dance”,
Irma Dorfman.
But Volkoff did
balance his programs.
There were almost always two
classical pieces for each presentation
and he did try experimenting with
modern dance as early as his 1932
concerts. In the 1935 shows, he had
his dancers wear black sheeny costumes,
while patterns created by
designer Fred Coates on a “colour
organ” rippled on a white backdrop.
From the start, Volkoff choreographed
Pauline Sullivan in Volkoff’s Mala, 1936 Berlin Olympics
all his own dances and always used
serious music: Chopin, Schubert,
Sibelius, Bach, even the sometimes
dissonant and abstract Bartok.
As his company was now the only
fully established dance group in
Canada, he was able to take advantage
of an invitation to the Internationale
Tanzwettspiele in July 1936,
which was directly tied to the Berlin
Volkoff students in recital at Hart House Theatre, 1933
Photo: From Boris Volkoff Collection, Toronto Public
Library (TRL)
No. 62, Fall 2006 7