The dance is instantly recognizable as the Candy Cane solo from George Balanchine’s beloved 1954 production of “The Nutcracker,” for New York City Ballet. But this figure sketched in pencil and flickering before our eyes dates from much earlier.
It was drawn sometime between 1900 and 1907 by Alexander Shiryaev, a former dancer of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia, who, after retiring from the stage, became a pioneer in recording dances on film.
The film, an early and rudimentary kind of animation, consists of 2,000 or so drawings, each pose, step and transition illustrated on a narrow strip of paper, one after another, then threaded through a special projector. What’s extraordinary is that Shiryaev not only captured the dance in this ingenious way, but that he also created the dance itself. That’s why he knew every detail so well.
It wasn’t uncommon at the time for particularly experienced dancers to create their own numbers in big ballets. So when choreographer Lev Ivanov was staging the original “Nutcracker” in St. Petersburg, in 1892, he let Shiryaev make up his own Trepak, or Ukrainian dance, full of twisting jumps and leaps in which the legs clap together in the air.
Shiryaev entered the school of the Imperial Ballet at 9 and became what was known as a character dancer, specializing in the acrobatic, folk-inflected moments that spiced up big classical ballets. Later, he trained generations of dancers including Balanchine, the founding choreographer of City Ballet.
Balanchine performed the hoop dance as a young member of the ballet company in St. Petersburg. (He probably learned it from Shiryaev.) It must have stayed with him, because when he made his own “Nutcracker” in New York decades later, he inserted a very similar version into his production.
In both, the dancer executes a series of turning pas de chats (jumps with the feet tucked under) followed by cabrioles (in which the two legs tap together in the air) to the front and to the back. In both, the dancer jumps through the hoop while turning, over and over and to increasingly impressive effect.
Both versions end with the same pose: the dancer holding the hoop in his left hand, his right hand outstretched. Balanchine’s only concession to his new country was to call the sequence “The Dance of the Candy Canes” rather than the more traditional “Buffoon Dance” or Trepak.
“It couldn’t be more vivid,” Daniel Ulbricht, who has been dancing the role of Candy Cane at City Ballet for almost 20 years, said after watching Shiryaev’s movie. “It’s so clear that Balanchine knew exactly what he was going to do; it was part of his lineage and his training. Even the costume is the same.”
There’s something ghostly about watching recognizable choreography emerge from the murky depths of dance history more than a hundred years after the fact. In a very concrete way, you get a sense of ballet’s performance tradition, the way dances are passed down over time. Very few dance films from the early 20th century have survived, so normally we have to imagine what these old dances looked like, or rely on highly technical notations, decipherable only by specialists.
But Shiryaev’s films have come to light thanks to the dogged research (and luck) of one man, the Russian dance historian and documentarian Viktor Bocharov, who tracked them down in the mid-1990s. We may not have footage of the original Sugarplum Fairy or the Waltz of the Flowers, but we have this hoop dance.
Shiryaev is little-known outside Russia; even there, he is known more for his teaching at the ballet academy than for his pioneering dance films. He wrote a memoir, but it has never been published. Most of his surviving dance films — there are several dozen, both animated and live action — were created between his retirement from the stage and a decade of teaching in Western Europe.
Few people, even dancers, knew about the films — he showed them only to friends and a few students. After he died, in 1941, they ended up in the hands of a Daniil Saveliev, a student of his who had gone on to become a photographer.
As Bocharov recounts in his 2004 documentary “A Belated Premiere,” which came to the Dance on Camera Festival in New York in 2005, the first evidence he uncovered of Shiryaev’s cinematic activities was a 1904 letter he found in the State Historical Archive. In it, Shiryaev requested permission to film rehearsals at the Imperial Ballet — a request that was denied. Bocharov kept digging until a former employee of the photography department at the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music led him to Saveliev.
Saveliev’s collection contained several dozen films of various types. Some, like the Hoop Dance, were animated drawings. Others documented dances performed by Shiryaev, his wife and friends at the Shiryaev summer house in Ukraine.
And yet others were sophisticated stop-action animations created using small wire and papier-mâché puppets, which Shiryaev would manipulate thousands of times to faithfully reproduce choreography. A contemporary of Shiryaev wrote that a groove had been worn into the floor of his home studio along the path between the camera and the puppet theater. But the films were never shown in a cinema.
Bocharov acquired the whole collection and used many excerpts in “A Belated Premiere.” (It can be seen in four sections on YouTube.) The films, particularly the stop-action puppet ballets, are incredibly lifelike and precise. Choreographers interested in historical restorations, including Alexei Ratmansky of American Ballet Theater, have consulted them.
“Those puppets and cartoon figures exist in the indistinct interspace between the living and the dead,” said the Princeton University musicologist Simon Morrison, who has written extensively on ballet. “Shiryaev tried to preserve ballet on film almost before the existence of film, and resorted to animation almost before the existence of animation.”
Given the films’ quality and charm, it is surprising that Shiryaev’s name should not be more widely known in film circles. But, as Bocharov, who lives in St. Petersburg, said in an email: “Shiryaev did not make them for public display. It was, if you like, his hobby.” They could easily have disappeared after Shiryaev died, just months before the Siege of Leningrad.
All the more reason this Hoop Dance, scratched, jumpy and schematic, feels like a small miracle, a charm-filled vestige of another time.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.