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Theatre and Performance
January 17, 2011

             

Alicia Markova in La Chatte and the petty cash receipt in her own hand for her shoes for this ballet

The Archival case has been dismantled. This was the last material taken out of its case. It was fun putting this together and although some visitors moved past it quickly others poured over the documents fascinated. The documents ranged from the first contract for Hilda Munnings (about to become Munningsova and later Lydia Sokolova), together with a letter from her father as in 1913 she was underage to sign a legal document, through to a petty cash receipt for Alicia Markova’s pointe shoes. There were also box office returns, a press release for His Majesty’s Theatre and the draft telegram to Thomas Cook for transporting all the company’s sets and costumes from Spain to the London Coliseum in 1918.

 

The receipt from Rushworth and Dreapers caught the eye of a visitor who had lived in Liverpool where this company were later to supply the Beatles with guitars. Rushworth began in 1828 as builders of organs and ultimately had a chain of retail shops selling instruments and music. They went into liquidation a few years ago. Our receipt is for the hire of piano player and rolls. I am pretty certain that this was for the first rehearsals for Léonide Massine’s Rite of Spring. What is interesting is that this is probably one of the earliest identifiable instances of a ballet being rehearsed to mechanical sound.

The Archival material (all but the press release coming from the Ekstrom Archive) will all be returning to its files in Blythe House where the collection may be consulted by appointment Contact tmenquiries@vam.ac.uk . A different selection of archives primarily in Spanish will be shown in Barcelona and Madrid. Thus instead of and including bill for lunch at the Café Parisien at the Savoy in London we will include his bill for the Ritz in Madrid for 5-9 March 1921.

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