Russian Ballerina Stars in Photo Study

It's a long entre chat from San Francisco to Moscow and back in someone else's ballet slippers, but ALBERT E. KAHN '34 did just that. And from this feat has come a published contribution to the Russian American cultural exchange.

The owner of the ballet slippers is Galina Ulanova, world-renowned ballerina for the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia. The contribution to cultural relations is a portrait in words and photographs entitled Days With Ulanova by Kahn and published recently in America by Simon and Schuster. This is no ordinary accounting of personal achievement. As Paine Knickerbocker '33 points out in his review in the San FranciscoChronicle, the book is the only photographic record of the great ballerina, now apparently retired from the stage. It's also notewrthy because Kahn succeeded in getting beyond the footlights to portray the sensitive, modest woman as well as the dedicated artist.

Although several of Kahn's previous books were translated into Russian and he had made several trips to Moscow, his first meeting with Ulanova was in New York in 1959. At the time he and his wife Riette invited Ulanova and her husband Vadim Rinkin, the chief designer for the Bolshoi, to go sightseeing with them when they came to San Francisco as the last stop in the Bolshoi tour. The invitation was accepted, and the sightseeing tour took place, with an unexpected stop in Riette's studio when Ulanova learned Kahn's wife was a sculptor.

The dancer was delighted with Riette's work and said that if Riette wished, she would pose. But it would have to be in Moscow. To help his wife get a start on preliminary studies for her sculpting. Kahn took some photographs. This was the beginning to not only a book, but an unusual inter continental friendship.

It took Kahn very little time to get the publisher's support he would need to take his family to Moscow and to get the material together for his book. The Kahns had planned a three-month stay in Moscow for themselves and their three sons. Actually the two projects, the sculpting and the book, took four trips and more than two years.

While in Moscow Kahn and his camera were constantly in action. He photographed Ulanova on stage (shooting even from the prompter's box at the Bolshoi Theater), in class as a pupil and as a teacher, in the rehearsal hall, vacationing in the country, and at home. In bringing this material together he used a running narrative such as that which is used in children's books in combining text and photographs.

Ulanova herself could not understand why someone would wish to catch her every mood on film and why others might be interested in that film. And yet she cooperated with Kahn so that in the end he had more than 5,000 photographs of the Russian dancer.

"The number seems sizable,'" Kahn has said, "but I think I'll always be haunted by the irrecoverable moments I failed to capture. I saw so much of beauty in Ulanova, in her work, her way of life, and, especially, in her as a human being."

Kahn lives in Glen Ellen, Calif., about 50 miles north of the San Franciscans who frequently find Paine Knickerbocker's byline on Chronicle film and drama reviews. Knickerbocker (Beta Theta Pi) sought the opportunity to review former fraternity brother Kahn's book just as The SaturdayReview sought out Knickerbocker for the article "Thespis in Sun Glasses" in October 20's report on The American West.

Al Kahn '34 talks with ballerina Galina Ulanova, subject of his newest book.