born Sydney Francis Patrick Healey-Kay in Slinfold, Sussex, Anton acquires a Russian name and joins Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1921, becoming principal dancer in 1924.



Goshorn Lake, near Saugatuck, Michigan, 2 July 2008.

You may ask yourself what a ballet dancer has to do with a family reunion in southwestern Michigan, and were I not constrained by the demands of a blog devoted to noteworthy events in 1904, I might be wondering the same thing.  Still, I promise you there's a connection, because if nothing else I think you'll agree that to spend time with family is to participate in a series of elaborate movements which have taken on special meaning over the years, and some of the positions are so subtle and simple looking you might not realize how hard they are to execute.  You might not realize the years of training involved, the demanding discipline behind the choreography.  All you might notice, if you are not on stage but in the audience, is how graceful it all looks, and how effortless.  Therein, of course, lies the beauty.

We had seven under the age of six with us, and you only needed to watch one of the young mothers reach down and pick up one of these infants, often to put him or her in your lap, to be reminded of all the mothers you had known in your life who lifted their young children in just that way, with that same almost careless confidence, without even seeming to give the practiced gesture much thought, with or without some encouraging word, and you would be struck by the resonance, like a skipped stone in the still water of the lake, of so much more than meets the eye, of the richness and complexity you recognized in the dip and rise, in the sweep of arms, the caress and release that reminds you of all those other mothers (grandmothers now) who had mastered that same series of positions and before them their mothers who were young during World War II and now gone to their well-deserved reward, so that what you were seeing and experiencing was also an echo of another time and place, a recreation of some timeless and even ancient ritual or dance.

Sir Anton Dolin danced with Irina Baronova, one of the famous "baby ballerinas" of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, who passed on to her reward while I was on reunion in Saugatuck.  There are also references to the ballerina Alexandra Danilova being born in 1904, but it's more likely earlier than that (some sources say 1903), so I went with Anton to make the connection.

During our gathering, I overheard a relative observe that, "in the end all you've got is family," and whether the remark was intended as a reassurance or a warning, I am sure you are aware of instances in which this old truism isn't technically accurate -- that in fact we can all doubtless think of people we've known who met their end with no family in sight.  So when I say that, likewise and in the same spirit, in the end all you've got is Art, I mean it in a similar interpretation of truth.  Family gives your life significance and meaning the way Art does.  It is what you turn to out of respect or out of desperation or duty or love or blame or when disappointed or lost or searching for something to shape and give order to the complicated and sometimes painful gestures and movements that make up life.  It gives a point to the dance.  Or I suppose you could say that the dance gives a point to family.  Or in the final analysis, which is to say in the end, maybe dance and family amount to the same thing.

Now I realize the cynical among you will say that this is simply a clever pas de deux of mismatched thoughts, that meaning is something we impose and then only afterward call it truth.  That 1904 has nothing to do with anything but is as random and inconsequential as any other sort of ordering system.  Meaning is whatever and wherever you happen to find it.  And anyway, what does it matter when a ballet dancer was born?  What difference does it make when a ballerina first began to dance, or when she died? 

You may be right.  But I will tell you, there is something about the way a young woman you are related to holds her child.  There is something about the way a mother who was once a baby you held in your arms now puts her own baby in your arms.  There is something there.  And sometimes, when you let yourself, as elusive and fleeting as beauty can be, you allow yourself to get lost in the dance, and you feel as if you might be a part of it, and even possibly, of something more.