OTD in early British television: 20 June 1933
John Wyver writes: On the evening of Tuesday 20 June 1933 Eustace Robb, producer of the BBC’s 30-line television service, achieved a considerable coup by persauding in front of the camera for the first time the great Russian dancer Tamara Karsavina. She performed solos from Mlle de Maupin to music by Lisberg, which she had choreographed herself, Claire de Lune to Debussy, and ‘Chant Indoue’ from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko.
Russian tenor Maxim Turganoff, a refugee from the Revolution, accompanied her in the Rimsky-Korsakov, and arias in period costume by Mozart and Bizet were also contributed by mezzo-soprano Leonie Zifado. The Gershom Parkington quintet provided the music.
After the dress rehearsal, Karsavina spoke to a journalist from the monthly Television:
No I am not in the least exhausted; I loved it. You see I have been here before to watch my pupils and I know what to expect. The flicker [from the projector beam, which was only light in the space] does not worry me as I do not move very close to it, and now I have practised I can easily keep in the picture, though the space is very small.
Tamara Karsavina had been a prima ballerina with the Russian Imperial Ballet and then with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Per Wikipedia:
The choreographer George Balanchine said he had fond memories of watching her when he was a student at the Imperial Ballet School. Shortly before 1910, she was regularly invited to dance in Paris with the Ballets Russes. During her years with the company, she created many of her most famous roles in the ballets of Mikhail Fokine, including Petrushka and Le Spectre de la Rose… She was perhaps most famous for creating the title role in Fokine’s The Firebird with Vaslav Nijinsky, her occasional partner.
She left Russia just before the Revolution in 1918 and settled first in Paris and later in Hampstead. In England she became a celebrated teacher and is regarded as a key figure in establishing The Royal Ballet. In 1957 she chose her Desert Island Discs, and she can be heard speaking these here; in 1965 producer and former dancer Margaret Dale made a television profile of her for BBC2. She died in 1978.
Image: Tamara Karsavina in studio BB for her television debut; from Television, July 1933.
[OTD post no. 185; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
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