Nini Theilade
Elfin young ballerina chosen by Dalí to play Venus in his bizarre surrealist fantasy Bacchanale
NINI THEILADE, who has died aged 102, was a precocious young ballerina in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo; the artist Salvador Dalí chose her to play Venus in Bacchanale, a scandalous surrealist ballet of 1939 that he created with the choreographer Léonide Massine.
Dalí demanded a “childish-looking” Venus, and had the elfin Nini drawn on to the stage in a shell wearing a nude skinsuit and blonde, Botticellian tresses, surrounded by men with large red lobsters attached to their groins.
The backdrop was one of Dalí’s characteristically rich fantasies on sex, birth and death, depicting a giant swan with a ragged hole torn in its breast, through which the performers emerged, the whole set to Wagner’s Venusberg scene from Tannhäuser.
The ballet, which premiered in New York, was a succès de scandale and went on to tour the US. As Nini Theilade wryly commented: “Imagine how that surrealism looked in the backwoods of America where they were seeing ballet for the first time.”
Early critics credited the ballet with having a decent psychological idea somewhere inside its excess, but as so often in that period, the decor outlived the choreography, and Bacchanale is today known primarily for Dalí’s art.
For Nini Theilade, though only in her early twenties, such publicity was old-hat. She had appeared in her teens in the celebrated director Max Reinhardt’s Oscar-winning film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the leading fairy alongside James Cagney, Mickey Rooney and Olivia de Havilland. Reinhardt entrusted all the fairy choreography to Nini Theilade, and its combination with imaginative cinematography made an eerie, suitably supernatural impression.
Reinhardt had spotted Nini Theilade, a startling young beauty of Danish, Polish, German and, she claimed, royal Indian ancestry, as a teenager in one of her solo shows in Europe and the US. Not yet 20, she joined Reinhardt’s Berlin productions of Tales of Hoffmann and Belle Hélène, before going to Hollywood to make the Shakespeare film. It won two Oscars and several nominations, and Graham Greene was among its many admirers. The dance sequences were especially praised.
On the strength of the film and her critical acclaim alone, Massine sent a telegram to her mother asking her to join the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, by then the most celebrated touring ballet company in the world.
However, the childhood success was bought at much emotional cost, as Nini Theilade described in her autobiography, published when she reached her centenary. Her mother, a former dance teacher, pushed the child relentlessly to exploit the stage impact of her unsettling combination of unworldly innocence and seductive beauty. Nini Theilade believed that her unstable love life and marriages resulted from her problematic emotional development as a child star.
Nini Arlette Theilade was born on June 15 1915 in Purwokerto, Java, then the Dutch East Indies, where her father, Hans Theilade, a Danish engineer, was on secondment.
Her mother Joanna, whose ancestors included a stray Maharajah, taught her Dalcroze Eurhythmics movement, and on their return to Denmark in 1926 the girl hoped to join the Royal Danish Ballet School, but was rejected.
Undaunted, Mrs Theilade took her to Paris to meet Lyubov Egorova, Princess Troubetzkoy, a renowned Imperial Russian ballerina who was noted for developing the beauty of arms, expressiveness and poetic effect in dancers. Though lacking technique, the 14-year-old Nini made a haunting impression with her sensual grace and talent for suggestive melancholy in an acclaimed soirée de danse that she toured to Europe and the US. Fragments of film survive on Youtube.
Alongside her growing fame as a star performer she showed choreographic potential in accomplished abstract-musical ballets created for the Royal Danish Ballet, Psyche (1936, set to César Franck) and the symphonic Orbits (1938, set to Tchaikovsky), for which she was decorated by the King of Denmark.
The Massine invitation put her in the company of the world’s most celebrated stars. With advice from the Ballet Russe’s leading ballerinas, Alicia Markova and Alexandra Danilova, whom she described as her “ballet mothers” in the company, she widened her scope to impress critics in Fokine’s romantic ballets Le Spectre de la Rose and Les Sylphides.
Massine, however, was more drawn to her contemporary charisma, showcasing her in Nobilissima visione, Le Rouge et le Noir and the notorious Bacchanale.
The vicious regiments of mothers accompanying the Ballet Russe’s young prodigies, clawing at rivals to advance their own progeny, were a well-known phenomenon, but it was only when Nini Theilade’s son encouraged her to publish her autobiography in 2006 (translated into English in 2015 as Dance Was Worth It All) that she admitted the legacy of her own mother’s obsessive ambition for her. Lonely and miserable behind the success, the girl kept a diary that recorded her overwhelming exhaustion in the peak years.
Her first marriage, to Piet Loopuyt, an older businessman in Brazil, virtually ended her dance career when Massine sacked her. She was still only in her twenties, but Europe was torn by war and she remained in Rio de Janeiro, bearing a daughter and giving ballet classes. On returning to Europe they settled in Portugal, where Nini Theilade had a son. But the marriage was unhappy and she left Loopuyt to return to Denmark, and revived her ballet contacts.
Nini Theilade choreographed further ballets for the Danish Royal Opera, made a more successful marriage to Arne Buchter-larsen and opened ballet schools in Denmark and France, teaching at the Oure College of Performing Arts until the age of 98.
Her daughter and second husband predeceased her; she is survived by her son, Peter.
Nini Theilade, born June 15 1915, died February 13 2018