Romanowsky was active in our country after the First World War, with several interruptions. These interruptions were caused by a series of frictions with some of the managers at the Romanian Opera House. Then, between the two world wars, the social context (the economical crisis, etc.) was inauspicious to strangers. Still, it is interesting that this passionate dancer, choreographer, teacher, had a strong bond with the Romanian ballet school, which was just being set up at the time. In 1925, George Georgescu hired him at the ‘Romanian Opera House’ as a prime dancer, also invested with the title of ballet master. I’ve seen Anton Romanowsky perform in many shows. It was obvious that he had studied at the solid ballet school of Serge Legat and Rafael Graci. That he had thoroughly studied the technique of Russian classical ballet, without which the endeavor to fly would have remained a useless adventure even today. As far as I know, he had the opportunity to be famous Ana Pavlova’s partner for a while, before World War I. He danced with two of the Nijinsky family members in Kiev. They were Thomas and Bronislava in the flesh, the famous Vaslav Nijinsky’s father and sister. Like all great creators, he shortly became an enigmatic figure. That’s how the legend was born. Anthological parts and ballets such as “The Sylphs”, “Carnival”, “Cleopatra”, “Petrushka”, “Scheherazade”, “The Rose’s Spectrum”, “Afternoon of a Faun” and many others, belong to him. They say he had a special grace, a great power of seduction over the spectator, an intimate way of being transfigured in the parts that he gave life to and, most of all, a giant leap, still unsurpassed. These things brought him that artistic personality fame that doesn’t leave room for the epigones. He was impossible to imitate. They even used to say that he had a bird’s bones. These are qualities that placed him, you see, not only in the “rose’s spectrum”, but also in success and glory’s spectrum. Therefore, in immortality’s. What else could the glory of afamous dancer mean than an endless sea of applauses. Can you hear them? Nijinsky headed Serghei Diaghilev’s troupe bills. And he is now considered to be the greatest dancer of all times.Romanowsky came back to Romania. He performed on our country’s first stage as a dancer and a ballet master. He was one of the founders of our first choreographic school. Since then, he was active in Romania, where he was awarded numerous medals and distinctions, as well as the State Prize, for his valuable contributions in setting up a prestigious national ballet school. He passed away in 1972, at the age of 90. What do I owe him? A solid artistic and technical background. I’ve just told you about the climate from which he had come. While I was performing, as a ballet dancer, at “Alhambra”, I gathered up some money. Later on – and I have mentioned the circumstances – I was able to take up some classes at the ballet studio that Romanowsky was running. I took lessons from a perfect teacher. He knew how to encourage the tenacious ones and to infer those qualities that, later on, will distinguish the future ballet dancers. It’s difficult for me to explain just how much my apprenticeship at Romanowsky’s school meant to me. I’ve learned essential things there. Things that inevitably brought me closer to the Opera, to the classical and the character creations. That’s where I understood that classical dancing was as much a matter of technique as it was of poetry. One can’t accomplish much only through the poetry of the body, of the movement. One has also got to know the language through which one communicates that inner tension one learns to live. Without the technique of classical dancing, I find that impossible to do in ballet performances. I learned about the traditional, the classical basis of the great Russian ballet from Romanowsky. The old, solid technique, that helped me a lot in setting up as a ballet dancer. Without any doubt, we owe Romanowsky a great deal of the development of the Romanian school of classical ballet, but also of the process of assimilating an aesthetics which was particular to classical creation.And more than that, we performed together in the ballet shows held by the Opera House (whose manager I was going to become later on). In “Harap Alb”, “The Fountain of Baccisarai”, “The Captain’s Wife”. I worked with him when I put on stage “Coppelia” by Delibes. He was a brilliant ballet master. It was only later on, while touring abroad and meeting some of his colleagues from the same school (I met one of them even in Pasadena, in the USA), that I discovered just how much this school had spread. And you can add one more thing: Romanowsky was one of those great artists that contributed to the total transfiguration of Romanian ballet, which is essential.
excerpted from The Conductor of Swans (Encounters with Oleg Danovski), by Marian Constantinescu, Editura Muzicala, 1989
by Oleg Danovski; Marian Constantinescu
