The Swan who danced herself to death 

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Rupert Christiansen salutes the magical Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova as a new performance honours her memory.

Anna Pavlova\'s art concealed art, looking inspired rather than learnt  Photo: Roger Viollet/Rex Features

Outside a circle of aficionados, I don’t suppose the name of the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova means much any more, except in relation to the horrible meringue dessert named after her. But in her heyday, just after the First World War, she was as famous as any modern showbusiness celebrity, and when I was a neophyte balletomane in the 1960s, I encountered several people who had never forgotten the unique beauty of her dancing.

Flickering snippets of silent film give one little idea of her qualities. She evidently lacked the dynamic virtuosity of her contemporary Karsavina , and wasn’t a great drama queen like her epigone Ulanova . Her technique was, by modern standards, limited. But what she did have was a unique charm, matched to a lithe but wiry physique (including an exceptionally long, pliant neck and high-arched feet) which gave her musculature a feline ease and sensuality.

She wasn’t best known for the major classical roles: mostly her genius shone through trite little numbers set to rubbishy music, in which she impersonated will-o’-the-wisps and snowflakes, butterflies and dragonflies, sylphs and houris, with the melancholy Dying Swan as her signature piece.

She would dance a selection of these solos anywhere she was asked – even if it was a one-night stand on the end of the pier – the result being a crazy non-stop schedule that contributed to her premature death at the age of 49 in 1931.

Her art was one which concealed art: open, spontaneous and lyrical, it looked inspired rather than learn t, conveyed without the faintest sense of sweated effort or self-consciousness. The choreographer Frederick Ashton, who was profoundly influenced by her, wrote: “Every movement was felt through her entire body, through to the tips of her exquisite fingers, through to her large and luminous eyes.”

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A gala performance featuring stars of the ballet world, many of them Pavlova’s latter-day compatriots, will be staged at the London Coliseum on March 4 (0871 472 0600 ) honouring her memory and marking the centenary of her purchase of Ivy House in Hampstead, which functioned as the nearest thing she had to a home. Today it remains a ballet studio and museum – a shrine to her magical if vanished art.

Bad, sad news for Sheffield. I visited this handsome city last week to see a terrific touring exhibition called The Family in British Art , which runs at the Millennium Gallery until April 29. The show is full of wonderful things selected from collections all over the country: paintings such as Hockney’s My Parents , Herkomer’s On Strike , Lockey’s copy of Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More’s clan, and Sickert’s Ennui, as well as less familiar canvases, drawings, sculpture, photographs and installations. So not surprisingly, the gallery was buzzing with folk.

But not for much longer: the Arts Council’s rejection of an application to renew a £1.4 million annual grant, alongside further cuts from other funding sources, means that shows of this quality will simply no longer be possible.

The Family in British Art muses on a word that we use unthinkingly. Like community, “family” doesn’t have any intrinsically negative connotation (unless a clichéd adjective such as “dysfunctional” is prefixed): we all want to be part of a family of some sort and the curators of the exhibition have spread their net wide in an effort to be inclusive in their depictions of the possibilities. Tracey Emin’s flock of seagulls and pictures of gay couples, single mothers and parlour-maids may blur the exhibition’s focus, but they have the merit of reminding us that kinship can be defined in an infinite variety of ways and isn’t solely confined to direct bloodlines.

But it struck me forcibly as odd that the subjects of these images are shown so often as self-absorbed or staring out at the artist. There’s not much togetherness. Figures are rarely shown interacting, an exception being Michael Andrews ’s gentle painting of himself teaching his daughter to swim in the black waters of a loch.

Much more typical is Thomas Struth’s powerful photograph of the Smith family of Fife , presumably consisting of parents, grown-up children and some of their spouses. Unsmiling and physically unintimate, these individuals almost defiantly refuse to give the onlooker any clue as to how they all feel about each other. This family is a closed shop, posting a keep out sign: and after all, every family has a private emotional domain which no outsider can ever fathom.

Rather more charming, although also slightly creepy, is Gillian Wearing’s video 2 into 1 , in which a mother and her two pubescent sons talk openly about their relationships, the trick being that the mother’s voice appears to come out of the sons’ mouths and vice versa. It’s simultaneously comic and tragic to see a plump, smug schoolboy ventriloquising his mother, explaining how he told her he thought she was “a failure, ­ which hurt, because I do think of myself as a failure”. Honesty in a family is meant to be a virtue, but here it verges on cruelty, too.

Dear Mr Daunt, this is how you can stop Waterstone’s going the same way as Blacks

In this column last week, Charlie Spencer was bewailing the parlous state of record shops. My own bugbear is bookshops – as a critic often left with 30 minutes to kill in wet and windy city centres as I await theatre doors to open, I rely on them for shelter if nothing else.

Waterstone’s remains the major name in the game. Last May, following its purchase by a Russian zillionaire, James Daunt of the small upmarket chain of Daunt’s Books took over as managing director. He is a good man, and change must be on its way, but beyond the depressingly illiterate dropping of its titular apostrophe (which I refuse to acknowledge), there’s little sign of it yet, so maybe there’s some point in offering Daunt a regular punter’s heartfelt advice.

The distinctive black-and-white branding has begun to look very démodé: any new corporate graphics should be warmer without being naff. Too many of the staff seem interested in neither books nor customer service, the embodiment of “the computer says no” mentality. I’m not convinced that cutting back on the 3 for 2 paperback offer is wise: the market for books is as price-sensitive as for any other commodity, and Daunt can’t act the ostrich by refusing to compete with Amazon’s superb one-click service and seductive discounts.

Most important, he should make the flagship shops cosier, more welcoming, interesting and individual. Smaller is better: the company surely needs to downsize its high-street leases – it must be haemorrhaging money on rent for vast department-store premises splurged over five or six floors when stock could more alluringly be fitted on to three.

As Mary Portas keeps reminding us, too many high streets have become deathly dull replicants. Bookshops have a golden opportunity to beat a different drum and show a touch of class. Never mind the convenience of Kindles and e‑readers, let’s have faith that printed books are lovely, magical objects that furnish a room as well as a mind, and that bookshops can be beautiful places. I dare say Daunt has heard a lot of this already, but after the crucial Christmas sales figures proved so disappointing, publishers are suffering a terrible fit of jitters and the entire sector is losing confidence. Time is not on his side if he wants Waterstone’s to avoid joining the sorry ranks of Blacks and Habitat in administration.

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