Theodore Kosloff

Theodore Kosloff, born Fyodor Mikhailovich Kozlov in Moscow on January 22, 1882, was a Russian ballet dancer, choreographer, actor, and teacher whose career spanned the imperial Russian stage, American vaudeville, Broadway, and silent film. He died on November 22, 1956.

Kosloff began studying dance at the age of eight and made his first public performance a decade later. His training took place at Moscow's Imperial Theater, where students followed the rigorous apprenticeship traditions of Russian ballet. Alongside dance, he studied music and painting daily, and works he produced were exhibited in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. After graduating in 1901, he joined the Diaghilev Ballet Company in 1909 and toured internationally, serving as a preferred partner of ballerina Tamara Karsavina.

He departed Russia with a touring company in 1910 and was subsequently engaged in Paris by theatre producer Gertrude Hoffmann, who hired him to choreograph Ballets Russes–inspired dances and perform alongside her. In June 1911, The New York Times reported on ballet performances at the Winter Garden in New York that Hoffmann produced and Kosloff staged. That same year, during an American tour, Kosloff married his dance partner Maria "Alexandria" Baldina in San Francisco. Baldina returned to Europe, where she gave birth to their daughter Irina in 1912. While the family was touring Italy that year, Irina contracted meningitis and survived but was left permanently disabled. Immigration restrictions prevented Baldina from returning to the United States with a dependent child, and she remained in Bournemouth, England, in a home Kosloff purchased for her. By December 1912, Kosloff was serving as choreographic director of La Saison Russe, preparing American premieres of operas and ballets for a spring 1913 New York season in coordination with impresario Morris Gest. The announced program included works by Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rubinstein, Borodin, and Glinka. In 1914, Gest presented a pantomime ballet titled He, He, and She, choreographed by Kosloff, at the Princess Theatre in London.

Gest brought Kosloff to New York in 1915, where he staged ballets for the operetta Maid in America and choreographed all the dances for The Peasant Girl. His Broadway work during this period included The Passing Show of 1915, the revue A World of Pleasure, and See America First in 1916. He also appeared as a performer in The Awakening and The Passing Show of 1912, with his Broadway activity spanning 1915 to 1918.

During this New York period, a young dancer named Winifred De Wolfe enrolled at Kosloff's studio, and their professional relationship became romantic. He encouraged her to adopt the name Natacha Rambova, believing it better suited a Russian imperial persona. When Rambova's mother discovered the relationship, she withheld $2,637 owed for dance lessons and gowns, prompting Kosloff to sue her in April 1916. Her mother subsequently sought to have Kosloff arrested and deported on statutory rape charges. In response, Kosloff arranged for Rambova to cross into Canada and travel to England, where she stayed in Bournemouth under the guise of serving as a governess to his disabled daughter. Rambova's mother appealed to American politicians and the Russian ambassador, prompting a nationwide search. During a San Francisco engagement of Kosloff's Imperial Russian Ballet, her mother agreed to withdraw the charges in exchange for Rambova's return to the company in September 1916. Rambova later became disillusioned upon learning that Kosloff had maintained relationships with multiple women during her absence. Former company member Vera Fredova, born Winifred Edwards, recalled that Kosloff exercised extensive control over the personal and professional lives of women in the company in exchange for promises of career advancement.

In the summer of 1917, Kosloff, Rambova, and Fredova relocated to Los Angeles, where they rented a house and erected a tent in the backyard to serve as a temporary dance school and studio. Actress and writer Jeanie MacPherson introduced Kosloff to director Cecil B. DeMille, whose niece Agnes de Mille had persistently encouraged her uncle to meet the dancer. DeMille cast Kosloff as an actor, and his screen debut came opposite singer and actress Geraldine Farrar in The Woman God Forgot. Rambova designed costumes for a DeMille film and researched ancient Aztec culture for the project, while all three also served as technical advisers overseeing choreography and movement for the production. Following the film's release, DeMille offered Kosloff and his associates further work, but the dancers declined in order to continue performing on the Keith-Orpheum circuit.

In the fall of 1917, the Imperial Russian Ballet began its second Los Angeles engagement. The program featured The Aztec Dance, performed by Rambova and Kosloff—who wore his costume from the DeMille film—alongside Fredova, Vlasta Maslova, Ivonne Verlainova, and Alex Ivanoff. The tour ran for 32 weeks before concluding in New York in the spring of 1918. During this period, the Russian Revolution had a direct financial impact on Kosloff: funds from the tours had been invested in a block of apartment buildings in Moscow, which the Bolshevik government confiscated, effectively causing the financial collapse of the Imperial Russian Ballet. From 1918 through 1919, Kosloff appeared on stage as an actor in a revival of The Awakening. Throughout his career he led his own touring company, the Imperial Russian Ballet, and remained active as a teacher and mentor, most notably to Natacha Rambova, who went on to become a significant creative figure in silent-era cinema.