The Torch Dance

A newly discovered film showing Tamara Karsavina dancing Mikhail Fokine’s ‘La Danse du Flambeau’ (‘The Torch Dance’). This performance was filmed in 1909. Tamara Karsavina’s shoes are not reinforced at the tip like today’s pointe shoes; she may have had cotton or wool stuffed into the toes of her shoes. (https://nycdancestuff.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/tamara-karsavina-michel-fokines-la-danse-du-flambeau-1909/)

Ways to Strength and Beauty

The perfect body as an object of cult worship. Based on the mass sports and body worship movement of the 1920s, the film propagates physical training and shows in stylized documentary scenes aspects of physical hygiene, gymnastics, sports and dancing as well as scenes in which supposed sportsmen of antiquity pose naked.