Crossing Continents: the Ballets Russes

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The exhibitions may be over, but the catalogues have lasting value, as Amy Sargent explains

It seems appropriate that two capital cities as far distant as Canberra and London should both have decided to launch exhibitions to commemorate the centenary of the Ballets Russes. The company was established in Paris in 1909 and temporarily based in Monte Carlo from 1923 until Diaghilev’s death, in Venice, in 1929. His entourage was to spend much of three decades touring. In his foreword to the Australian catalogue, Ron Radford offers an explanation for the interest and enthusiasm this ‘cultural phenomenon’ continues to inspire: linked to the most accomplished choreographers, dancers, composers, designers and artists of the time, the company ‘created not only exotic, extravagant and charming theatrical spectacle but excitement, critical discussion, technical innovation, glamour and scandal wherever it appeared’.

Both catalogues include essays setting Diaghilev’s contribution to ballet and theatrical performance in an historical context (as inheritor of a Wagnerian notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk or complete work of art), conveying an impresario’s flair as an organizer matched by a sometimes despotic and obsessive dedication to the promotion of art. (This resulted in personal and professional rifts within the company – notoriously between Diaghilev and his protegés Fokine and Nijinsky.)

For many audiences, a night with the Ballets Russes was an introduction to a larger experience of applied modernism. Picasso (who married one of Diaghilev’s dancers), Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico and Robert Delaunay are covered alongside the Russian émigré artists, Léon Bakst, Alexander Benois, Naum Gabo, and his brother, Anton Pevsner. Indeed, the art historians writing here remind one how much the appearance of ‘modernism’ itself shifted in the period spanned by the company’s ‘Golden Age’. In costumes and settings, Natalya Goncharova provided a boldly exaggerated and romanticized version of a Russian folkloric tradition. Petrushka, The Step of Steel and the Blue Train are all ballets, which speak, in different ways, to Russian experience in this period.

The Australian exhibition, in Canberra, included costumes and accessories from 35 productions, all drawn from the gallery’s collection, augmented by programmes (themselves often memorably designed by artists – such as Jean Cocteau’s cover showing Nijinsky as the faun), designs, drawings, souvenir photographs and photos of dancers costumed, in character.

This catalogue includes detailed entries itemizing collaborators on individual productions, biographies of personnel and a useful chronology. I was especially engaged by Debbie Ward’s article, ‘Sights Unseen: tags, stamps and stains’, detailing various painstaking processes through which these opulent confections of furs, feathers, sequins, braiding, beading, appliqué, patchwork and stencils have been rendered fit for public display. The costumes include not only those worn in performance but also replica items worn for gala receptions. ‘More than six thousand fibres have been identified, hundreds of metres of fabric have been dyed to undertake repairs and fifty thousand hours’ have been devoted to the gallery’s project of conservation and restoration. Tarnishing, mould, dust and stains from sweat and make-up have been removed; textile deterioration and insect damage redressed: apparently, although Nijinsky was famous for his athleticism, he perspired little. Ward notes the significance of the patronage of the Ballets Russes to the London suppliers Angels and Anello & Davide (while the V&A catalogue includes invoices from the wig-maker, Gustave) and the creative contribution of costumiers in interpreting designers’ drawings and adapting them for the comfort and ease of movement of dancers. She thus draws attention to a double concern on the part of the conservator: reading costumes for evidence of performance (multiple adaptations and taggings of a costume suggest that a role was performed by more than one dancer, for instance), counterbalanced by a reading of supporting evidence (the accompanying photographs, drawings, programmes and so forth) the better to date and understand the costumes.

The V&A, boasting the world’s largest collection of Ballets Russes costumes, seized the opportunityof its exhibition in 2010 to show its largest, single object: the 1926 canvas backcloth for The Firebird. This was created from preparatory drawings produced by Goncharova (a staggered mass of gilded domes and spires) – again demonstrating the contribution of skilled crafts personnel in adapting designs for use on stage. One of the smallest objects on display, indicating at the outset the Russia from which Diaghilev emerged, was a Fabergé egg.

Like the exhibition, the catalogue witnesses the range of the museum’s holdings, across the decorative, applied and performing arts; across design, theatre, dance and music. The exhibition thus included records of choreography in practice (analysing the work of the émigrés Massine and Balanchine) and commentary from Howard Goodall (who contributes an essay on Diaghilev’s composers). There are reminiscences from former Ballets Russes performers, re-encountering at auctions the costumes they once wore. Videos show recordings of later stagings of The Rite of Spring. Long before Matthew Bourne, Diaghilev presented an all-male corps de ballet, in 1927. Visitors were made aware of Diaghilev’s continuing legacy as much as the historical impact of this ‘cultural phenomenon’, with retired dancers demonstrating from memory to a new generation of ballet pupils. Meanwhile notebooks plotting dances, sketches of original dancers in rehearsal and film excerpts, attempt to catch or to fix transient movements delivered in a particular time and space.

One of the achievements of the Hatley Drinkall Dean installation at the V&A was its organization of a plethora of material. While the show was themed around five ground-breaking Paris premières, black-painted hampers, boxes, suitcases, bales and bentwood chairs, piled high around video screens, emphatically conveyed the impression of a company forever on the move. The catalogue duly includes group photos of the troupe on trains and boats. One photograph shows Diaghilev and Stravinsky arriving at Croydon Aerodrome in 1926. Sometimes, collaborators took snap shots and made sketches or caricatures of one another (an annotated menu survives as a record of one momentous occasion). But it comes as no surprise that Diaghilev often felt threatened by the celebrity enjoyed by dancers for whose fame he credited himself. The internationally adored Pavlova made London her home while Una Trowbridge produced her plaster head of Nijinsky as faun in 1912. The V&A exhibition included newsreel footage of Lopokova. Other Ballets Russes prima ballerinas were invited to model for and thereby endorse fashion houses.

In his introduction to the catalogue of the 1979 touring exhibition, ‘The Diaghilev Ballet in England’, Diaghilev’s biographer, Richard Buckle, noted that some dancers ‘were born English, some achieved Englishness, some had Englishness thrust upon them’. Lopokova and Karsavina both married Englishmen. One might now equally conclude that an equal number of dancers had ‘Russianness’ thrust upon them by Diaghilev. Alice Marks became Alicia Markova; Hilda Mannings became Lydia Sokolova, Patrick Healey Kay became Anton Dolin. This most peripatetic of entrepreneurs, expansive in his embrace of transnational artistic trends and international in his ambition and reach, endeavoured to attach his company, as a promotional strategy, to its Russian roots. Yet for all his marketing aptitude, Diaghilev remained, to the last, indebted to the support and subsidy of wealthy patrons.

Exhibitions, like stage productions, are ephemeral events. Nonetheless, both these catalogues present an impressive array of visual material and a considered selection of commentary, historical and contemporary, providing more than a programme or souvenir. These are handsomely presented, celebratory and inspiring books that should long survive the centenary.

Ballets Russes: The Art of Costume edited by Robert Bell is published by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010. ISBN 978-064254-1574

Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909–1929 edited by Jane Pritchard is published by V&A Publishing, London 2010. ISBN 978-185177-6139