From the Russian avant-garde to Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-229
Author(s):  
Jane Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes

The Spanish Reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (1913–1936)

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Idoia Murga Castro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps ◽  
Cultural Expansion

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Parade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet Bellow
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Production Team ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Cabaret Songs ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
One Act

A one-act ballet on the theme of a fairground sideshow, Parade was produced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and premiered on May 18, 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. According to Jean Cocteau, the poet who wrote the ballet’s libretto, the impetus for Parade originated in 1912 with Diaghilev’s command, ‘‘Astonish me!’’ To fulfill Diaghilev’s mandate, Cocteau assembled a production team drawn from the Parisian avant-garde: for the score, he recruited the composer Erik Satie, known for experimental piano compositions such as Gymnopédies (1888) and for cabaret songs performed at the Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir. In 1916, Cocteau secured the participation of Pablo Picasso, a painter associated with the Cubist movement of the early 1910s, to design the overture curtain, set, and costumes. Working with the choreographer Léonide Massine, this group produced a ballet-pantomime featuring familiar characters from the circus, variety shows, and cinema. Mixing various forms of art and entertainment, Parade used dance to explore the unstable relationship between elite and popular culture.

Diaghilev, Serge (1872–1929)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Quinton
Keyword(s):  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Henri Matisse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Synthetic Vision ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Face ◽  
Business Acumen ◽  
Vaslav Nijinsky ◽  
Creative Role

Impresario, critic, curator, and founder-director of the Ballets Russes (1909–1929), Serge Diaghilev was a towering figure and pioneer of early 20th-century modernism. Through his various projects, Diaghilev offered a cosmopolitan, dynamic, and synthetic vision of art that revolutionized the multiple disciplines with which he came into contact. With the Ballets Russes, in particular, the impresario created a significant space for experimentation by artists of the Russian and Western European avant-garde. Among the visual artists he commissioned were Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Juan Gris, Max Ernst, Joán Miró, Pavel Tchelitchev, and Georges Rouault. Composers linked to the Ballets Russes include Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Richard Strauss, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Henri Sauguet, and Manuel de Falla. The company was also a major platform for the choreographers Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, and George Balanchine, innovative artists whose careers Diaghilev significantly advanced and developed. Through his commissions, Diaghilev brokered partnerships among artists that guided the avant-garde in new directions. A perfectionist with serious business acumen and immense resolve in the face of financial and artistic reverses, he played an active creative role in all his company’s productions. Although a proponent of modernism and internationalism in art, Diaghilev was also a romantic, remaining throughout his life a champion of Russia’s cultural riches, past as well as present. So closely was Diaghilev’s forceful, larger-than-life personality linked to the identity of the Ballets Russes that within months of his death in 1929 the company collapsed.

Feigned and Distorted Bodyscapes

2021 ◽  
pp. 88-114
Author(s):  
Ron J. Popenhagen
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Charlie Chaplin ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Artistic Collaboration ◽  
Popular Performance

Creative interdisciplinarity in performance and scenography permeate the masking and disguising of the avant-garde. Chapter Four highlights the artistic collaboration of choreographers, composers, visual artists and writers in Paris and beyond, beginning with the production of Parade in Paris (1917) and concluding with work of Vsevolod Meyerhold in Moscow in the 1920s. Popular performance disguising by Liesl Karlstadt and Karl Valentin in Munich, as well as Alexander Vertinsky’s Ukrainian Pierrot, contrast with much of the abstraction proposed in other urban bodyscapes. The bold distortions of Aleksei Granovsky’s mises en scène with the State Yiddish Chamber Theatre complement the masquerading described in Paris with the Swedish Ballet and the Ballets Russes. This chapter parades a line-up Charlie Chaplin, Clowns and Pulcinella interpreters alongside the omnipresent Pierrots who offer an escape from the troublesome years of war. In this era, disguising also proliferated in domestic and military circumstances as malingerers and ‘Aspirants and Pretenders’ displayed Chaplinesque masquerading skills throughout the belligerent communities and battlefields of Europe.

The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde

Experiment ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 214-230
Author(s):  
Linda Nochlin
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Ballets Russes

Abstract “The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde” deals with the complex relationship between Diaghalev and the members of the Parisian avant-garde he commissioned to design sets and costumes for his productions after World War I. Despite their previous aesthetic radicalism, such artists as Gris and Derain were obliged to rein in their vanguard originality and produce work of surprising conservatism, at the urging of the impresario. Matisse attempted greater originality, but in an unsuccessful ballet. The only really avant-garde production sponsored by Diaghalev after the war was Parade, in which such luminaries as Picasso, Satie and Cocteau played a leading role. Yet ultimately, it was not Diaghalev but Rolf de Mare’s Ballet Suedois that created the most experimental productions involving dance: Relache and Entr’acte. Yet, in experimenting with new forms, de Mare, in effect, abandoned ballet for different forms of expression relying on cinematic techniques rather than classical dance.

The Ballets Russes Connection with Fashion

Costume ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-144
Author(s):  
Samantha Vettese
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Fashion Designers

This paper examines the influence that the costume designers of the Ballets Russes, many of whom were important artists from significant art movements of the day, had on contemporaneous fashion. It looks at why in particular the 'Ballets Russes' artists Leon Bakst and Natalia Goncharova went on to involve themselves in actual fashion production and the similarities between their work and the fashion designers producing work at the same time, principally Paul Poiret, Mariano Fortuny and Coco Chanel. Overall, this paper investigates the significance of the cultural times and of the distinct characteristics of the separate art forms, that may have encouraged avant-garde art and fashion to crossover and collaborate so unreservedly.

Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-103
Author(s):  
Hanna Järvinen
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
Set Design ◽  
Total Work ◽  
Past Performance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Interdisciplinary Scholarship ◽  
A Company

From the outset, I have to admit I am partial to new scholarship on the Ballets Russes, particularly interdisciplinary scholarship that offers new perspectives on staged dance as an art form. Hence, two recent books on a company famous for striving for the total work of art effect sounded like an absolute feast. I may have set my expectations high, but these books actually exemplify how easily dance becomes secondary to music and set design in discussions of past performance, and how “interdisciplinary” studies often are anything but. In both books, the analyses offered of dance are, for a dance scholar, implausible, specious, even outright incomprehensible, and the dance-related topic emerges as servile to agendas of other disciplines, namely those of music and art history.

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