Picasso's "Parade" from Street to Stage: Ballet by Jean Cocteau, Score by Erik Satie, Choreography by Leonide Massine

Notes ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 147
Author(s):  
Carl B. Schmidt ◽  
Deborah Menaker Rothschild ◽  
Ornella Volta
Keyword(s):  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Erik Satie

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.

Honegger, Arthur (1892–1955)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Waters
Keyword(s):  
Francis Poulenc ◽  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Harmonic Language ◽  
Arthur Honegger ◽  
Acceleration And Deceleration ◽  
Les Six ◽  
French Composers ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
Symphonic Work

Composer Arthur Honegger was one of a group of six young French composers, known as Les Six, in the forefront of post-WWI Parisian musical modernism. Les Six (Honegger, Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Georges Auric (1899–1983), Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983), and Louis Durey (1888–1979)) frequently presented their work together. They were championed by author Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) and loosely associated with composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Contemporary critics noted a seriousness and profundity to Honegger’s music that contrasted with that of the other members. Honegger’s instrumental compositions, such as his chamber and symphonic works, often cultivated large multi-movement formal structures. Several of his oratorios (for orchestra, chorus, and soloists) treated biblical topics. He also wrote operas, songs, music for ballet, and film scores. Early works, such as the 1921 oratorio Le Roi David and the 1923 symphonic work Pacific 231 (which musically depicts the acceleration and deceleration of a steam locomotive) helped seal Honegger’s international reputation as a modernist whose music was nevertheless eclectic and accessible. Much of Honegger’s music is characterized by strong motoric rhythms, use of counterpoint and contrapuntal devices (imitation and fugue), and an inclusive harmonic language that uses tonality, extended tonality, and atonality.

Massine, Léonide (1896–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Straus
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Popular Theater ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Erik Satie

Russian-born Léonide Massine’s career flourished in the cities of Western Europe, where he made his name as a lead dancer and choreographer for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–29). Massine’s choreographic development coincided with and helped to define the Ballets Russes’s modernist period. As Diaghilev’s protégé, Massine absorbed principles of Cubism and Futurism, consequently developing an angular, distorted movement style, heralded for its intensity and polyrhythmic complexity, along with its satiric and cinematic elements. Massine’s Parade (1917), in collaboration with Pablo Picasso (decor and costumes), Erik Satie (music), and Jean Cocteau (libretto), is recognized as a landmark of ballet modernism. Like other modernists, Massine incorporated national and folk material (commedia dell’arte to flamenco) and popular theater forms (including film) as tools for creative innovation. Following his departure from the Ballets Russes, Massine became interested in formalism and abstraction, which he expressed in a series of symphonic ballets. The most recognized dance artist of the 1920s and 1930s, Massine’s magnificent presence as a performer, even an aging one, can be seen in the film The Red Shoes (1947).

Massine/Picasso/Parade

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Gay Morris
Keyword(s):  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Erik Satie

This essay concerns Leonide Massine's choreography for the Ballets Russes production of Parade (1917). The ballet was groundbreaking in its incorporation of Cubist and Futurist innovations and for its vanguard collaborators, which included Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso. Massine was only twenty-one at the time, and his choreography has often been dismissed as inconsequential. I argue that Massine not only made a major contribution to the collaboration, but that his working methods and approach to choreography owed more to Cubism's reformist tendencies than to Futurism's call for a radical remaking of art. In laying out a path close to Cubism, Massine set western ballet in the direction of the high modernism that would later be epitomized by George Balanchine.

scholarly journals Le magazine américain Vanity Fair (1913-1936) : vitrine de la modernité musicale à Paris et à New York

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Malou Haine
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Monte Carlo ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Carl Van Vechten ◽  
Hall Of Fame ◽  
Rhapsody In Blue ◽  
John Alden Carpenter ◽  
Erik Satie

De sa création en 1913 à sa fusion avec Vogue en 1936, le magazine américain Vanity Fair a pour vocation de parler de l’art contemporain européen et américain par de courts articles de vulgarisation, des photographies et des caricatures. Plusieurs domaines artistiques sont couverts : musique, danse, opéra, littérature, peinture, sculpture, arts graphiques, cinéma, photographie et mode. La France constitue tout à la fois le rêve, l’attraction et le modèle des Américains : elle reste omniprésente jusqu’au milieu des années 1920, puis cède la place aux artistes américains. Vanity Fair reflète plus particulièrement la vie culturelle à New York et à Paris, même si ses ambitions sont plus largement ouvertes sur l’Europe et les États-Unis. Dans la rubrique intitulée « Hall of Fame », il n’est pas rare de trouver un Français parmi les cinq ou six personnalités du mois. La France est présente davantage pour ses arts plastiques et sa littérature. Le domaine musical, plus réduit, illustre cependant plusieurs facettes : les Ballets russes de Diaghilev, les ballets de Serge Lifar, les ballets de Monte-Carlo, les nouvelles danses populaires (tango, matchiche), l’introduction du jazz, la chanson populaire, les lieux de divertissements. Quant à la musique savante, le Groupe des Six, Erik Satie et Jean Cocteau occupent une place de choix au début des années 1920, avec plusieurs de leurs articles publiés en français. Dans les pages de Vanity Fair, des critiques musicaux américains comme Virgil Thomson et Carl Van Vechten incitent les compositeurs à se débarrasser de l’influence européenne. John Alden Carpenter ouvre la voie avec The Birthday of the Infanta (1917) et Krazy Kat (1922), mais c’est Rhapsody in Blue de Gershwin (1924) qui donne le coup d’envoi à une musique américaine qui ne copie plus la musique européenne. À partir de là, la firme de piano Steinway livre une publicité différente dans chaque numéro qui illustre, par un peintre américain, une oeuvre musicale américaine.

Jean Cocteau et Paris 1920

1967 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Fermigier
Keyword(s):  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Erik Satie

L'histoire de Jean Cocteau, critique d'art, est un peu celle de ses rencontres avec Erik Satie et Picasso. Rencontres qu'il sut provoquer et, rapprochant des milieux jusque-là ignorés les uns des autres ou réputés inconciliables, organiser ; dont les principaux résultats furent le ballet de Parade monté par Serge de Diaghilev à Rome et présenté à Paris en mai 1917, le Coq et l'Arlequin (Notes autour de la musique) publié en 1918, en 1919 quelques articles parus dans Paris-Midi (Carte Blanche), en 1920 une éphémère et charmante petite revue (Le Coq), un ensemble de textes critiques, dont le plus important est un Picasso (1923), que Cocteau rassembla en 1926 sous le titre significatif de Rappel à l'ordre. Tous ces essais, si disparates, elliptiques ou pointus qu'ils puissent aujourd'hui paraître, représentent peut-être ce que l'après-guerre nous a laissé heureusement ou malheureusement de plus significatif dans le domaine critique.

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