Nijinsky, Vaslav (1889–1950)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Järvinen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
World War ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Vaslav Nijinsky ◽  
New Research ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps

Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian dancer and choreographer of Polish descent. He achieved international renown as the star of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes Company between 1909 and 1916. A dancing prodigy, Nijinsky was lauded as the best male dancer of his generation. From 1912 onwards, his choreographic modernism inaugurated the use of simpler movement language that de-emphasized virtuosity with L’Après-midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), Jeux (1913), Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) and the little-known Till Eulenspiegel (1916), created during the company’s second North American tour. Nijinsky refocused attention on the choreographer as the author of dance, which had great influence on how dance as an art form was understood and discussed after World War I. Because Nijinsky was institutionalized for mental illness in 1919, none of his choreographies survived intact and were, for decades, considered artistically irrelevant. This attitude began to change in the late 1980s, when new research and reconstructions of Nijinsky’s choreographies helped scholars and audiences to rethink his place in dance history, and his works are now considered to be important examples of modernism as well as precursors to both contemporary ballet and contemporary dance, more generally.

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.

The Rites of Spring

Nancy Cunard ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 103-120
Author(s):  
Jane Marcus
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
World War ◽  
Creation Myths ◽  
Rite Of Spring

The chapter explores primitivism, African creation myths, and an analysis of Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring and Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster in the context of Cunard’s poetic aesthetic. Marcus also contrasts Edith Sitwell’s anti-war Wheels anthology and Cunard’s engagement with African cultures and artifacts with Eliot’s primitivism. Additionally, the chapter investigates the visual primitivism of World War I and representations of the slaughter by William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis.

Hostile Heartland

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
New Research

Hostile Heartland examines racial violence—or, more aptly, racist violence—against blacks (African Americans) in the Midwest, emphasizing lynching, whipping, and violence by police (or police brutality). It also focuses on black responses, including acts of armed resistance, the development of local and regional civil rights organizations, and the work of individual activists. Within that broad framework the book considers patterns of institutionalized violence in studies of individual states, like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas over a number of decades; it also targets specific incidents of such violence or resistance in case studies representative of changes in these patterns like the lynching of Joseph Spencer in Cairo, Illinois, in 1854 and the lynching of Luke Murray in South Point, Ohio, in 1932. Significantly, Hostile Heartland not only addresses the years from the Civil War to World War I, which are the typical focus of such studies, but also incorporates the twenty-five years that precede the Civil War and the additional twenty-five that follow World War I. It pioneers new research methodologies, as exemplified by Chapter 4’s analysis of the relations between and among racist violence, family history, and the black freedom struggle. Finally, Hostile Heartland situates its findings within the historiography more broadly.

Mercé y Luque, Antonia Rosa (Stage Name: La Argentina; b. 4 September 1888, Buenos Aires, Argentina; d. 18 July 1936, Bayonne, France)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ninotchka Bennahum
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
World War ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
School Of Music ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Subject

Antonia Rosa Mercé y Luque, known by her stage name La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Greatly influenced by the modernist productions of the Ballets Russes who sought political refuge in neutral Spain during World War I, La Argentina fused the modernism of the Spanish School of Music to the Escuela Bolera, or Spanish Bolero School of classical dance, adding many rhythmic and choreographic stylizations from Romani flamenco and other complex regional styles of folk dance she had learned on ethnographic trips throughout Spain. This hybrid vision resulted in a polyrhythmic, African and Hispano-Arab-Sephardic fusion of musical and choreographic cultures whose artistic influence can still be felt along the Iberian Peninsula. With this rich and varied musical and choreographic vocabulary, and a full company of Romani, Spanish, and European dancers and musicians, La Argentina took Europe, the Americas and Asia by storm. Between her first tour to New York in 1915 and her final European performances in 1936, she introduced and cultivated global audiences by performing, touring, writing, publishing and giving afternoon lectures on the subject of the Spanish dance,

Mexicanism Russian Style

2020 ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
K. Mitchell Snow
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
World War ◽  
Diego Rivera ◽  
Mexican Art ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
Ballets Russes

The influence of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes saturated the artistic environment inhabited by Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro in Paris before World War I. In predecessors to the debates surrounding nationalism in Mexico, Diaghilev explored its intersections with folk art in the pages of his magazine Mir iskusstva. Montenegro studied with Diaghilev ally Hermen Anglada who urged his disciples to use elements from their nation’s folklore to escape the hegemony of Parisian modernism. Although Rivera disparaged the Ballet Russes’s influence on Mexican art, he painted his “Mexican trophy,” a cubist Zapatista landscape with a prominent serape, in response to an exhibit of Russian folk art that had been inspired by the success of Diaghilev’s dance company. Montenegro also cited this exhibition as one of the major influences in his decision to pursue Mexican folk art as a source of inspiration.

Comedy Ballet as Social Commentary:Till Eulenspiegel(1916)

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-184
Author(s):  
Hanna Järvinen
Keyword(s):  
Tone Poem ◽  
Past Performance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Vaslav Nijinsky

In 1916, during the American tours of the Ballets Russes company, Vaslav Nijinsky created a choreography to Richard Strauss's tone poem Till Eulenspiegels lustische Streiche, nach alter Schelmenweise, in Rondo Form (1894–1895). Only performed during the tour, the work was long deemed a failure or an indication of the choreographer's approaching insanity. Tracing the reviews and other contemporary materials, this article asks what can be known of a past performance and rehearsal practice – and what our interpretations of the past reveal of present-day concerns and assumptions about dance as an art form.

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.

4. Cinema as art form

2017 ◽  
pp. 50-73
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
The Road ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Different Types ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Narrative Techniques

In the years before World War I there were few people who thought that cinema was or might become an art form. From about 1910, however, signs emerged that cinema was on the road to acquiring some sort of legitimacy. These signs initially pointed in different directions, but eventually a cluster of forms developed, which were to become the cinema as we know it today. ‘Cinema as art form’ considers how cinema has developed through the evolution of editing and narrative techniques and sound synchronization, and then discusses different types of film genre, the neo-realism movement, and the diverse varieties of modern cinema.

Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova (1881–1962)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Parton
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes

One of the most talented and prolific of 20th-century Russian artists, Natalia Goncharova was not only a leading member of the Russian avant-garde in the years before World War I but also achieved widespread recognition afterwards for her work as a stage designer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. As a painter she was a leading exponent of neo-primitivism but subsequently engaged in abstraction and Rayonism, becoming one of the first non-objective artists in Russia.

A River Runs through It

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan K. Rode
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Early Life ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Birth Certificate ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
Art Form

Curtiz’s birth and early life in Hungary are delineated. Despite the numerous erroneous birth dates, some deliberately promulgated by Curtiz, his Christmas evening birthday of 1886 is verified by a birth certificate. Born as Mano Kaminer, he changed his name to MihályKertész to cloak his Jewish heritage while identifying himself as a Hungarian. The artistic role of pre–World War I Budapest, with its cultural incubator of coffeehouses—particularly the Café New York—is described in terms of its effect on the young Kertész. Transitioning from a circus roustabout to an apprentice actor, he was transfixed by the new technology of film and was determined to shape it into a new art form.

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