Ballets Suédois (1920–25)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel N. Dorf
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Fernand Leger ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Modern Artists ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
Francis Picabia ◽  
De Chirico

Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois was active from 1920 to 1925. It was the chief artistic rival to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and de Maré was often referred to as the Swedish Serge Diaghilev. With Jean Börlin as chief choreographer, the company created twenty-four ballets in collaboration with prominent modern artists and composers, including Fernand Léger, Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, and Cole Porter. When first launched, the troupe performed ballets in a style similar to the Ballets Russes, but de Maré’s interest in the visual arts and the vibrancy of modern, contemporary life resulted in a greater emphasis on abstraction and popular idioms in both the design and choreography of Ballets Suédois productions.

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.

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.

Börlin, Jean (1893–1930)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles R. Batson
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Fernand Leger ◽  
The Face

As principal choreographer and dancer for the 1920s avant-garde troupe Les Ballets Suédois (Swedish Ballet), Jean Börlin contributed greatly to the modernist cauldron that was interwar Paris. Founded by the wealthy Swedish arts patron Rolf de Maré in 1920, the Ballets Suédois expanded upon the model of avant-garde collaborative dance theater established by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes a decade earlier. In the five years until their disbanding in 1925, the Swedes rivaled the better-known Russian company for artistic creativity with such signal works as the 1921 Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Newlyweds of the Eiffel Tower), the 1923 La Création du monde (The Creation of the World), and the 1924 Relâche (Theatre Closed). With twenty-three original choreographies, some 900 performances, and international tours throughout Europe and the United States, Börlin and his company played a significant role in the development and propagation of innovative modernist work, which grew from the interplay among the visual and performing arts. In collaboration with such artists as Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, and Fernand Léger, Börlin helped change the face and forms of dance theater.

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

scholarly journals A New Gloria for Satie's Messe des pauvres

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Erich Schwandt
Keyword(s):  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
Contemporary Account

Erik Satie worked on his Messe des pauvres from 1893 to 1895 but never completed it. After Satie's death, Darius Milhaud selected movements from the composer's notebooks and published them in 1929 as the Messe des pauvres for organ and voices. The Mass is missing its Gloria; however, the only contemporary account suggests that the Gloria was in existence in 1895. The object of this article is to propose a new Gloria based on one of Satie's contemporaneous piano préludes. As well, to involve the singers more fully, two very short movements are furnished with Latin texts.

New Religious Movements and the Visual Arts

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Massimo Introvigne
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Traditional Religions ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Modern Artists

Contrary to popular conceptions, modern artists are often religious. Some of them are part of mainstream religions including Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam. Others try to establish new religions and forms of spirituality based on art itself. A significant number of artists, while alienated from traditional religions, were either part of, or deeply influenced by, new religious movements and esoteric groups. Scholars have particularly focused on the influence of the Theosophical Society on the visual arts, but other movements have also been significant.

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.

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.

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