Escudero, Vicente (1892–1980)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Lasting Influence

Vicente Escudero was a multitalented artist. There is no question that the great bailaor Antonio el de Bilbao, whom he met on a tour of Andalusia and Portugal, had a lasting influence on Escudero, as did the modernist dance-theater of La Argentina, the Ballets Russes, and the visual art revolution. He even became a close friend of the modern master Pablo Picasso. Between 1920 and his debut as a concert dancer in 1927, Escudero honed his craft and his choreography, learning to dance longer works in the cafés cantantes of Madrid. Escudero was particularly known for his famous Farruca solo, and for his performances with Carmita Garcia, who would become his lifelong stage partner. Dancing on a concert stage, Escudero was received by critics like André Levinson, who wrote seriously about his work as a dancer and a choreographer.

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).

Beyond Bach

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Talle
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Teenage Girls ◽  
Keyboard Music ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Musical Interests

This book investigates the musical life of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Germany from the perspectives of those who lived in it. The men, women, and children of the era are treated here not as extras in the life of a famous composer but rather as protagonists in their own right. The primary focus is on keyboard music, from those who built organs, harpsichords, and clavichords, to those who played keyboards recreationally and professionally, and those who supported their construction through patronage. Examples include: Barthold Fritz, a clavichord maker who published a list of his customers; Christiane Sibÿlla Bose, an amateur keyboardist and close friend of Bach’s wife; the Countesses zu Epstein, whose surviving library documents the musical interests of teenage girls of the era; Luise Gottsched, who found Bach’s music less appealing than that of Handel; Johann Christoph Müller, a keyboard instructor who fell in love with one of his aristocratic pupils; and Carl August Hartung, a professional organist and fanatical collector of Bach’s keyboard music. The book draws on published novels, poems, and visual art as well as manuscript account books, sheet music, letters, and diaries. For most music lovers of the era, J. S. Bach himself was an impressive figure whose music was too challenging to hold a prominent place in their musical lives.

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.

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.

Names, écriture and Enigma: Adorno on Art as Writing

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Welchman
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Multi Media ◽  
Media Practices

Dieser Essay in Form einer Vorlesung untersucht verschiedene Formen der Beziehung zwischen Bildender Kunst und Schrift, indem er sich auf Adornos Rede von Kunst als écriture konzentriert. Nach einleitenden Bemerkungen über die Beziehung von Adorno zu zeitgenössischen konzeptionellen, aktivistischen und multi- medialen Praktiken und seinen kurzen Beschreibungen des »virtuosen« Werkes von Pablo Picasso geht es um den relationalen Zusammenhang zwischen Kunst und Geschichte an, wie er durch Namen und Titel vermittelt wird (mit besonderem Bezug auf die Arbeit des deutschen Künstlers, der sich Andy Hope 1930 getauft hat), die Operationen von Methexis und Sprachcharakter, Realismus und Abstraktion, sowie Ideen, sowohl analoge als auch diskontinuierliche, im Denken Jacques Derridas und Jean-François Lyotards, die jeweils unter der Schirmherrschaft von Adornos ahistorischem Verständnis von écriture einberufen wurden. Die kreativ- elastische Vorstellung von écriture deutet darauf hin, dass die definierende Qualität der Kunst als Rätsel am besten »aus dem Blickwinkel der Sprache« begriffen wird. This lecture-form essay examines various orders of relation between visual art and writing focusing on Adorno’s propositions about art as écriture. Following introductory remarks concerning Adorno’s relation to recent and contemporary Conceptual, activist and multi-media practices and his brief descriptions of the “virtuoso” work of Pablo Picasso, it addresses the relational nexus between art and history mediated by names and titles (looking to the work of the German artist who christened himself Andy Hope 1930), the operations of methexis and Sprachcharakter, realism and abstraction, and ideas, both analagous and discontinuous, in the thinking Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, each convened under the auspices of Adorno’s somewhat ahistorical understanding of écriture. The creatively elastic notion of écriture suggests that the defining quality of art as enigma is best comprehended “from the perspective of language.”

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