One hundred years ago in Paris the most extraordinary thing happened to dance. And even Serge Diaghilev, the mastermind behind it all, could not have foreseen just how extraordinary it would turn out to be. But his Ballets Russes, which began in 1909 as a showcase for Russian dance in the West, sparked a revolution that changed the face of dance in the 20th century.
Those were heady days, when Paris was the centre of the intellectual and artistic universe, and the Ballets Russes was its darling. Diaghilev’s troupe of expatriate Russians — stars such as Nijinsky and Karsavina — made dance vibrant and sexy, while Bakst’s lavish Orientalist designs turned fashion on its head and Stravinsky’s violent rhythms turned music upside down. Diaghilev wasn’t a dancer by training, or even a ballet lover by inclination. But early on he discovered his true vocation as a patron of the arts.
“I am firstly a great charlatan, though with brio; secondly, a great charmeur; thirdly, I have any amount of cheek,” he wrote to his stepmother in 1895. It was those qualities that enabled him, from 1909 until he died in 1929, to entice the most innovative and exciting artists to help him to create something new, daring and frequently brilliant. Fokine, Massine and Balanchine, the choreographers; Debussy, Ravel and Prokofiev, the composers; Picasso, Braque and Matisse, the painters. The list is staggering.
The fruits of Diaghilev’s vision seeded dance for decades. His colleagues travelled the world to spread the messsage and start companies of their own — George Balanchine in America, Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert in Britain. For years after his death, rival Ballets Russes companies toured the globe feeding the public’s inexhaustible passion for the craze he fathered.
I wonder what Diaghilev would think now, watching us celebrate the centenary of his enterprise. The Royal Ballet and English National Ballet have tribute programmes planned. So, too, does Sadler’s Wells, which is commissioning four new creations in the spirit of Diaghilev. For a top ticket price of £440 you can see Russian stars perform Diaghilev works at the Royal Opera House on June 7. Joy Melville has published a lively new biography of dance’s greatest impresario, while an exhibition of costumes, designs and other Ballets Russes memorabilia is coming to a London gallery.
The landscape for dance is much changed in the 21st century, of course, with national companies in the West having taken over where the Ballets Russes phenomenon left off. But I bet that Diaghilev would be shocked and disappointed by how conservative ballet has become in the age of publicly funded organisations. He knew what it meant to scrabble for money — his company frequently teetered on the edge of financial collapse — yet that did not prevent him from seeking to provoke and amaze his audiences with the shock of the new. Imagine his dismay at the hold that Swan Lake now has at the box office.
That is certainly true at Covent Garden, where the prominence given to 19th-century repertoire (as wonderful as it is) would leave Diaghilev wondering why he had bothered. Still, Monica Mason, the Royal Ballet’s director, is well placed to appreciate his legacy. “When I joined the company in 1958 our ballet master had known Diaghilev and performed in the Ballets Russes,” she says. “It was total goosebump time. But young dancers today don’t feel connected to the Diaghilev legacy. They are technically very secure and they cover a wide range of work, but we need to stimulate their imagination.”
She’s hoping to do that with a centenary triple bill that features two Fokine ballets, Les Sylphides (“so that they can feel the moonlight on their cheeks”) and The Firebird. In between the two, in a move that Diaghilev would no doubt approve, comes a world premiere from the British choreographer Alastair Marriott, who is setting his ballet to piano preludes by Debussy.
The concept of one-act ballets, upon which the Ballets Russes was based, is now so hard to sell at the box office that companies increasingly rely on popular full-length productions. Ironically, most of them are the ballets that Diaghilev sought to leave behind (though he did famously stage The Sleeping Beauty, or The Sleeping Princess as he called it, in London in 1921). This is certainly true of English National Ballet, which once had a wonderful line-up of Ballets Russes works. “We tend not to do triple bills any more because our hands are tied financially, which is a great shame,” says Jane Haworth, ENB’s artistic co-ordinator. “Yes, ballet has regressed from Diaghilev’s day, it’s all about the safe option now. You can’t be as creative as you want artistically.”
Still, ENB is mounting two tribute programmes at Sadler’s Wells in June. Balanchine’s Apollo will join a quartet of Fokine ballets, including Les Sylphides, Schéhérazade and Le Spectre de la Rose, the latter danced by guests from Australian Ballet. In addition, there’s Faun(e), David Dawson’s contemporary reimagining of Nijinsky’s L’après-midi d’un Faune. “For the dancers it’s great to do something different,” Haworth says. “The old ballets are not taxing physically, because ballet has evolved so much technically in the past 100 years. But stylistically it’s a challenge. It’s like looking into a history book and seeing something that’s gone.”
Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, has decided to honour the past by looking exclusively to the future. A quartet of new pieces inspired by the Ballets Russes will be shown in October. “I think it is worth marking such a seminal moment in history because Diaghilev’s example is still there in terms of collaboration,” says Alistair Spalding, artistic director of the Wells. “He developed the first real sense of bringing artists from different disciplines together and I wanted to mark that because that’s also what we try to do at the Wells. But I didn’t want to do it like other companies, which is to recreate some of those ballets.”
The four choreographers have taken to the brief in different ways. Russell Maliphant has been inspired by drawings of Nijinsky and his ideas of circular movement; Wayne McGregor is making an intellectual connection with the cultural and scientific things that were happening in 1909; and Javier De Frutos is setting his dance to Ravel’s La Valse, a score commissioned by Diaghilev and then rejected. As for Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, his inspiration comes from Nijinsky’s Faune, which, with its explicitly erotic fantasy, caused a scandal at its 1912 Paris premiere.
Faune was the only Nijinsky ballet to be notated (he wrote it down in his own idiosyncratic hand), but because so many Ballets Russes creations were not notated and none of the performances was filmed, the choreography is the most fragile part of the company’s legacy. That is not true of its art or music. You can hear The Rite of Spring in the concert hall, though you cannot see Nijinsky’s long-lost choreography, and you can gawp at magnificent sets and costumes. Many of the latter are reproduced in countless books, while many of the originals are held in museums around the world, including the Victoria and Albert, which is planning a blockbuster Ballets Russes show of its own for autumn 2010.
The art dealer Julian Barran, who has been involved in the sale of Diaghilev memorabilia for 40 years, has seen interest in the Ballets Russes skyrocket. “In 1968 you could buy six costumes designed by Matisse in the low hundreds. Today, the last one sold for about £33,000.”
Barran has five original costumes (by Bakst, Matisse, Larionov and Golovine) in his centenary exhibition at the Daniel Katz Gallery in London, which also includes portraits and photographs of the dancers. The costumes, in particular, are testament to the innovative spirit of Diaghilev’s artists, even if dance was quite possibly the last thing on their minds. “Larionov’s Cubist costumes for Chout were so angular and stiff that no dancer today could possibly move in them, let alone dance,” Barran adds.
It’s tempting to wonder just how open we would have been to such a reckless experimental spirit. Would we have been among the angry spectators booing the first night of Rite of Spring? Or would we have seen it for what it was, the birth of our modern age?
Many of Diaghilev’s ballets were failures, and many are irretrievably lost. How I would have loved to have seen Massine’s Ode, with its revolutionary stage effects (neon lights and film projections) astonishing its 1928 audience. Or Nijinsky’s Jeux, with its sexually ambiguous love triangle played out on a tennis court.
But even those ballets that have survived, such as Petrushka, The ThreeCornered Hat and Parade (the last two choreographed by Massine and designed by Picasso) are not seen enough. Thankfully, Covent Garden keeps alive Bronislava Nijinska’s magnificent Les Noces, in a precious staging overseen by the choreographer herself. But the Diaghilev ballets have not enjoyed the same staying power as Giselle, The Nutcracker and their ilk.
“It is almost as if the Diaghilev legacy is not important any more and that’s very sad,” Haworth adds. “Hopefully English National Ballet will rekindle interest in it by showing people what they have missed over the years. Maybe we can be the spark that sets it off again.”
The Royal Ballet Diaghilev tribute opens at Covent Garden (020-7304 4000) on Monday; the English National Ballet tribute is at Sadler’s Wells (0844 4124300), June 16-20; Diaghilev and Friends, by Joy Melville, is published by Haus; Serge Diaghilev and Les Ballets Russes is at Daniel Katz Gallery, London W1, May 19-June 12
