Ballet Russes

I Dreamed I Was a Ballerina

Dance of the Swan: The Story About Anna Pavlova

Nijinsky, Pavlova, Duncan: Three Lives In Dance

Pavlova: Repertoire of a Legend

Nijinsky

Vaslav Nijinsky:
A Leap into Madness

The Queer Afterlife of
Vaslav Nijinsky

Reading Nijinsky

The inventiveness of Russian Ballet in the fields of dance, theater, stage design, music and visual art, inspired and electrified! Every performance in Paris, London, Monte-Carlo, Berlin or Rome, created excitement and rapture-- and the jetset of that time swarmed around the ballet and its artists.

As a private, independent company, the Ballets Russes traveled everywhere without being attached to any one venue, although its Paris season remained an important annual event.

Diaghilev´s stars such as Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, both considered the best ballet dancers of all time, reached a cult status which can only be compared to the rock icons of our time.

Anna Pavlova and Vaslay Nijinsky

From its very beginning the Russian Ballet influenced and created fashions. Oriental ballets like Schéhérazade inspired fashion houses as well as designers of hotels, restaurants, other public spaces and also of private homes. Ballets Russes became a style, and a concept, which was marketed to a large and wide audience and which still serves as an inspirational source for the fashion designers of our era like Yves Saint-Laurent.

Yves Saint-Laurent on the runway

Anna Pavlova is widely regarded as one of the finest dancers in history and was most noted as a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev. She is most recognized for the creation of the role of The Dying Swan and would become the first ballerina to tour and introduce ballet around the world.

When she first danced in New York the critics had never seen live ballet and did not know how to describe what she did-- but they all agreed that they liked it!

Pavlova's ability to accept her role as spokesperson for her art, often with good humor and always with devotion and poise, brought vast audiences to her and eventually to the ballet itself. She was willing to perform in different venues, from the most famous theaters of Europe to small London music halls and even in New York's gigantic Hippodrome.

Vaslav Nijinsky was one of the most gifted male dancers in history. No one matched him for his virtuosity and the depth and intensity of his characterizations. His ability to perform en pointe, a rare skill among male dancers at the time, and his seemingly gravity-defying leaps were legendary.

Nijinsky joined the Ballet Russes as principal dancer and his first performance with them was on May 17, 1909, in Paris at the Theatre du Chatelet.

Nijinsky took Paris by storm. The expression and beauty of his body, his featherweight lightness and steel-like strength, his great elevation and incredible gift of rising and seeming to remain in the air, and his extraordinary virtuosity and dramatic acting made him a genius of the ballet.

In 1912 he began his career as a choreographer. In 1919, at the age of 29, Nijinsky retired from the stage,

"Nijinsky never once touched the ground, but laughed at our sorrows and passions
in mid-air," wrote one spectator.

Sergei Diaghilev , impresario of the Ballet Russes, actively encouraged artistic collaboration and experimentation between painters, choreographers and composers. In this way he created what would become the art of modern ballet.

His 'legendary command' was simply: 'Astonish me!'

This was a time of passionate artistic experimentalism, There was a new feeling-- one of liberation, of freedom, of boundary breaking. Anything was possible. In ballet this fostered a conscious move away from the classical repertoire of the corp de ballet to single performers, and the male dancers were featured in ways they had not been previously.

The first productions by the Ballets Russes in Paris 1909 caused a sensation. Here was the virtuosity of the charismatic Nijinsky leaping, arching, stepping and twisting sinuously as a wild faun to Mikhail Fokine's innovative choreography and Stravinsky's and Rimski-Korsakov's swirling music. Leon Bakst's bold, exotic costumes and sets complemented the raw emotion, sensuality and Oriental eroticism the company exuded.

Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes

Diaghilev: A Life

A Feast of Wonders: Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes

Working For Diaghilev

Scheherazade thrilled and excited audiences when it premiered on June 4, 1910 in Paris and was an international success with its Oriental exoticism. Ida Rubenstein and Nijinsky danced the leads. Rimsky-Korsakov was the composer of Scheherazade and Leon Bakst designed the costumes. The ballet is one act, The mime, or acting, of Rubenstein and Nijinsky was bold and very unusual for a dance performance of that time.

The story of Scheherazade is as follows: The Sultan Schariar, convinced that all women are false and faithless, vowed to put to death each of his wives after the first nuptial night. But the Sultana Sheherazade saved her life by entertaining her lord with fascinating tales for a thousand and one nights. The Sultan, consumed with curiosity, postponed from day to day the execution of his wife, and finally repudiated his bloody vow entirely.

Drawings of costumes for Scheherazade by Leon Bakst

George Barbier's illustration of Nijinsky performing in Sherherazade

Léon Bakst became internationally famous after his costume design for Schéhérazade which opened in Paris in June of 1910. Bakst had shown an early talent for art and in the theater he found the perfect outlet for this talent.

Bakst, amazed the theatrical world with his passion for stark color, bold forms and startling designs. His dancewear designs are sensual, full of energy, and have a deep affinity for the Orientalism that had become all the rage in the early Twentieth Century. He was able to capture fantasy and exoticism (and some eroticism) in his designs.

As a person, he was given to strong passions and even obsessions. In the end, he broke down and his final illness seems to be a combination of a mental breakdown and some kind of undiagnosed physical illness. Some say it was the strain of working so hard on Istar with Ida Rubenstien.

Drawings of costume designs for Cleopatra by Leon Bakst.

Costume designs for Narcisse

Drawing on left is of a costume for Nijinsky
as a faun.

The Great Eunuch, Costume Design for "Scheherazade" 1910
Print by Leon Bakst,

Costume Design
for Nijinsky 1911
Print by Leon Bakst

Bailes Rusuos
Premium Poster
Print by Leon Bakst

"The Oranges"
Giclee Poster
Print by Leon Bakst

Feelings ran high at the Theatre des Champs Elysees in Paris that night in 1913, at the premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). The Ballets Russes danced to a choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky when a riot ensued. The orchestra had barely begun to play when the shocked audience erupted into a riot over this non-classical approach to ballet.. Anarchy followed. Shouting turned into fist fighting. The police had to be called. Stravinsky retreated backstage; Diaghilev tried turning the lights on and off to quell the masses; and Nijinsky bellowed counts to the dancers who could not hear the orchestra. Later it was revealed that it had not been just the music which had set the audience off-- but also the choreography and the costumes.

Avant-garde is just too weak a term to describe those heady days where art reigned supreme.

Works of Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring & Suite from "The Firebird"

Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky: Firebird and others

For Picasso the taste of the ballet was very seductive! He worked with the Ballet Russes for eight years and during this time he married the Ballet Russes ballerina Olga Koklova.

He sketched the troupe as it rehearsed and painted dancers' portraits. More importantly, he designed theater curtains, scenery and costumes for six different ballets. On opening night he often appeared in the wings with paint and brushes.

Diaghilev loved to use dramatic front cloths to help quieten the audience at the start of performances and help establish the mood. They were never meant to be seen for very long. An overture was played, the curtains were parted, and what you would see was essentially a large canvas. At the performance of Le Train Bleu the audience was wowed when they saw this huge canvas by Picasso featuring two stupendous women racing joyously along a Brittany beach.

The canvas is an enlargement of Picasso's "Deux Femme Courant Sur La Plage" and was executed with Picasso's permission within a twenty-four hour period by one of the Ballet Russes set painters. When Picasso saw the result he was so delighted that he prominently signed the massive piece in the lower left and dedicated it to his friend, Diaghilev.

This is Picasso's enormous front curtain for Le Train Bleu, on which two joyous women running portray unfettered energy and freedom, It is the largest Picasso painting and measures 34 by 38 feet

Pablo Picasso's costume for the Chinese conjurer in 'Parade', (1917), worn by Léon Woizikosky, it survived the Second World War buried in a trunk in Warsaw. Made of silk, satin, silver tissue and appliquéd silver cloth, complete with woolen pigtail. This was the first ballet to include cubism sets and costumes.

Pavlova and Nijinsky
Paper Dolls
in Full Color

Erte Fashion
Paper Dolls
of the Twenties

Diaghilev's Ballets Russes
Paper Dolls
in Full Color

Ballet Stars
of the Romantic Era
Paper Dolls

Le Dieu Bleu was a ballet loosely based on stories of the Hindu god Krishna. Unfortunately, the ballet itself was not successful, but we are left with beautiful and extravagant costumes to marvel over. .

The choreography often had to play second fiddle to the lavish costume designs. A range of fabrics including wool, heavy cotton-flannel, fur, paint, metal, tinsel and leather were used, which proved hard to dance in; at times the dancers threatened to mutiny. Still we can only marvel at the consummate skill with which the craftspeople fashioned costumes from extravagant materials using techniques varying from embroidery, applique, beading, embossing, flossing, flocking and dyeing.

Anne Estelle Rice was a young modernist artist working in Paris when she created The Egyptian Dancers, inspired by the 1909 Paris debut of the Ballets Russes with an avant-garde production of Cleopatra.

Determined to evoke the ballet's angular choreography and sensual costumes (by Leon Bakst), Rice employed decoratively simplified forms and unnatural colors inspired by a French modernist aesthetic called Fauvism (fauve means "wild beast"). Several years after its acclaimed European debut in 1910, the painting was lost due to war concerns but has recently been recovered and will stand among the most significant achievements by an American modernist at work among the turn-of-the-century Parisian avant-gard.