Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  None of this, however, was apparent at the time. The outbreak of war had thrown the Ballets Russes into disarray. Diaghilev briefly disbanded the company and scrambled to keep a stable core of artists working. The difficulties of arranging papers and crossing borders, of securing engagements and raising money to pay dancers and keep himself afloat, made Diaghilev’s enterprise unstable at best.* Change was inevitable. Dancers left and others arrived, until by 1918 less than half the reassembled troupe was Russian: Poles, Italians, and English (with charmingly Russified names) filled out the ranks. The political identity of the Russians themselves became uncertain, and by the early 1920s most were stateless exiles. The geographic axis shifted in other ways too: the company became less tied to Paris and more international, based variously in London, Rome, Madrid, and Monte Carlo. Most important of all, Diaghilev was increasingly cut off from Russia: he made his last visit there in 1914. During and after the First World War he would turn increasingly to Western artists and musicians—to Picasso, Matisse, and Derain; Poulenc, Satie, and Ravel.49

  In choreography, however, this would not do. The cachet and commercial appeal of the Ballets Russes still depended on its ability to produce Russian dances, and Diaghilev never worked with a ballet master from the West. With Fokine and Nijinsky both gone, he turned to another Russian recruit, Léonide Massine (1896–1979). Massine, however, was a different breed: a charismatic folk and character dancer from the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, he lacked the strict Imperial training that had heretofore sustained Diaghilev’s enterprise. Indeed, the impresario had originally recruited Massine as a performer to fill Nijinsky’s dancing roles, but the dancer soon stepped into Nijinsky’s former life in more intimate ways: he became Diaghilev’s lover and the chief choreographer for the Ballets Russes. In customary fashion, Diaghilev immersed his new charge in art, music, and literature and involved him in every aspect of planning, production, and design.50

  One result was Parade (1917). The ballet had a libretto by Jean Cocteau, music by Erik Satie, and sets and costumes by Picasso. It was inspired by Italian vaudeville and marionette productions that Picasso and Cocteau had seen with Diaghilev and Massine in Naples, but Cocteau also took his cue from Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring. The audience, he said, had wrongly felt that they were being mocked; this had prevented them from really seeing and getting beneath the surface of Nijinsky’s great ballet. More important, perhaps, the self-promoting Cocteau also wanted his own succès de scandale and worked hard to make Parade suitably shocking. The plot, however, was a flimsy conceit. It concerned the commercially appealing skits and sideshows performed outside a theater: a Chinese conjurer, a little American girl, acrobats, and various managers beckoned audiences to enter—to get past the exterior “show” of a work of art and find out what was really inside. Cocteau liked Satie’s music for its ironic insertion of sounds from everyday life—typewriters, pistol shots—although Satie himself disclaimed what he disparagingly referred to as “Jean’s noises.” The choreography, by Massine (with intrusions by Cocteau), was a thin pastiche of moves from everyday life and popular culture, with Chaplinesque antics, a cakewalk, and movements inspired by Mary Pickford.51

  The problem with Parade—and it was indicative of the artistic difficulties facing the Ballets Russes in the years during and after the war—was that there was no inside. Parade was all surface irony and too-clever illusions, a point perhaps deliberately accentuated by Picasso’s Cubist decor. The choreography was nondescript and the dancers were in any case severely constrained by Picasso’s boxy and cumbersome costumes, some of which were over seven feet high: they and not the dances were the show. Premiered on May 18, 1917, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris at a gala benefit for the French Red Cross and other charities, and with an audience papered with wounded Allied soldiers and a celebrity avant-garde, the performance was coldly received. At a time when the French were suffering devastating losses and mutinies on the Western Front, Cocteau’s lightweight chic seemed in poor taste.

  Parade represented a choreographic low for the Ballets Russes. Massine would make better ballets in the future, but none would match those of Fokine or Nijinsky: his work was adept and entertaining, but he did not have the mind or the drive to push—or change—the boundaries of choreographic art. He had a dancer’s rather than a choreographer’s sensibility, and his best dances were those that he himself performed, such as Tricorne, based on an exhaustive firsthand study of indigenous Spanish dance traditions. Moreover, Diaghilev’s balance was off: as he leaned more and more on art and decor, dance slid into second place and became an extension of painting. Picasso and Matisse both liked to paint onto the dancers, with brushstrokes applied directly to the body—“like a painting,” as Matisse himself put it, “but with colors that move.” Massine did his best to follow their lead, but his talent was no match for theirs and the dances he made played a supporting role. Isadora Duncan, noting the change in the late 1920s, commented sarcastically but perhaps not entirely unfairly: “The Russian ballet are hopping madly about in Picasso pictures … sort of epileptic gymnastic with no strength or center … If that is Art I prefer Aviation.”52

  There were other problems too. The cultural landscape was changing, and Diaghilev was being out-Diaghileved. The Ballets Russes was no longer the only fashionable dance company around. There were several chic split-off and copycat Russian companies, and the experimental Ballets Suédois, bankrolled by a wealthy art collector, established itself in Paris from 1920 to 1924 and threatened to steal Diaghilev’s avant-garde lead. The war, moreover, had brought the full force of American jazz to European soil. In 1925 Josephine Baker’s daring Revue Nègre, with its raw (black and near-naked) syncopated jazz-world energy, swept all before it. “These shows,” wrote Count Harry Kessler, “are a mixture of jungle and skyscraper elements … ultramodern and ultraprimitive. The extremes they bridge render their style compulsive, just as it does with the Russians.” Audiences in the 1920s, moreover, were notoriously jaded and disillusioned, and Diaghilev was forced into ever-hotter pursuit of fashionable entertainments to distract a blasé elite. Without the advantage of novelty and big-name Russian dancers—Massine was no Nijinsky—it became increasingly difficult to juggle the demands of art and commerce. As the English composer Constant Lambert later reflected, Diaghilev was becoming “part of Western Europe himself—a little déraciné and a little old.”53

  But that was only one side of the story. The other was the continuing and ever-urgent press of Russia on Diaghilev’s mind and art. Diaghilev closely followed events at home, and like many displaced Russians, he supported the Revolution. In early 1917, before the Bolsheviks came to power, he was invited to become minister of fine arts, a proposition he seriously considered for a time. Stravinsky was swept up too and enthusiastically orchestrated the popular Russian folk tune “Song of the Volga Boatmen” to serve as a new national anthem; Diaghilev had the tune played before all of his shows, and even arranged to have a red flag dramatically unfurled at a performance of Firebird in May. But when the Bolsheviks took over and the country lapsed into bloody civil war, skepticism and disillusion set in. The Revolution, as Stravinsky later put it, had turned out to be grim evidence that the country could not sustain a cultural or political tradition: “Russia has seen only conservatism without renewal or revolution without tradition.” Like Diaghilev, he did not go back.54

  Except, that is, in memory and in art. In the early 1920s, Diaghilev began collecting Russian books and manuscripts, scavenging through bookstores for relics of the pre-Bolshevik past. It was an indication of his deepening sense of disorientation and exile, and in 1921 he returned nostalgically to the ballet that seemed to hold within its frame a complete picture of a lost Imperial world: The Sleeping Beauty. In a sign of the changing times, Diaghilev did not mount this old Petipa ballet in Paris: instead, it premiered in London at the Alhambra Theater, a music hall with a long tradition of vaudeville entertainment and ballet acts. The Alhambra took on Beauty as a sub
stitute for the traditional English Christmas pantomime: it was retitled The Sleeping Princess.

  In spite of its music hall venue, however, Diaghilev saw The Sleeping Princess as a chance to introduce Europe to Imperial Russian ballet in its highest, strictest classical form. He went to great lengths to bring together the pieces of the old Beauty tradition: he found the original Aurora, Carlotta Brianza (by then aged and living in Paris), and invited her to perform the role of Carabosse. He went looking for Riccardo Drigo, the Italian composer who had worked at the Imperial Theaters and conducted the premiere of the ballet in 1890. (The old composer was back in Italy but too senile to participate.) To help re-create the steps, he brought in Nikolai Sergeyev, a former Maryinsky ballet master who had made rough notes of several Petipa ballets in a (now defunct) notation system; after the Revolution, Sergeyev had packed these precious documents in trunks and brought them to the West. In search of a ballerina, Diaghilev sought out Olga Spessivtseva, an elegant Maryinsky classicist. When she arrived, the Ballets Russes dancers—many of whom did not have Imperial training or were out of shape from performing less technically demanding modern ballets—were amazed by her classical strength and purity. Diaghilev did not stop there. Turning back to his old St. Petersburg “artistic committee,” he asked Bakst to create new sets and costumes, based on baroque and rococo designs, while Stravinsky helped with the music and became the ballet’s chief advocate and spokesman. The preparations were feverish, almost giddy, as the Russians set out to reconstruct their own lost past in postwar London.

  The English, however, did not get it. The Sunday Times proclaimed The Sleeping Princess the “suicide” of the Ballets Russes, and others cringed at the lavish costumes, seeing in them little more than “Bank Holiday dresses.” It was a ballet, one critic sardonically noted, “that delighted those who hated the Sacre.” There were others, however, who liked The Sleeping Princess, and indeed, the ballet’s high ideals and noble style would later play a seminal role in the future of classical ballet in Britain. But at the time nothing could save the production: it was a commercial disaster and was soon forced to fold. Diaghilev was shocked, emotionally devastated, and faced with financial ruin. He had placed the full weight of his reputation on this expensive failure, and under the strain his already precarious health (he had diabetes) gave out and the company briefly dispersed.55

  Two years later, Diaghilev produced his last “Russian” ballet: Les Noces, with music by Stravinsky, decor by Natalya Goncharova, and dances by Bronislava Nijinska. Stravinsky first had the idea for the music while he was composing Sacre du Printemps, and the score, composed intermittently through the war and not completed until 1923, recalled Russian folk songs and the Orthodox liturgy. It had the percussive drive of Sacre—there were four grand pianos—but was less destructive, more lyrical, and strikingly religious in tone, especially in its choral parts. The difference may have reflected in part the composer’s growing interest in Eurasianism, an émigré and Slavophile movement that gained momentum in the early 1920s among White Russians. The future, they believed, belonged neither to the Bolsheviks nor to the West, but to a new “Eurasian” civilization founded on a pre-Petrine Christian and Byzantine past. It was a variant of the ideas that had fascinated Stravinsky for so long, but with an added emphasis on authority and Orthodoxy. One émigré Russian critic described the music as “a mysterium of Orthodox daily life … Dynamic in musical terms, but on the emotional level it is saturated with the tranquility and quietude of an icon.”56

  Bronislava Nijinska, however, came to Les Noces imbued with Russian revolutionary culture and art. She had returned to Russia just before the war. Determined to carry on with the work she had done with her brother, she had spent time in Moscow and settled in Kiev, where she established a school to train dancers for the company she hoped one day to run with Vaslav. It was a difficult but heady time, and her students paid their way with food or fuel and stayed into the night debating the future of art. When the Revolution broke out Nijinska traveled to Moscow and found herself at the nerve center of the city’s avant-garde: she worked in cabaret and was drawn to constructivist design, to industrial art and radical theatrical productions. In the years that followed Nijinska worked hard to bring these experiences to bear on the technique she and Vaslav had pioneered: the training at her school was classically based, but she also strived for a denser, more tensile muscularity and modern aesthetic. As she once explained, she was after “the dynamic rhythm of the automobile or airplane … speed, deceleration, and the unexpected, nervous breaking.” Her brother was never far from her mind, and upon learning of his madness in 1921, she took her two small children and aged mother and returned, at great peril (her requests to travel had been officially denied), to the West.57

  Les Noces was Nijinska’s answer to Sacre. It was a reenactment of a Russian peasant wedding: not a joyous occasion but a foreboding social ritual in which feelings were strictly contained and limited by ceremonial forms. The ballet depicted the customary separation of the bride and groom from family and friends and their prearranged union in marriage. Static and weighted, it was a powerful invocation of a rigid and timeless peasant world. The look of the ballet was essential, and Nijinska worked closely on the decor with Goncharova, herself a leading figure in Moscow art circles before the war with a strong interest in folk art, religious symbols, and the East. Goncharova had been one of Diaghilev’s mainstays: she had joined him in Paris in 1914 and designed decorative neoprimitivist stage sets in the style of the early Russian ballets. For Les Noces she thus initially proposed a bright, richly colored decor in the old Ballets Russes manner. Nijinska, however, would have none of it. Instead the choreographer suggested dark, solid masses and an etched gray-blue theme, a color then widely associated with the proletariat. Goncharova immediately took the cue and responded with earthy brown and white costumes, cut to simple peasant lines, severe in their simplicity and lack of color. The sets were equally stark and constructivist, with flat, steely blue geometric shapes—wedges, arcs, rectangles—hard benches, and platforms arranged in a tense, formal, and static design.

  Nijinska’s dances were no less austere. The women performed on pointe, but not to create a sense of the ethereal: instead Nijinska hoped to elongate their bodies to “resemble the saints in Byzantine mosaics.” The steps were classical but stony and archaic, stripped of all ornament and grace, and the dancers moved with cold detachment and unerring discipline. There were sharp steps with the dancers on pointe pounding their toes like jackhammers into the floor; the bride had three-foot-long braids that were plaited and unplaited by her friends and used to show her connection to them but also to pull and maneuver the young girl as if she had no will of her own. The émigré critic André Levinson, whose taste lay firmly in the past with Petipa, wrote of the ballet’s disturbingly “automatized motions,” which “look like machinery: mechanical, utilitarian, industrial.” An “entire Red army division,” he said, seemed “to be involved in the show as well as crowds of working-class people.” He called Les Noces a “Marxist” dance for its depiction of the cruel sacrifices demanded of the individual by the collectivity.58

  Yet in spite of its asceticism, Les Noces also had a profound underlying lyricism. Nijinska’s steps were coordinated and whole, never fractured, disintegrating, or collapsed in on themselves. These were not “cells in mitosis” but people deprived of free will, and even today—the ballet is still performed—we feel their subjection and loss, their suppressed and restricted feelings. In one of the ballet’s most poignant and telling images, the women dutifully pile their faces like bricks one on top of another, forming an abstract, pyramid structure (an image that recalled Meyerhold’s “building the pyramid” exercise, in which actors climbed on top of each other to construct a physical architecture). The bride sets her face on the top and rests her head despondently in her hands. We see both the individuals (those faces) and their submission to authority and the group: if one face pulls away, the pyramid will
collapse. At the end of the ballet, the women take this pyramid pose again—this time without the bride, who has left their midst—and the men line the sides of the stage, heads bent on hands in a posture of resignation. A male figure stands behind the pyramid and as the final gongs sound, he raises his arms, priest-like, and the curtain falls.

  Following Stravinsky’s lead, Nijinska had found a way out of her brother’s nihilism through the formal beauty and discipline of the Orthodox liturgy: those Byzantine saints. Noces was not, however, a religious ballet; it was instead a modern tragedy, a complicated and very Russian drama that celebrated authority, Orthodoxy, and a communal past but also depicted their brutal effect on the lives of individuals. Nijinska’s great achievement was her ability to show external forms and inner feelings at the same time. Thus Noces had the cold under-a-microscope objectivity and flat, impenetrable surface of Sacre, but it also allowed glimpses of grief and pain, which shot up through the cracks of the ballet with poignant urgency. The idea was not, as we might suppose today, to suggest that it would be better if these feelings were fully released from their pent-up ritual forms and freely expressed; to the contrary, the feelings were more powerful for being ritualized. Noces was a monument to Russia, a cruel but nonetheless dignified “rite of marriage.”

  Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces: the bride supported by friends with her long braids draped over them. (8.2)