The ticket said ‘Darcey and Rafael in conversation’. The menu cover said ‘Dance—collaboration, creativity and choreography’. A tall order? This luncheon event associated with the National Gallery of Australia’s current exhibition Ballets Russes: the art of costume featured former Royal Ballet star Darcey Bussell, now living with her family in Sydney, and Rafael Bonachela, artistic director of the revamped Sydney Dance Company. So what happened?
Well, about 200 people gathered in Gandel Hall, the Gallery’s new-ish public event space. Seated at round tables accommodating nine or ten people per table, we started with a main course, a most acceptable meal given that it clearly needed to be prepared in advance. Then, as dessert was brought in, Darcey and Rafael, made their way to the stage and, seated in armchairs, began to talk about dance. So far fairly predictable. Things began to get interesting as dance became the focus.
Some footage was shown. We saw the amazing Ms Bussell, with those incredibly articulate arms and legs not to mention face and entire body, in excerpts from Christopher Wheeldon’s Tryst, which Australian audiences were lucky enough to see when Ross Stretton brought the Royal Ballet to Australia in 2001, then in parts of the Black Swan pas de deux from Swan Lake Act III, and finally in the last pas de deux from Manon. Footage of Bonachela’s recent works followed, including segments from We Unfold and 6 Breaths.
The conversation centred for a while on the similarities between classical and contemporary dance in terms of the athleticism required by dancers whatever style they are performing, and on the nature of collaboration. Bonachela stressed his aesthetic of commissioning artistic collaborators to produce new work and outlined the importance of moving the art form forward through the creation of new work. Bussell introduced a certain degree of humour as she recounted the trials of rehearsal and the pitfalls (and pleasures) of performance. They both showed a beautifully human side of themselves.
But perhaps the most interesting moments came when the floor was opened up to questions. For me there were three particularly provocative questions. The first concerned narrative in contemporary dance. Did it exist? And was its lack (or apparent lack outside of ballet) what differentiated contemporary dance from ballet? Bonachela’s answer was beautifully phrased. ‘I believe’, he said ‘that the body has a narrative and I am interested in finding it through my choreography. I want to engage with the audience in an emotional way. I am interested in ideas and think the body is a strong communicative tool.’ He did add however, tongue in cheek, that perhaps he would wake up tomorrow and want to make a narrative work!
The second question of particular interest to me concerned the Australian Ballet and its now apparently entrenched decision not to perform in Canberra. How, asked the audience member posing the question, do we continue to engage with ballet when the flagship company denies Canberra audiences the opportunity to see Australian Ballet performances other than by spending large amounts of money to travel out of Canberra? Bussell rightly outlined the various problems associated with touring especially by major companies. But because she may not be aware of the situation, she didn’t mention the Australian Ballet’s apparent problems with the size and nature of the Canberra Theatre’s stage, nor its perceived issues with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. But she did say that in the end it is up to us, the people of Canberra, to make it known that we do constitute an audience for ballet and that we want to see performances by the main company, not only those of the Dancers Company or specially contrived one-off events. Well, I’m not sure that any movement from the people would have the slightest effect.
And the third question of particular interest to me concerned the difference in physicality between the dancers of the Ballets Russes era and those of today. It is clear from watching old footage from the 1930s that the dancers who came to Australia between 1936 and 1940 were different in musculature, in technique and in the performance values they brought to the stage. But probably the luncheon conversation was not the forum in which to elaborate on the various changes we see in the way dancers look and perform today. The responses petered out a little. Another occasion perhaps?
The National Gallery of Australia has provided some inspiring events associated with its Ballet Russes exhibition. This was one of them. May there be more events where an audience feels free to ask and comment in the way it did at this event.
The British-Australian choreographer and dancer Liz Lea recently presented a show at the National Gallery of Australia in which she managed, with singular success, to rework her popular piece 120 Birds, staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010, from a work for a small company into a one-woman show.
But the irrepressible Lea has another project in the pipeline—a documentary made with Kuwaiti director, Talal Al-Muhanna, and Indian cinematographer, Lakshya Katari. Lea has had an ongoing fascination with dance makers who toured to far flung destinations in the early part of the twentieth century, including Ruth St Denis and Anna Pavlova, and the documentary, entitled On the trail of Ruth St Denis, follows the journey of St Denis across India. The crew visited the locations in which St Denis performed including the cities of Amritsar, Agra, Kanpur, Lucknow, Varanasi, Kolkuta and Mumbai.
Lea acts as the on-screen presenter for the documentary and also performs some of the ‘Oriental’ dances that made St Denis famous in her day.
The film is currently being cut in the United Kingdom by editor Krishna Francis and has music by Nick Parkin. Further information (published earlier) is available. See e-press from India.
Michelle Potter, 6 March 2011
Featured image: Liz Lea in front of the Taj Mahal. Photographer not idfentified.
Meryl Tankard reports that her first short documentary film, MAD, has been selected for showing at the 17th World of Women: WOW Film Festival.
MAD focuses on madness and schizophrenia, explored by poet and writer Sandy Jeffs, who has lived with schizophrenia and all its moods for 34 years. It features music by Elena Kats-Chernin and vocals by Mara Kiek both of whom have collaborated with Tankard on numerous previous occasions. Lyrics are by Sandy Jeffs. Jeffs was a featured writer at the 2010 Melbourne Writers Festival. She has published five books of poetry.
Sandy Jeffs in Meryl Tankard’s short documentary, MAD
Tankard says she is thrilled that her first documentary has been chosen to be screened at the Festival. She says:
‘I hope this documentary will give viewers a glimpse inside the schizophrenic mind. I have been inspired by Sandy’s works and by Sandy herself, in particular the way she deals with her inner voices and the way she articulates her feelings about her illness.’
MAD will be screened on 9 March 2011 at the Dendy Opera House Quay cinema.
In a post in September 2009 I queried various aspects of an image held in the National Library of Australia’s Pictures Collection. The image is attributed to Axel Poignant, although I indirectly questioned this attribution as the photograph appears to have been a gift to Poignant from the Dandré-Levitoff company in recognition of the work he did with them in Perth. Why, I wondered, would the company be giving back to Poignant a print of his own image?
Since September 2009 I have been pursuing research into the extensive touring schedule of the Dandré-Levitoff company and was fortunate enough to be given access to archival material belonging to the family of Anna Northcote (Severskaya). Amongst photographic material in this collection I came across the photograph reproduced below:
Final position, Prince Igor. Dandré-Levitoff Russian Ballet, 1934-1935. Anna Northcote (Severskaya), Personal Archive. Private Collection
This seems to me to be very similar, if not the same, as the image held by the National Library. Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is that a very similar image, perhaps in relation to the action of the ballet taken slightly before the one reproduced above, appeared in an advertisement in Cape Town, where the company performed between 18 May and 9 June 1934, well before arriving in Australia.
Could it be that the image in Northcote’s collection and that appearing in the Cape Town advertisement are both publicity shots taken either in Cape Town, or earlier before the company’s arrival in South Africa? Given that the South African advertisement shot is slightly different, the alternative of course is that the company did give back to Poignant a print of his image with their signatures on the back as a memento of the occasion, and that the dancers were each given a copy as well (or bought one)? If this is the case, Northcote’s archive, which contains a number of performance shots, may well include other images by Poignant.
I am still not convinced, however, that the image of the final moment of Polovtsian Dances was shot by Poignant, but I would love to be proved wrong.
I didn’t see roadkill or lawn, the previous works by Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood shown in Australia in recent years. So I have no way of knowing how Food Chain, presented at the Sydney Festival 2011, fits in with their developing (or developed?) aesthetic. I have to say that if those previous works were like Food Chain I find it difficult to understand their apparent success.
Food Chain was episodic—not surprising given the experience of Webber and Millwood, which includes working with Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre and in various situations in Germany. Billed as ‘a David Attenborough documentary in reverse’, it purported to examine the idea of animals experimenting on humans and on how much ‘animal’ was apparent in human beings. Men in bear suits changing into business suits. A woman wearing a bear head backwards or on the end of her leg. A conversation with a line-up of stuffed animals. A game of shadow play of a fairly simplistic nature that morphed into shadowy allusions to bestiality. Crude references to sexual smell. For me Food Chain just lacked any kind of sophistication of thought. Even those polar bear advertisements for Bundaberg rum we used to see on commercial television with some frequency had more to offer in my opinion.
For me Food Chain also lacked any kind of sophisticated movement. With no-one identified as choreographer perhaps this is not surprising. Take the closing scene when the cast spent some time slowly descending a large tree trunk that made up the major part of the set. Each performer would make it, eventually, to the floor and disappear only to return at the top of the trunk and make another descent. It seemed to last an age. The work was also punctuated with the spoken word. Some lines were just inaudible. Not all dancers have the ability or training to speak on stage. Very frustrating.
In the end it was difficult to understand exactly what Webber and Millwood were trying to say other than something on the most superficial of levels. I thought Food Chain was way down the chain of where dance is in the twenty-first century. At least the tickets were only $30.
28 January 2011, Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay. Sydney Festival, 2011
Wayne McGregor’s Entity, performed by his company Random Dance as part of the 2011 Sydney Festival, begins and ends with black and white footage of a greyhound in motion. It may be or be based on the work of the nineteenth-century, British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneer of the physics of animal locution. It certainly recalls the work of Muybridge. To me this visual clue is of far greater import and carries much more interest for the viewer than any amount of philosophical discussion of McGregor’s research project ‘Choreography and cognition’ and his work with neuroscientists, as fascinating as those and other aspects of McGregor’s career are.
Entity shows the remarkable ability of the human body to move, bend, twist, flex, soar and travel. Like the greyhound the dancers are sleek. Their limbs extend and reach outwards. Their bodies are stretched long and lean. They use their muscles efficiently. They move with intention. In their black briefs and white T-tops, dispensed with towards the end to reveal black bra tops on the women and for the men a bare upper body, they hover on the edge of classical movement before morphing into strange new shapes. They twist and contort their bodies with one recurring motif being an arched spine with backside pushed out, the antithesis of the classically stretched spine with the head balanced perfectly at the top. Bodies are in constant dialogue with each other and the movement screams out its edginess.
Danced to a score by Joby Talbot followed by another from Jon Hopkins, the work is set in an enclosed space consisting of three light coloured, translucent screens, one at each side and one at the back of the stage area. Designed by Patrick Burnier they can be manipulated by a (viewable) mechanical system and lit when required. When lit (design by Lucy Carter) their internal structure is further revealed. During the second part of the work the screens rise above the dancers and are enhanced by video projections. From my position towards the back of the circle of the Sydney Theatre it was not entirely clear what the projections were other than they seemed to be various formulae. Part of the choreographer’s fascination with mathematical and engineering principles?
But in the end Entity is about McGregor’s choreography and about his attitude to how the body can move in this present day and age. It makes me long to see more of McGregor’s work, especially when danced by intensively trained ballet dancers. There are some great scenes of McGregor rehearsing Genus, his work for the Paris Opera Ballet, along with brief excerpts from the work in performance in the recent film La danse. While Random Dance performed superbly in Sydney, there is something additional in the way the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet perform. There is a certain security in the way they move, an inherent understanding of the body, something deeply intuitive about movement, that allows McGregor’s classical references to be offset in a particular way. The mix of the classical and the restive tension of today becomes heightened and makes us see both and all more clearly.
Although this is a little simplistic, McGregor reminds me of Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine and William Forsythe rolled into one. He’s a formalist. He dispenses with fussy costumes and decorative sets. And he has a remarkable intellectual curiosity. It makes for unusual and ultimately satisfying dance, which in its essence is purely McGregor.
As the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Diaghilev exhibition is being taken down, its curator, Jane Pritchard, has made the startling discovery that there appears to be film footage of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in performance. And we have always thought that no such footage exists! She reports on this remarkable discovery in her latest blog post—’I eat my words’, where you can also view the footage via the website of British Pathé.
Michelle Potter, 27 January 2011
UPDATE 16 June 2020: The footage and blog post is no longer available via the link above. But the footage (lasting just 30 seconds) of a section from Les Sylphides, filmed in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1928, is below.
During my research into the year-long tour by the Dandré-Levitoff Russian Ballet between 1934 and 1935, the name Alexander Levitoff loomed large. Unlike Victor Dandré, who did not join the tour until the company had reached Java in mid September 1934, Levitoff sailed from Southampton with the Russian Ballet dancers on the R. M. S. Kenilworth Castle on 27 April 1934. His name appears on the passenger list when the KenilworthCastle arrived in Cape Town on 14 May 1934 for the beginning of the South African leg of the tour. Throughout South Africa the Russian Ballet was promoted as being presented by Levitoff, as the poster in the photograph below, taken in Durban in June 1934, indicates. Yet information about Levitoff and his activities, both during the tour and beyond it, has proved elusive, as has the exact professional relationship between him and Dandré.
Alexander Levitoff in Durban, June 1934. Anna Northcote (Severskaya), Personal Archive. Private Collection
Recently, however, information about Levitoff has come to light in files held by the National Archives of Australia, some of which were made accessible only in January 2011. Combined with some correspondence between Levitoff and the English dancer Algeranoff, and the personal archive of Anna Northcote (Severskaya), another English dancer who performed with the Dandré-Levitoff company, it is possible to begin to piece together some biographical information about Levitoff. Although some reports refer to him as ‘a native of Moscow’, documents completed by Levitoff when he arrived in Australia on a number of occasions from 1934 onwards as an ‘alien passenger’ indicate that he was born in 1891 in Tiflis (present day Tbilisi, Georgia). On these documents he gives his profession as ‘impresario’ and this description also appears on his personal stationery immediately underneath his name. The immigration documents also record, where ‘nationality’ is requested, that he was ‘stateless’ and that both his parents were born in Russia.
Levitoff lived in Paris from at least the early 1930s at 5 rue de Boudreau. It was from Paris that he issued Northcote (and presumably other dancers) with a contract for the Dandré-Levitoff tour. But he appears to have led a peripatetic life as an impresario following the Dandré-Levitoff tour, working between the northern and southern hemispheres. His personal stationery during the 1940s and early 1950s gives his address as ‘formerly 5 rue de Boudreau’ and lists his places of business as ‘Sydney, Auckland, Paris’. He brought a number of artists and companies to Australia and New Zealand during the late 1930s and into the 1940s including the Don Cossack Choir, pianist Isador Goodman, and soprano Ninon Vallin. He announced many other theatrical plans although a significant proportion of those plans appear not to have been realised. In the mid 1940s he was involved in a legal dispute with a Sydney sponsor and was eventually ordered to repay monies advanced to him.
In Sydney, at least for part of 1939, he lived in what Tamara Tchinarova Finch describes in her memoirs as ‘chic poverty in a small back room of the Hotel Australia’. Finch also records that Levitoff persuaded her and some of her colleagues who had remained in Australia in 1939 at the end of the tour by the Covent Garden Russian Ballet to give some matinee performances in the city of Newcastle, north of Sydney. She writes:
‘He made an agreement with us that he would pay us each ten pounds a performance and keep the rest of the box-office himself. It was a roaring success; the theatre was chock-a-block with wide-eyed youngsters. At the end of the three days, Levitoff, now a few hundred pounds richer, was easily able to pay off his pressing bills.’
He may also have had connections with Ballet nationale, a company founded in Sydney in the late 1930s by Leon Kellaway, another dancer with the Dandré-Levitoff company. Kellaway joined the Dandré-Levitoff company when they arrived in Brisbane in October 1934 and danced under the name Jan Kowsky (Kowskiy). He remained in Australia when the company left for Ceylon in January 1935.
By 1942, however, Levitoff had moved to Melbourne where he lived in the salubrious suburb of Toorak. Between 1942 and 1945 he worked as Canteen Manager with the Department of Munitions at the High Explosives and Ordnance Factory, Marybrynong, and in 1945 he applied for, and was granted, Australian (Commonwealth) citizenship. In one document he intimated that, as a stateless person, travelling overseas was not easy and that having citizenship would allow him to travel more easily in the ‘Dominions’. In support of his citizenship application he noted his good character while working at Marybrynong and noted that as an impresario it was his practice to require the artists whom he engaged to give two charity concerts for some worthy cause. A clipping from an unidentified New Zealand newspaper notes that a concert by Isador Goodman in Wellington raised £1020 for the Metropolitan Patriotic Fund.
Levitoff was still at his Toorak address in May 1950 but by the mid 1950s he was back in Paris where he died in 1957. His obituary in Dance News notes that he was survived by his wife about whom I have as yet been unable to find information.
Program notes for My bicycle loves you, the 2011 Sydney Festival production from Legs on the Wall, promote the show as a day in the life of seven characters inhabiting the same apartment building. They also explain that the show features archival footage sourced from the National Film and Sound Archive, rare footage dating to the early twentieth century as used by the Corrick family of vaudeville entertainers.
The footage is fascinating and is a mix of travelogue, chase, and fantasy scenes, with some trick photography and early use of tinted film. It has been beautifully manipulated for the show by video artist Mic Gruchy. Whether projected onto screens—sometimes large, sometimes small—used as shadow play, or mixed with contemporary footage of the artists of Legs on the Wall, it rarely loses its fascination.
But as on so many occasions when footage or projections of some kind are used as an integral part of a theatre performance, especially one where movement is the central mode of expression, the movement becomes a secondary partner. Without an exceptional collaborative aesthetic at work, the visual imagery always dominates. And this is what happened in My bicycle loves you. It was only when the very skilful artists of Legs on the Wall were performing against a static backdrop (which was not often) did they command the attention they deserve.
The eclectic movement style of Legs on the Wall, dubbed ‘physical theatre’, often appears to me to lack focus at the best of times. The mind tends to wander and wonder whether the mixture of circus acrobatics, street dance, stunts and other varieties of dancing and movement, is able to convey a narrative, even a surreal or episodic one. It is worse when something else takes the attention away from the physicality on display. Bouquets, however, to the four musicians in the pit, especially for their five minute or so jam at the end of the show.
Jane Pritchard’s record of the itinerary of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes from 1909 to 1929, published in two parts in Dance Research 27, issues 1 and 2 (2009), is an absolutely indispensable resource and it was remiss of me not to have recalled its publication in my previous post and comments. From her listing I have extracted the Diaghilev performance history of Le Dieu bleu.
Paris: Théâtre du Châtelet, 6 performances 1912 (13, 15, 17, 18 May, 5, 7 June)
London: Royal Opera House, 3 performances 1913 (27 February, 1, 6 March)
Monte Carlo: Opera House, 3 performances 1913 (22, 26 April, 2 May)
Buenos Aires: Teatro Colón, 3 performances 1913 (20, 24, 28 September)
Rio de Janeiro: Teatro Municipal, 1 performance 1913 (29 October)
Berlin: Teater am Nollendorfplatz, 2 performances 1914 (11, 13 March)
18 performances in total according to the current state of knowledge.
Further information is in Jane’s comments originally posted on part one of this discussion but now also reproduced below as part one has become a little unwieldy to read. In addition, the illustrations from the The Sphere, mentioned in Jane’s comments, are also reproduced below (again with thanks to Jane).
From Jane Pritchard, 31 December 2010:
Oh dear thousands of comments to make and not much time at present. Let’s not get into the changing evolution of Schéhérazade and Zobéïde’s costumes yet – Bakst must have redesigned this to flatter each of his dancers.
1. The original costume for Ida Rubinstein 1910; 2. The Karsavina/Astafieva version for autumn 1911 (I don’t know what Roshanara who also dance the role this season at the ROH wore) This is the Karsavina version currently on display at the V&A; 3. The Karsavina version for 1912; 4. The Vera Fokina version originally for performances for Royal Swedish Ballet in 1913 and then worn with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1914; 5. Schéhérazade was redesigned in 1915 (see credit in programme). This is when the Flora Revalles version comes in; 6. This is modified for Lubov Tchernicheva (and since she continues to dance the role it settles down as the costume);
What this alerts us to is that there is often not a fixed version of one characters costume in a successful ballet—and do critics ever alert audiences to changes?
And on the subject of Fokine & Fokina photos in The Ballets Russes and the Art of Design many were actually taken in Stockholm when Fokine mounted Cléopâtre, Les Sylphides, Le Spectre de la rose, Le Carnaval and Schéhérazade there when spurned by Diaghilev, 1913–14.
But to the challenges of Le Dieu bleu, a ballet full of questions and one for which a contemporary viewer (A. E. Johnson) commented that the published programme synopsis was not the action realised on stage. I recall once having an argument with a significant choreographer when his synopsis was clearly not what happened in performance but he insisted it was published none the less—what a disservice to his audience and posterity.
Whatever one thinks about Herbert Ross’ film Nijinsky it contains a wonderful scene in which we see a dress parade of the costumes for Le Dieu bleu followed by a petulant Fokine (played by a young Jeremy Irons) complain to Léon Bakst that Bakst is trying to ruin the ballet by over-designing it. This may not be an historically accurate meeting but there is a real truth to it. Le Dieu bleu to me appears to be such an old fashioned production drowning in display. I find it fascinating that when the French start contributing to the Ballets Russes productions it takes them a while from them to break away from their balletic past. Much of Le Dieu bleu was procession and mime Beaumont described the one performance he saw as having ‘dull’ music, ‘uninspired’ choreography and containing ‘too much miming and posing, too many processions’. The demons and reptiles were ‘reminiscent of a Christmas pantomime’ and comic. Gosh aren’t I excited that I’ll be able to see Wayne Eagling’s new version of this ballet at the London Coliseum in April!
But to sort out some facts. Le Dieu bleu did not receive a large number of performances but it was presented in Paris (1912), London, Monte Carlo, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janiero (all 1913) and all these performances featured Nijinsky in the title role. It was also given two performances in Berlin in 1914 when Nijinsky was no longer in the company thus the title role was performed by Fokine and his wife, Vera was the Goddess (a role created by Nelidova).
I found it extremely valuable when told I was mounting a Ballets Russes to compile a day-to-day itinerary for the Company so that I understood which productions were performed where and how often. And on the subject of itineraries, just as we say in Britain you wait ages for a bus and then three come along—the same happened with the Ballets Russes performances. Sarah Woodcock published her version in The Dancing Times; the Paris Opéra’s exhibition book Les ballets russes included a version by Boris Courrège and team and my own (the most complete for which I happily acknowledge assistance from Roland John Wiley, Andrew Foster and others) was in Dance Research Volume 27 (2009) which is available through JSTOR on line.
There appear to be two sets of photographs for Le Dieu bleu—those taken in a Parisian studio by Walery at the time of the 1912 premiere in Paris. These were initially reproduced in the souvenir programme (produced by Comœdia Illustré) and serve to document the creators of the ballet in their costumes—I feel certain many of these photos were taken to show Bakst’s magnificent costumes rather than the dancers.
Then there are the Berlin photographs taken in 1914 which were reproduced as postcards and reproduced as a full page spread in The Sphere, London 23 May 1914. I think these are taken posed on stage and what we are seeing is the Lotus pool and the golden staircase of the set. I think our god and goddess are on their plinths on which they rose from the pool (Fokine’s lower right leg is hidden) to make their first appearance. The review in the Observer, 2 March 1913, p.8 refers to ‘the Lotus flower that dreams in a large basin. From its petals the Goddess arises; at her side the blue god who proceeds to charm the denizens of the den to tameness. The tunes of his pipe and his elaborate dance play the part of Orpheus with considerable effect.’ At the end of the ballet the ‘Goddess returns to the heart of the Lotus and the blue god goes in another direction to the Indian Walhalla, with the assistance of a golden staircase that conveniently appears behind the opened rocks’. I would actually suggest that the best published description of the ballet appears in A.E. Johnson’s book The Russian Ballet (with illustrations by René Bull) London: Constable, 1913. pp. 163-177
But to return to the costume as seen in the photos . Nijinsky and Fokine are not wearing identical head dresses—once again, as with the shoes it is Fokine whose head dress is closest to the Bakst design note the drop ‘pearl’ decorations like ear-rings hanging from it.
I agree that of the two known extant versions of costumes for the Blue God—the Canberra version matches the tunic in both sets of photographs. Please note it was never in the V&A’s collection we did not de-accession it. The Canberra costume appeared on the cover of the catalogue for first major Ballets Russes Sale 13 June 1967 when according to the published list of Prices and Buyers’ Names it sold for £900 to a Mrs Gibson—incidently the costume can be glimpsed in the background of the photo of Marie Rambert in Lubov Tchernicheva’s Pas d’acier jackets at a preview of the sale on p.167 of our exhibition book. The Canberra version was on display in the amphitheatre foyer at the Royal Opera House for years so I am amazed that it is still in such good condition.
The British version is extremely fragile and was one of the two last costumes worked on, the other being one of Matisse’s costumes for Le Chant du Rossignol. Both demanded very long hours of work and were not ready to be photographed for our book (not catalogue) to accompany the exhibition. The old photo of it as reproduced in Shead is horrid. I’ll get together more specific material on our version of the Blue God costume and get back to you on this. We also have a lot of other costumes for this production.
Adrian’s suggestion about new costumes for the USA tour is an interesting speculation— I just wish I knew how many of their costumes the Ballets Russes had access to when they re-formed in 1915–all the productions that year are described as being ‘redesigned’. I would love it if that also made sense of the mystery concerning the two versions of Le Festin costumes but it does not. So over New Year I’ll have to do some more thinking about the costumes.
I’ll finish these ramblings by including the copy on the labels for our four Dieu bleu objects in the exhibition; the painting of the set, a costume design (in the Bakst section) and two costumes (in the Nijinsky case).
Le Dieu bleu 1912
Diaghilev never let concerns over authenticity override artistic impact. Le Dieu bleu (‘The Blue God’ or Krishna) was designed by a Russian in a vaguely Indian setting, with a score by a Venezuelan composer for a French audience. Bakst’s designs mixed elements from various south Asian cultures. The faces on the stone cliff resemble those on the Bayon Temple of Angkor Thom in Cambodia.
Oil on canvas, Léon Bakst (1866–1924). Private collection
Costume design for a young Rajah in Le Dieu bleu 1912
Bakst’s designs for Le Dieu bleu were among his most elaborate, but the ballet was old-fashioned in its emphasis on design at the expense of dancing. His costume for a young Rajah, a character not individually named in the programmes, shows fantastic detail in the feathered turban, pearl decoration and stylised shoes. Pencil, watercolour and gouache, Léon Bakst (1866–1924). V&A: S.338-1981
Costume worn for Le Dieu bleu 1912–14
The Blue God (1912), a ballet based on Krishna, was created for Nijinsky. His solo included poses inspired by Hindu sculpture, and his costume featured a closed lotus flower among sunrays on the appliquéd torso. Nijinsky and Fokine, who took over the role, were each photographed wearing different versions of the costume. The example here is more richly decorated. Watered silk, inset with satin and embroidered with mother-of-pearl
Designed by Léon Bakst (1866–1924). V&A: S.547-1978
Costume for a Little God in Le Dieu bleu 1912
Léon Bakst’s lavish costumes emphasised design over choreography in The Blue God. A child performer wore this costume, whose tall headdress reveals the influence of Cambodia in its pyramid shape and sculptural forms. Gold knit, satin and gold-painted decorations
Designed by Léon Bakst (1866–1924). V&A: S.613 to B-1980
