Diaghilev, Serge (1872–1929)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Quinton
Keyword(s):  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Henri Matisse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Synthetic Vision ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Face ◽  
Business Acumen ◽  
Vaslav Nijinsky ◽  
Creative Role

Impresario, critic, curator, and founder-director of the Ballets Russes (1909–1929), Serge Diaghilev was a towering figure and pioneer of early 20th-century modernism. Through his various projects, Diaghilev offered a cosmopolitan, dynamic, and synthetic vision of art that revolutionized the multiple disciplines with which he came into contact. With the Ballets Russes, in particular, the impresario created a significant space for experimentation by artists of the Russian and Western European avant-garde. Among the visual artists he commissioned were Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Juan Gris, Max Ernst, Joán Miró, Pavel Tchelitchev, and Georges Rouault. Composers linked to the Ballets Russes include Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Richard Strauss, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Henri Sauguet, and Manuel de Falla. The company was also a major platform for the choreographers Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, and George Balanchine, innovative artists whose careers Diaghilev significantly advanced and developed. Through his commissions, Diaghilev brokered partnerships among artists that guided the avant-garde in new directions. A perfectionist with serious business acumen and immense resolve in the face of financial and artistic reverses, he played an active creative role in all his company’s productions. Although a proponent of modernism and internationalism in art, Diaghilev was also a romantic, remaining throughout his life a champion of Russia’s cultural riches, past as well as present. So closely was Diaghilev’s forceful, larger-than-life personality linked to the identity of the Ballets Russes that within months of his death in 1929 the company collapsed.

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.

‘Beautiful, baleful absurdity’: Chinoiserie and Modernist Ballet

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Witchard
Keyword(s):  
Love Affair ◽  
Henri Matisse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Post War

The post-war return of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to London in 1918 was heralded by colourful posters of a ‘Chinaman’ complete with trailing pigtail. This was Picasso’s design for the Chinese Conjurer in Jean Cocteau’s ballet, Parade (1914). However Parade would not receive its London premiere until months later. While the avant-garde Parade had a distinctly minority appeal, Picasso’s Chinese Conjurer was a shrewdly commercial choice, testament to the British love affair with theatrical chinoiserie. This chapter examines the ways its engagement with chinoiserie contributed to the development of Modernist ballet. It starts with Alexandre Benois’ designs for Stravinsky’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Nightingale’ in 1914. Diaghilev re-adapted it in 1917 as Le Chant du Rossignol, commissioning Italian Futurist designer, Fortunata Depero. In its juxtaposition of artifice with nature, ‘The Nightingale’ lent itself to modernist treatment. Depero’s kinetic sculpture garden of cones and discs peopled by geometrical court ladies and mandarins was never staged, but in 1919 Diaghilev revived the idea, bringing Henri Matisse to work with choreographer Léonide Massine in London. In 1925 Diaghilev revived Matisse’s Le Chant du Rossignol for a third time with new choreography by George Balanchine fresh from the Soviet avant garde.

A Directory of Diaghilev Dancers

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-205
Author(s):  
Andrew Foster
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Vaslav Nijinsky

Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes came to an end with his death in 1929, but it has since been an endless source of fascination and inspiration for dancers, dance historians and fans. It would seem that every aspect of the Ballets Russes has been exhaustively explored and documented – from the art, the music and the choreography, to the personalities who created them. The names of Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky are legendary, and many others (Michel Fokine, George Balanchine, Ninette De Valois, Marie Rambert) went on to influence and define the art of ballet for much of the 20th century. But what of the hundreds of dancers who actually gave life and form to the Ballets Russes? Who were they? Where did they come from? How long did they spend with the company? The following listing of more than 400 performers is a comprehensive record of the dancing artists who performed with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

The Spanish Reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (1913–1936)

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Idoia Murga Castro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps ◽  
Cultural Expansion

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Being Numerous

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Language Poets

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

scholarly journals Unknown Siberian Poems by Vasily Yan

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-227
Author(s):  
I. V. Prosvetov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Face ◽  
Poetic Style ◽  
At Home

The first publication of poems by the Soviet writer-historian, 1st degree Stalin Prize laureate Vasily Yan (Yanchevetsky), composed in 1920–1923, when he lived and worked in Siberia. Source – handwritten miscellany “Poems of Wanderings”, recently discovered in the Yanchevetskys’ family archive. The publication is accompanied by detailed biographical comments. In the civil war, V. Yanchevetsky took part on the side of the whites as one of the main propagandists of the Kolchak army – the head of the Informative Department of the Special Chancellery of the Supreme Commander’s Staff, editor of the front newspaper “Vperyod”. After the collapse of the white movement, V. Yanchevetsky had to hide his past, changing occupations and places of residence (Achinsk, Uyuk, Minusinsk). The Siberian po- etic cycle, created at this time, makes it possible to understand not only the mood of the author in the last years of the turning point in Russian history, but also literary searches, and the atmosphere of the time in general. The main themes are homeland, revolution, freedom, atheism, building a new life, preserving the personality in the face of political upheavals. Obviously, the influence on the poetic style of the author of such trends as symbolism and futurism, which he was interested in. In Omsk V. Yanchevetsky closely communicated with the writer, poet and avant-garde artist Anton Sorokin, attended his literary evenings at home. Probably, as a result, some of the Siberian poems were written in free verse, to which V. Yanchevetsky had never used before.

Are Puns Mere? Christine Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-545
Author(s):  
Julia Jordan
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Late Modernism ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Secret Knowledge ◽  
The Relationship

This article will explore the relationship between linguistic puns and knowledge, in particular puns in Christine Brooke-Rose's work, and what they tell us about knowledge: secret knowledge; encoded knowledge; latent knowledge that remains latent; and the refusal of knowledge. My title is an allusion to Frank Kermode's 1967 essay ‘Objects, Jokes, and Art’, where he puzzles away at his own difficulty with distinguishing avant garde writing and art, especially what he calls the ‘neo-avant garde’ of the 60s, from jokes. ‘I myself believe’, he writes anxiously, ‘that there is a difference between art and a joke’, admitting that ‘it has sometimes been difficult to tell.’ Brooke-Rose, whose work Kermode admired, is a perfect example of this. Her texts revolve around the pun, the surprise juxtaposition between semantic poles, the unexpected yoking together of disparate elements. Puns, for Brooke-Rose, sit at the juncture between the accidental and the overdetermined. So what is funny about the pun? Not much, I propose, or rather, it provokes a particular sort of ambivalent laughter which becomes folded into the distinctive character and affective potency of late modernism itself: its deadpan silliness; its proclivity to collision and violence; its excitability and its melancholy. Brooke-Rose's humour is thus of the difficult sort, that is, humour that reveals itself at the moment of its operation to be not all that funny. The unsettling laughter, I propose, that exposes literature's own incommensurability with itself. For Jacques Rancière, the novel must illuminate somehow the ‘punctuation of the encounter with the inconceivable’, in the face of which all is reduced to passivity. The pun, in particular, forces the readers’ passivity, and exposes us to limits of what can be known.

Russian Modernism (1890–1934)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Douglas Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Face ◽  
Russian Modernism ◽  
Lev Tolstoy ◽  
Important Shift

Russian modernism arose as a rejection of positivism and the realism of the major nineteenth-century Russian novelists such as Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Turgenev. In its first phase it was marked by a rekindled interest in poetry, mysticism, and symbolism. There was also a tendency to seek a fusion of different forms of artistic expression: poetry, music, painting, and theatre. Playwrights reflected the move away from naturalism towards the theatricality of commedia dell’arte and metadrama (the play within the play). In prose there emerged a new decorative style and new themes such as sexuality. The Russian Revolution of 1917 signalled an important shift towards the avant-garde. Poets adopted radical new poetic forms, glorified the new machine age or hearkened back to the pre-historical roots myth, and experimented with invented, abstract language. Prose writers shifted towards a stark new factual style that incorporated documents and slogans. Their themes were the revolutionary changes in Russia and their own inadequacy in the face of the new Soviet man. The avant-garde received its death-blow with the promulgation of Socialist Realism as the mandatory style for all publishing authors at the All-Union Writers’ Conference in 1934.

Nijinsky, Vaslav (1889–1950)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Järvinen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
World War ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Vaslav Nijinsky ◽  
New Research ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps

Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian dancer and choreographer of Polish descent. He achieved international renown as the star of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes Company between 1909 and 1916. A dancing prodigy, Nijinsky was lauded as the best male dancer of his generation. From 1912 onwards, his choreographic modernism inaugurated the use of simpler movement language that de-emphasized virtuosity with L’Après-midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), Jeux (1913), Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) and the little-known Till Eulenspiegel (1916), created during the company’s second North American tour. Nijinsky refocused attention on the choreographer as the author of dance, which had great influence on how dance as an art form was understood and discussed after World War I. Because Nijinsky was institutionalized for mental illness in 1919, none of his choreographies survived intact and were, for decades, considered artistically irrelevant. This attitude began to change in the late 1980s, when new research and reconstructions of Nijinsky’s choreographies helped scholars and audiences to rethink his place in dance history, and his works are now considered to be important examples of modernism as well as precursors to both contemporary ballet and contemporary dance, more generally.

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