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Diaghilev FestivalDiaghilev period works performed by Joffrey Ballet, Ballet de Bordeaux, Dutch National Ballet and others January 2005 Groningen, the Netherlands © Michelle Potter Michelle Potter is dance critic of the |
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The setting is Groningen, a small city of around 180,000 inhabitants in the northern part of the Netherlands, where a festival focusing on the activities of the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev is in full swing. The artist cum lecturer is Robert Wilson, that towering figure in the world of contemporary experimental theatre. Wilson stands at the lectern for several minutes without speaking. When his voice does break the silence it is to declaim a passage from Hamlet. Then follows some two hours of explanatory discussion of his works, his process, his colleagues, punctuated occasionally with weeping, screaming, and assorted theatrical outbursts. This lecture was as challenging as the Wilson works that have been seen in Australia in the past decade or so, including Einstein in the Beach in 1992 and The Black Rider in 2005. And it was quite appropriate that Wilson, an unconventional figure in today’s society, should be invited to speak at a festival celebrating Diaghilev, an unconventional figure from the past. Their lives in art have many parallels. Wilson’s public lecture was in fact a real highlight of the festival. It dealt with contemporary modes of collaboration across the arts, and so engendered reflection on Diaghilev’s collaborative aesthetic, which sprang from an interest in Richard Wagner’s concept of the total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk. Wilson’s lecture also captured a particular attitude and approach to theatrical practice, and alluded frequently to the kind of intellectual ferment from which Wilson’s work grows, and which one imagines must also have existed between Diaghilev and his inner circle of artists, lovers, sponsors and patrons. Diaghilev brought Russian art, dance, music, design and opera to the surprised attention of Western audiences in the early decades of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known today for his Ballets Russes company that took Paris by storm in 1909. The company continued to shock and scandalise audiences with works like Afternoon of a Faun in 1912 when in the final moment of the piece Vaslav Nijinsky as the Faun appeared to be making love to the scarf worn by a nymph whom he had fleetingly encountered. Then there was The Rite of Spring in 1913 danced to the celebrated Stravinsky score. The opening night had the outraged audience calling for a doctor and a dentist. The dancers were unable to hear the music as a result of the noise from the audience and had to be coached from the wings by the choreographer, Nijinsky. The Diaghilev company went on creating shock waves until 1929 with often provocative but always challenging, collaborative works for the theatre.
 The Festival image of dancer Cédric Ygnace © Joris Jan Bos Over a six day period the Groningen festival set out to recreate the ambience of the Diaghilev seasons. An array of dance and opera companies and symphony orchestras arrived in the city to perform works from the Diaghilev period and to stage contemporary versions of the old repertoire. In the case of dance some of the works from the Diaghilev period were recent reconstructions using historical source materials. Others had remained in the international repertoire throughout the course of the twentieth century. In addition, the Groningen art museum mounted a large exhibition called ‘Working for Diaghilev’, which included a selection of costumes from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia along with a range of works on paper and canvas from those visual artists who had contributed to the flowering of Diaghilev’s aesthetic ideals. A selection of films was screened, ranging from works by and about Jean Cocteau (who belonged to Diaghilev’s inner circle of friends and collaborators), to the 1940s dance classic The Red Shoes. There was a lecture cycle, a special opera production for children and a new multimedia work, Nijinsky, a painting, made especially for the festival and billed as ‘a new contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk in the spirit of Diaghilev’.  Nijinsky, a painting © Diaghilev Festival It was an ambitious program and one not without its problems. Timetabling of events was not ideal. Nor was the fact that venues were so scattered. Some of the performances, including what looked like a promising program of works by the famed Kirov Ballet, were quite appalling by international standards. Then the exhibition, which had some fabulous items on display including a large collection of rarely seen portraits and set and costume designs from the State Tretiakov Museum in Moscow, lacked a challenging curatorial argument and any kind of theatricality in its staging: such a shame when one thinks of the strengths in these areas that lay behind our own National Gallery’s two Ballets Russes costume exhibitions. But problems aside the Diaghilev Festival presented audiences with a heady experience of performance after performance of some quite astonishing works from the early twentieth century. Dance-wise the highlight was probably an absolutely inspired performance of Apollo (Apollon Musagete) by the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. This work entered the Diaghilev repertoire late in the history of the company. It was given its Ballet Russes premiere in 1928 the year before Diaghilev’s death. It marked not the first but perhaps the first really momentous collaboration between Stravinsky and choreographer George Balanchine. Balanchine has admitted that the collaboration was a turning point in his life and from there the two artists went on to make some of the greatest ballets of the twentieth century. Apollo is a shimmering jewel of choreography danced to a beautifully pared back, almost austere score, and the Joffrey company gave it not just the classical, sculptural look it deserves but invested it with a subtle drama as well – that of the wild child Apollo learning nobility from the Muses.
 Joffrey's Le Sacre du Printemps © Joffrey Ballet of Chicago The Joffrey also presented two reconstructed works: Nijinsky’s original Rite of Spring with designs by Nicholas Roerich, and the languorous Afternoon of a Faun with choreography again by Nijinsky, music by Claude Debussy and designs by Leon Bakst. Nijinsky has been feted as an unusual choreographer who moved startlingly away from tradition with his angular, two dimensional movements and poses. But it is choreography that lacks the power, form and vision of Balanchine and, next to Apollo, Rite and Faun were choreographic curiosities whose design and music were undoubtedly the overpowering elements in the collaboration.
Leonide Massine’s Parade was one of the most anticipated works of the festival and it did not disappoint as a significant collaborative work of the period. With designs by Pablo Picasso, libretto by Cocteau and music by Erik Satie, which incorporated the assorted sounds of a siren and a typewriter and several pistol shots, Parade was created in response to the well-documented demand from Diaghilev to Cocteau – ‘Astonish me!’ It was also inspired by the Cubist movement in the visual arts and brought Cubism off the canvas and into the theatre. Set outside a travelling theatre with the slight narrative centring on the attempts of the characters to entice an audience into the show, the work premiered in 1917 in Paris and was recreated by the Joffrey Ballet in the 1970s. In Groningen it was performed by the Ballet de Bordeaux and, while it will perhaps always remain slightly eccentric, its apparently simplistic and unadorned choreography is a perfect foil for its idiosyncratic designs and music.  Ballet de Bordeaux's Parade © Julien Palus, Ballet de Bordeaux With these works placed alongside Petrouchka, The Firebird, Le Spectre de la rose, Les Noces, Le Tricorne, Prodigal Son, Icare and La Valse, what emerged from the week’s dance performances was a clear view of astonishing artistic innovation when a single impresario had the foresight to commission artists across disciplines without fear of failure and the courage to take artistic risks of major proportions. There was also the lingering, unstated of course, suggestion during the week that the Diaghilev period had its artistic lows as well as its artistic highs. Massine’s Spanish flavoured Le Tricorne from the Ballet de Bordeaux was visually stunning with its colourful and flamboyant costumes and scenery by Picasso but it struggled to maintain any level of choreographic interest. And one can’t help wondering how different some works might have been had the performers had a clearer understanding of why they were dancing particular ballets or, in the case of contemporary takes on old works, had they been designed differently. It was hard to imagine that the Kirov dancer who took the lead in Michel Fokine’s The Firebird, a ballet with significant weight to it musically, choreographically and visually, really had any handle on the notion that the fantastic creature she was portraying was half bird, half woman. And would different set and costumes, ones that didn’t look like something from a bad Ice Follies show, have made the dancers of the Dutch National Ballet look slightly less awkward in their new version of Firebird?
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