The unexpected discovery of a grainy scrap of footage from 1928 showing the Ballets Russes in rehearsal, reported last week, seems particularly timely. The recent V&A exhibition, Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929, demonstrated the company’s vast influence and significance. Under the direction of impresario Sergei Diaghilev and with collaborators such as Stravinsky, Picasso, Bakst and Chanel, the Ballets Russes was more of a pioneering cultural movement than a mere dance troupe. Following the release of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, there has been much critical chattering that has placed ballet in the public consciousness. Many reviews have accused Aronofsky of overblown hamminess or stylistic pilfering. Newspapers and radio programmes have wheeled out professional dancers to pour scorn on the imperfect balletic technique of lead actress Natalie Portman. Some have decried the ridiculous prospect of a young woman sprouting feathers. Others have thrown up their hands in horror at the apparently cynical inclusion of a torrid lesbian scene between two beautiful actresses – a gambit surely designed to entice a leery male audience into watching a film that features tutus. But above and beyond this, Black Swan is a film about female breakdown, which uses the themes and preoccupations of ballet to delineate a psychological disintegration, blurring the boundaries between “life”, “art” and paranoid nightmare.
Much has been made of Black Swan‘s relation to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 classic The Red Shoes. The film stars Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, a young ballerina catapulted to stardom by a suave and flinty Russian impresario, who in return demands a complete dedication to dance at the expense of “life” and love. (Like Nina in Black Swan, certain types of privation are necessary to elicit true artistic expression – similarly Victoria suffers an unpleasant demise in the grip of uncanny forces, destroyed by the battle between love and art). The powerful influence of director over dancer mirrors the peculiar and proprietorial relationship that Diaghilev fostered with the dancers of the Ballet Russes. Last week’s discovery exemplifies this – since capturing the company on film was officially forbidden by the impresario, the footage was probably unauthorised. Openly homosexual, Diaghilev took several male dancers as lovers, including Léonide Massine (who stars in The Red Shoes) and most famously, Vaslav Nijinsky. Jealous rage erupted when Nijinksy, away from Diaghilev’s supervision, married a wealthy Hungarian countess. He was dismissed from the company. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1919, Nijinsky’s last years were spent in psychiatric hospitals and asylums across Europe, where he was treated for schizophrenia.
Reviewing Black Swan, New Statesman dance critic Sanjoy Roy notes that the film “appears to be part of a long film tradition in which ballet is associated with madness, sickness, torture, the paranormal and death.” The narrative elements of classical works themselves often contain disquieting Gothic themes that go far beyond the popular misconception of ballet as a saccharine diversion largely enjoyed by small girls and effeminate men. In the great Romantic ballet Giselle, emotional abandonment leads to lunacy and death when the eponymous character falls in love with a disguised and flippantly flirtatious prince. Innocence is lost amid deception; the vengeful force of warped female sexuality dominates in the figures of the ethereal ‘Wilis’.
The physical beauty or contortions of dance evoke moral ambiguities which are in turn suggestive of wider human complexities. The idea of transgression is important here. The Ballets Russes’ far-reaching influence was borne out of Diaghilev’s innovative merging of dance with Modernist set design, costume and music. Notoriety was courted – when it premiered in 1912, the eroticism of L’Apres Midi d’un Faune caused public outcry. (The editor of Le Figaro exclaimed: “We have had a faun, incontinent, with vile movements of erotic bestiality and gestures of heavy shamelessness”). A year later, the primitive scenarios and violent choreography of The Rite of Spring caused a riot. The scandal, declared Diaghilev, was “just what I wanted.” In terms of gender, the Ballets Russes is significant, especially given the sexual machinations and manipulations at play within the company. Dancers like Nijinsky brought a powerful new physique to the stage, but this overt masculinity was complicated by the epicene nature of roles such as the Rose in Spectre de la Rose or the exotic Golden Slave in Scheherazade. Visually, the dancer could be subject to a blatantly homoerotic or desirous gaze, or objectively appreciated as an aesthetic embodiment of grace and strength.
The combination of music and movement, in the absence of words, creates a physical language that can articulate the most primal or transcendent human experience. It isn’t just bony girls and men in tights.
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