What then are the essential characteristics which differentiate the “revolutionary” Russian ballet from the traditional ballet as
TROUHANOWA
IN AN ORIENTAL BALLET
Photograph: Gersche
it has hitherto been known both in Russia and elsewhere? The essential difference is to be found, not in technique, but in idea. The ballet has been brought into relation with life. Dancing, which had its origin in the most elemental emotions, gradually strayed further and further from its source, until in the ballet it lost its last remnant of vital significance. The ballet was relegated to a kind of barren limbo of the imagination; it was the mise en scène of the fairy tale; none of the echoes of the real world ever disturbed its enchanted silence; no excitement, no passion, no humour, was permitted to relax the fixity of its unmeaning smile. It was supposed to be structurally incapable of supporting anything more weighty than merely gossamer fancies, eternal variations upon the themes of coquetry—invitation and refusal, pursuit and evasion. Such inconsequential argument as there was served only to introduce a series of independent dances which were quite unrelated to any central inward idea. The ballet’s complete sterility of idea was acquiesced in as a necessary condition of its existence. It was an artificial and somewhat withered paradise from which the river of life was carefully diverted. The work of the revolutionaries was to open the sluice-gates and let in the fertilising flood of vital emotion. The ineffectual rhythms of the dance were suddenly caught up into the masterful rhythms of life itself. What is revolutionary in the new ballet is the power to rouse and trouble the imagination. The innovators have extended the range of the ballet, a range as wide as that of the drama—one is tempted to say wider, for not only does it express a minute grace as choice as the grouping of the petals of a rose, but at times its huge leaping rhythms throb with an unconstrained and elemental violence, all too shattering for the formal mould of speech.
If the aim of the new movement is the strict subjection of the ballet to an artistic idea which shall express a high emotional impulse, the means by which it is attained is no less novel and characteristic. The ballet is a composite form of art, at once plastic, decorative and musical. Its success therefore depends upon an intimate collaboration between its composers, the choregraphic designer, the painter and the musician. An obviously necessary condition?—yes, but one which until the advent of the revolutionary ballet had been considerably neglected. Its neglect had resulted in the production of a mosaic of more or less artistic effects, jarring and warring among themselves. Too often the dance did not concur with the action. The steps were considered not as a means of expression, a language, but only as a brilliant exercise, without more signification than an acrobatic performance. Occasionally, as in the production of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, the musician and the ballet-master worked in accord, but more often independently. The scene-painter produced a finished and usually photographic picture without any thought of the placing of the performers in the scene. The costumier, again, was accorded his own sweet will, and added his private inharmonious notes to the general discord. The new composers worked on the principle that there was not one design of the dance, another of the music and a third of the décor, but one design, one rhythm, one dominating impulse of the whole. In their ballets, the lines, the colours and the movements together interpret the spirit and the action, mutually reinforcing one another and producing a cumulative effect of strength and beauty, which at once grips and delights us.
If one of the collaborators of the revolutionary ballet has impressed upon it his personality more strongly than another it is M. Leon Bakst. He belongs to the new romantic school of painting, though he himself prefers to call it the new classical school, which is in full revolt against the illusion that the realists have set up as the final aim of art. He is a member of the Salon d’Automme, a pioneer and leader of the art movement which seeks to apply the principles of “post-Impressionism” to the decoration of the stage. The importance, not to say the pre-eminence, of the place which he claims in the theatre for the decorator, is best stated in his own words. “I believe,” he says, “the time for the conventional producer to arrange the sunshine and shadow of the ‘scene’ has passed for ever. The peculiar form of ‘mental’ intelligence which has dominated the theatre for so many years is about to be replaced by the plastic intelligence, and the tone of the ensemble will be determined by the painter. The evolution of the
