THE Russian ballets are based upon an endless variety of themes, but the dancing may be said to draw its inspiration from three sources. First and foremost, of course, is the traditional method of the old Italian masters. This is the mother tongue of the ballet, which is spoken from Copenhagen to Moscow, with only the least perceptible trace of local accent. But this common language the Russians have refined to a purity unknown elsewhere; from being the vehicle of the stiff rhetoric of the conventional ballet, they have transformed it into a flexible speech, in which they have been able to utter such gem-like poems as Le Spectre de la Rose, Le Carnaval and Les Sylphides. Next, they have gone for inspiration to their own national dances. They have refreshed the stage with the bracing air of the steppes. In the Polovtsian dances of Prince Igor they have given to an art that was nurtured in courts and has always moved with courtly grace, the tigerish motions of a full-blooded barbaric life. Finally they have enlarged the scope of the ballet by making use of the classical and Oriental dance. And for the sources of the classical dance they have gone not only to Greece but to Egypt. The theme of Cléopâtre is really the Egyptian attitude, just as the theme of Scheherazade is the Eastern attitude.
The Diaghilew ballet has an extensive repertory, wide enough to display to the full the genius of the composers and the talents of the dancers. Naturally, during the six seasons in which it has appeared in Paris, its large variety has been better exhibited there than in London. The principal pieces which have been given at Covent Garden are Le Pavillon d’Armide, Le Carnaval, Prince Igor, Les Sylphides, Le Spectre de la Rose, Cléopâtre, Scheherazade.
Le Pavillon d’Armide is a link with the old conventional ballet. The fable is full of unreason. The pavilion is a spacious apartment in an old French château, deriving its name from the personage who forms the subject of a piece of Gobelin tapestry on the wall. To this castle comes one night a storm-belated traveller. He is hospitably entertained by the wicked marquis, the owner of the castle, who is an amateur magician of considerable attainments. After admiring the pictured figure of Armide, he falls asleep. As he sleeps the figures on the tapestry come to life, and he is transported in dream to the Court of Armide, where her captive knights dance in a chain of roses. He conceives a grand passion for the princess, and the king, whom he does not recognise to be the wizard marquis, blesses their union. The magic Court vanishes and the traveller wakes to find himself still in the bare, dawn-lit chamber. When the marquis enters to ask how he has slept he recognises with horror that he is none other than the king in the dream. And yet it was not wholly a dream, for at the same time he finds the actual golden scarf which Armide had given to him in plighting her troth. He knows himself to have been the victim of a fatal enchantment, and thereupon somewhat irrelevantly dies.
M. Fokine has made of this irrational fable the framework of a number of dances which display the perfect unity and discipline of the dancers. But Nijinsky, as the servant of the traveller, and Karsavina, as Armide, are scarcely given adequate scope for their originality and faculty of interpretation. The thing is good of its kind—it is the perfection of the traditional ballet d’action—but it has been done before. The most satisfying feature of the performance is a dance of seven buffoons, of whom the premier buffoon is M. Rosai. Incidentally they execute several steps which technically are among the most difficult in the dancer’s repertory. But the chief merit of their display is its grotesque wit, the mimicry of the half-human antics of marionettes, executed with a faultless rhythmical precision.
The decoration was devised by M. Benois and, at all events
WASLAW NIJINSKY
IN Le Pavillon d’Armide
Photograph: Gerschel