Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant–Garde by Juliet Bellow (review)

True to their artistic goal of forging an alliance between dance and the other arts, the Ballets Russes worked in close collaboration with some of the foremost painters and musicians of the time. Yet surprisingly, perhaps, the rich intermedial exchanges between painting, music, and choreography on the Ballets Russes stage have received little critical attention until now. This blatant gap is filled by Juliet Bellow’s masterful study of the interactions between sets, costumes, performance, and musical accompaniment in four exemplary ballets designed by Picasso, Sonia Delaunay Matisse, and De Chirico. An introductory chapter maps out the evolution of choreographic style from the ‘oriental’ Schéhérazade (1910) to the modernist Le Sacre duprintemps (1913), and examines the changing discourses in the reception of Ballets Russes productions. While Fokine’s seemingly improvisational and instinctive dance language was hailed as a liberation of the body from the ills of civilization, the convulsive choreographies introduced when Nijinski took over as the troupe’s lead choreographer not only generated controversy but challenged the racialized vision of Ballets Russes dance as a type of unmediated, ‘primitive’ art form. Chapter 2 looks at the complex ways in which Picasso referenced film in his set designs for Parade (1917) as a means of exploring new modes of spectatorship and experimenting with corporeality in space. Chapter 3 examines the crossover between ‘high’ and decorative art in Sonia Delaunay’s costume designs for Cl éopâtre (1918), paying particular attention to the articulation of female agency in her garment for the title character. In Chapter 4, Bellow offers a fascinating reading of the shifting definitions of the ‘oriental’ and the ‘decorative’ with regard to modernism in Matisse’s designs for Le Chant du rossignol (1920). Finally, Chapter 5 examines De Chirico’s disjunctive approach to classicism in the costumes and sets for Le Bal (1929) as an attack on the total artwork’s promise of a harmonious union between different art forms. Through these case studies, the author explores wider questions of the modernist body, changing modes of spectatorship in the first decades of the twentieth century, the relationship between technology, performance, and the natural world, the tensions between elite art and popular culture, and, not least, the inherent conflict between the totalizing gesture of the nineteenth–century Gesamtkunstwerk, which the Ballets Russes consciously embraced, and modernism’s insistence on the autonomy of the arts. Elegantly written and sumptuously illustrated, this wonderful book offers a fascinating journey through the rich intersections between music, painting, the decorative arts, and performance on the Ballets Russes stage. What is at stake here is no less than a rethinking of the concept of modernism from an intermedial perspective. Modernism on Stage is a tour de force not to be missed by anyone interested in the Ballets Russes and the Parisian avant–garde.