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  • Failed Impressions: Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in America, 1916
  • Hanna Järvinen (bio)

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[End Page 76]

In 1916 the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) took the Ballets Russes out of war-torn Europe for a tour across the North American continent.1 The tour was scheduled to run from January to April 1916, with short seasons in New York at the beginning and the end. As it turned out, the company returned for a second tour that ran from late September to January 1917, during which time, however, Diaghilev’s former lover and principal star dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950), replaced him as director.

In this article I discuss the cultural differences at the heart of the Ballets Russes’ failure to conquer America in 1916–1917, and why that failure had to be edited out of history.2 Specifically, I look at three aspects of the publicity and critical reception: elitism, patriotism, and modernism. The publicists of the company both misunderstood and underestimated their audience, but in dance research, their prejudices have been taken for granted. The “eye-witness accounts” of Diaghilev’s employees and the histories of the company written in the first half of the twentieth century have largely gone unquestioned since, but contemporary primary sources of the North American tours tell a different story. By contrasting the first tour with the second, which received less publicity and better reviews, I emphasize the practical experience of touring in the New World and how differently American critics evaluated the achievements of the two Russian directors of the company—Diaghilev (for the first tour) and Nijinsky (for the second).

The reviews of 1916–1917 offer surprisingly acute insights into the fortunes of a dance company ravaged by the effects of the war if not by the war itself: after nearly a year’s interval in performances, the Ballets Russes was not up to its prewar standard, and the company lacked many of the star performers audiences expected to see. More importantly, reviews reveal how, in the American context, the Ballets Russes did not appear as vanguard as it did in Europe. As a conclusion, I ask what were the repercussions of the American fortunes of the Ballets Russes to the history of dance, the consequences of what we remember for how we remember. [End Page 77]

To do this, I make a distinction between hegemonic and canonical dance history. The term “hegemonic” derives from Michel Foucault’s view that historiography is use of power over how we collectively remember the past. Hegemonic dance history is the dominant form of narrating the past that actively suppresses or silences alternative forms of the discourse. “Canonical,” by contrast, refers to the process of constant re-evaluation and reinterpretation of certain individuals and works of art as particularly relevant to today’s aesthetic preferences.

The influence of the hegemonic interpretation of the 1916 tours has had substantial effect on the canonical history taught to dance students and dance aficionados, which, in turn, is repeated in program leaflets and CD covers as well as academic research. Rather than correct factual mistakes in the hegemonic account or attempt a canonization of works dismissed as being of little importance in the canonical account, I argue we should move toward a genealogy of dance, a metahistorical approach that forces us to be aware and take responsibility of the narratives about the past that we repeat and reproduce in our own work.

Coming to America

In the annals of ballet, the American fortunes of the Ballets Russes have been subject to some controversy. In terms of repertories of dance companies, the narrative spectacles of the Ballets Russes are not often performed—yet many of them are canonized as crucial masterpieces and the company presented as a major turning point for the art form in histories of dance. Over the past century, which works have been given importance and on what grounds has changed to emphasize abstract compositional qualities of the works and the role of the choreographer. In contemporary records these are rarely in focus— rather, critics discuss (star) dancers, visual and auditory qualities of the performances, and the social importance...

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