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Reviewed by:
  • Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde by Juliet Bellow, and: The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris by Davinia Caddy (review)
  • Hanna Järvinen
Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde by Juliet Bellow. 2013. London: Ashgate, 280 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. $107.25 cloth.
The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris by Davinia Caddy. 2012. New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism 22. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 237 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. $99.00 cloth.

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[End Page 95]

Where Is the Dance?

From the outset, I have to admit I am partial to new scholarship on the Ballets Russes, particularly interdisciplinary scholarship that offers new perspectives on staged dance as an art form. Hence, two recent books on a company famous for striving for the total work of art effect sounded like an absolute feast. I may have set my expectations high, but these books actually exemplify how easily dance becomes secondary to music and set design in discussions of past performance, and how "interdisciplinary" studies often are anything but. In both books, the analyses offered of dance are, for a dance scholar, implausible, specious, even outright incomprehensible, and the dance-related topic emerges as servile to agendas of other disciplines, namely those of music and art history.

In five chapters set between a longish introduction and a much shorter conclusion, art historian Juliet Bellow offers analyses of works by the Ballets Russes that span the two decades of the company’s existence. The first chapter, "Modernism on Stage," focuses on the pre-war company; the second discusses Parade (1917) as cinema; and the third covers Sonia Delaunay’s 1918 designs for Cléopâtre (originally Egipetskii nochi, 1908). The topic of the fourth chapter is Matisse and Le Chant du rossignol (henceforth, Chant) of 1920, and the fifth is Giorgio de Chirico and Le Bal (1929). From the list of contents onward, it is evident that canonized stage decorators receive the lion’s share of the author’s attention, to the extent that she constantly forgets to mention sources for her claims on dance and choreography. The canonicity of the artists discussed emerges as a self-evident assumption, while much of Bellow’s source critical discussion is buried in the extensive endnotes. Despite her professed emphasis on the total work of art, dance is not merely secondary to Bellow’s argumentation: dance and choreography—the physical bodies dancing on stage—are almost entirely absent, nothing but an extension of the visual ideas of famous painters.

As with previous dance publications from Ashgate (Batson 2005), Bellow’s book suffers from scant editorial attention. The array of outright errors is remarkable: apparently, Gabriel Astruc, the French impresario of the Ballets Russes, was merely its "supporter" (Bellow 30–1); Marius Petipa "imported Western European dance technique to Russia" (35); and Fokine advocated "asymmetrical, unbalanced poses" (36). All of these examples are from Bellow’s first chapter, which follows a badly structured, confusing Introduction. These are not, as I first thought, simple typographical or terminological errors ("decrescendi" for diminuendos, 50); they reveal a lack of interest in dance scholarship and a preference for art historical interpretations of the Ballets Russes (including many unpublished dissertations) that becomes more pronounced in later chapters. Unfortunately, sets and costumes are not choreography.

Bellow’s chapter on Parade rests on the presumption that this work aimed at "images in a moving picture," "paper-thin dancing figures" (90). Her reading is conditioned by unstated authorism, which attributes choreographic ideas to Picasso (and Cocteau), rendering the few descriptions of movement (109–10) as echoes of Nijinsky’s work. In part, this is clearly due to Jeux (1913) [End Page 96] being the only Ballets Russes precedent for the Western, urban, popular culture setting of Parade—but setting, as noted, is not choreography. Although many of Bellow’s ideas—such as that of the human-machine hybrid (esp. 93) or, indeed, the work’s utilization of popular culture (94–8)—are intriguing as such, her argumentation suffers from lack of contextualization...

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