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70 7 An Introduction to the Ballets Suedois The year 1920, in which the Ballets Suedois made its debut in Paris, was not a good year for Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. His tours were not successful, and his financial situation was complicated by theft and lawsuits. The following year, Diaghilev's choreographer and lead dancer, Uonide Massine, quit the company precipitously because he wanted more independence. Chout (Le Bouffon), the impresario's newest modernist ballet, with choreography hastily conceived by the painter Mikhail Larionov, was badly received in Paris. It seemed as though Diaghilev's influence was losing ground. He began a strategy of retrenchment, for example producing (in 1921 in London) a lavish revival of The Sleeping Princess, the Russian Imperial Theater's greatest classic ballet. That production was a commercial failure that nearly brought about Diaghilev's bankruptcy . It was several years before the company would recover from the problems it faced in the first two years of the decade.l Another impresario and another avant-garde ballet company had arrived in Paris in 1920. This company had been instituted directly as a result of the prodigious impact the Ballets Russes had made on the European stage. Rolf de Mare and his Ballets Suedois would, for the next five years, produce modern theater works incorporating dance, mime, painting, and music that would rival anything Diaghilev had created in terms oftheir avant-garde aspirations. It was perhaps partly due to Diaghilev's reaction to the success ofthe Ballets Suedois that the Ballets Russes began to turn away from Russian painters and composers and instead employ the newest French artists as collaborators. Both de Mare and his choreographer and lead dancer, Jean Borlin, were influenced profoundly by the Ballets Russes. De Mare, a wealthy Swedish landowner who had studied agriculture and managed his own estates, was also an amateur ethnographer who collected folk art and lore not only in Sweden butalso in other parts ofEurope and in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. When Mikhail and Vera Fokine left Diaghilev and came to northern Europe to perform and teach, they became friendly with de Mare Ballet Review 7/2 & 3 (1978-79). Ballets Suedois and often stayed at his estate at Hildesborg in southern Sweden. It was there that they spoke offorming a new ballet company, which would present the folk art of Sweden as translated into theater by modern artists, just as Diaghilev had brought Russian culture onto the stages of Europe with his ballets beginning in 1909.2 Fokine and de Mare agreed that Jean BorIin, a young Swedish dancer who had left the company of the Stockholm Royal Opera to study with Fokine in Copenhagen, should be engaged as the "animator" of the new troupe. BorIin was born in 1893, the son ofa sea captain, in Haernoesand in northern Sweden. Raised by an aunt and uncle, he was encouraged to follow his rhythmic inclinations and given piano lessons at an early age. At nine he was sent to Stockholm to study ballet with Gunhild Rosen at the ballet school attached to the Royal Theater. There he learned both the Danish Bournonville technique and the virtuosic Italian academic method. In 1905 BorIin joined the corps de ballet at the Opera, and five years later he was promoted to deuxieme sujet. In 1913, the year Bodin was further promoted one rank to second dancer, Mikhail Fokine arrived with his wife to stage several ballets at the Royal Theater.3 Fokine had recently left Diaghilev's company, angry that Vaslav Nijinsky had been appointed second choreographer. From the Russian choreographer, BorIin learned parts in several of Fokine's ballets, including Cleopdtre, Scheherazade, and Le Dieu Bleu. Borlin danced the role ofa faun in Cleopdtre, and years later Fokine remembered his impressions of the young man: He skimmed the stage with immense jumps, dropped with all his weight, and glided overthe floor, among the groups ofbacchantes. What a nature! What ecstasy! The fanatical sacrifice ofa bruised body in order to create the maximum choreographic expression. It was a revelation for me.... These Scandinavians.... A northern people, cold and stony. Where did this fervor come from? From where did this ardent flame burst forth?4 The mixed strains of dance traditions in the Opera school- the Bournonville technique, which preserved the mid-nineteenth-century French romantic ballet idiom, and the Italian school, which stressed technical virtuosity above all- had produced in Sweden an academic, gymnastic style. It was a similar academic rigidity...

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