Revolution at the Ballet

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WHEN I THINK OF THE BALLETS RUSSES, I inevitably think of two minor, banal incidents that have nothing, and yet everything, to do with Serge Diaghilev's revolutionary vision.

In the first I am at a swanky bar near Lincoln Center, waiting to see New York City Ballet. Two well-heeled women are similarly passing time before curtain-up, and in-between flirting with the bartender, one blithely announces, "We're off to the ballet - to have our nap!"

In the second incident, an elderly dance critic gently chides me at the intermission (of another company's performance) for having complained of a restless, wandering mind. "That, my dear, is precisely why we go to the ballet."

We do not go to the ballet expecting fisticuffs, or even the stray boo. We do not go with the delightful shiver - half trepidation and half hope - which signals that our ideas about ourselves and our culture might be complicated or challenged, that we may be made to feel terribly uncomfortable or thrillingly alive (leave that to those weirdo modern dancers). We do not, apparently, even expect to remain conscious.

Is it any wonder we have utterly romanticized - at times beyond recognition - the Ballets Russes, who one hundred years ago in Paris, on May 18th, tore triumphantly onto the international stage?

Those in the theater (reportedly, all of Paris) knew they were history's audience. Today, history has become legend. Whether it is Vaslav Nijinsky's dazzling ascent to glory, and horrifying descent into madness (has any artist ever been so immortalized on such scant evidence?). Or that 1913 Parisian riot over Nijinsky and Stravinsky's iconic collaboration, The Rite of Spring (whose choreography now exists only through reconstruction and guesswork). Or the mere list of names (Picasso, Bakst, Fokine, Massine, Nijinska, Debussy, Ravel, Cocteau)... we lap it up, wide-eyed. No napping.

Yet, for all our fascination, it can be hard, as those two anecdotes demonstrate, to discern the Ballets Russes' intellectual legacy of vibrant artistic collaboration and contemporary pertinence in today's grand, sleepy theaters. (Though some, like Christopher Wheeldon, and William Forsythe before him, are trying hard to resurrect it.) A climate in which ballet is the repository for new ideas rather than a cloistered annex of tradition seems as foreign, as exotic, as any of the famed Ballets Russes intrigues and dramas.

When my restless, wandering mind turns longingly to visions of popular uprisings, this is what I'm really longing for: a ballet culture in which the ideas of the day are being contested even before they are fully hammered out. The higher the stakes, the louder the riot.

This, for me, is what makes the Ballets Russes so singular. European culture was undergoing a time of volatile transformations, and the ballet was rumbling right along with it. There is nothing pretty or pink or smiling about the savage gender relations and ruthless social forces in Nijinska's Les Noces, which starkly, abstractly depicts peasant wedding rituals. In her dances we see the classical infused with - and thus renewed by - modernism. We see the Russian revolution and civil war. We see a choreographic mind tussling with all of these things (just as we hear Stravinsky's musical mind tussling), in some places following her brother, and in others going much further.

Fokine and Stravinsky's Firebird, which proved too bizarre for Pavlova, who refused the title role, is a ballet about freedom. This is not simply fairytale, but a mission statement from a choreographer who, four years later, in 1914, wrote a letter to the London Times demanding that "the new ballet" follow its own dictates, yet allow "perfect freedom both to the scenic artist and the musician."

Today, performances of Ballets Russes works tend to be lavish, festive affairs in which a grand show is put on for all to ooh-and-ahh over. Diaghilev, ever the showman, would no doubt appreciate this, and so should we. But one suspects he might also appreciate a Ballets Russes celebration in which the involved artists honor what is now canonized history by tossing all of its most cherished values and sensibilities into the alleyway, in favor of a new ballet for the early 21st Century. I'd like to see those ladies at the bar taking a nap through that.

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