Fashion Major Project Idea

After research about some idea, finally I choose my first idea, Ballet Russes. I came out of this idea after I did a consultation with my teacher and they gave me a sugestion to choose this idea. I agree to take this idea because I think this is the most suitable topic for me, if I want to experiment with beading and handstitch for the fabric manipulation.

At the begining I confused because the topic about Ballet Russes is a big topic, luckily my teacher give a direction about it. The direction from my teacher make me decided to choose a "Golden Age of Ballet Russes (1909-1929). Here my research about my idea.

Ballet Russes History (1909- 1929)

In Russia's Imperial theaters and ballet school, the traditions of ballet, rooted in the court dances of Louis XIV's reign and Italian pantomime were not only preserved but also nurtured and developed further. With extensive financial support from the Tsar's coffers, few corners were cut in the training of dancers, the hiring of choreographic and performing talent, and the staging of productions. It was in St. Petersburg that all of Diaghilev's great choreographers and many of his star and corps de ballet dancers were trained. Fokin, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinska, and Balanchine were all the products of the Imperial Ballet School, and began their dance careers at the Mariinsky theater, as did Karsavina, Pavlova, Danilova, Lopokova and countless others.

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The first Ballets Russes actually premiered in Russia and had nothing at all to do with Diaghilev. Pavillon d'Armide was the brainchild of the artist, critic and historian Alexandre Benois, an avid balletomane whose grandfather had built the Mariinsky Theater. Benois wrote the libretto of the ballet in 1903 and Nikolai Tcherepnin composed the music to suit the plot, in close consultation with Benois. The ballet was bought by the

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Mariinsky, but left onstage until Mikhail Fokin, a brilliant young choreographer and ballet master there came across it, staging a segment of it as a graduation performance for the students of the Imperial Ballet School. The success of this performance led to renewed interest in the ballet for the Mariinsky's main stage, and in 1907 Fokin and Benois staged

[endif]--the ballet together, with sets and costumes designed by Alexandre. A scholar of not only art but dance history, Benois worked throughout with Fokin on the stage direction and even choreography of the piece, especially the numbers involving large groups of dancers. Benois' great friend, Diaghilev was present at the opening and was conquered by the performance, finally agreeing with Benois' advice that he should bring not only opera but also ballet productions to Paris. Le Pavillon d'Armide demonstrated both Fokin's innovative approach to choreography, and Benois' ideas about collaborative creation in the theater, where he felt directors, designers, composers and performers should work together as one, to achieve aesthetic unity. All this would become the foundation of the Ballets Russes as a company, and would ensure its Parisian success.We can separate the twenty-year existence of the Ballets Russes.

On 19 May 1909, after weeks of publicity, Diaghilev launched his first season of Russian ballet in Paris. Audiences were dazzled by the dancing and striking designs. Over the next few seasons a self-consciously Russian element dominated the productions. Innovative music magnified their impact, in particular that of Igor Stravinsky. The company's principal choreographer was the Russian dancer Mikhail Fokine.

Visually, the first Ballets Russes seasons were marked by the exotic designs of the Russian-born artist Léon Bakst. His jeweled colors, swirling Art Nouveau elements and sense of the erotic re-envisioned dance productions as total works of art.

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Nijinsky's first choreographic effort, Prelude a l'apresmidi d'un Faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun) was the most controversial performance of the Ballet Russe in 1912, signaling the beginning of a shift towards modernism. In the ballet, Nijinsky completely fulfilled Diaghilev's expectations of a revolutionary and provocative dance.

On 1916 Nijinsky danced in the Ballets' North American tour and created one last ballet, Till Eulenspiegel. Although his work as a choreographer was brief, it was significant; in Prelude a l'apresmidi d'un Faune, Le Sacre du Printemps and Jeux, Nijinsky, even further than Fokin from the traditional vocabulary of movement, progressing more in the direction of modern

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dance than in the continuation of ballet tradition resumed by his successor, Leonid Massine.

1915- 1921

After both the Choreographer Fokin and Nijinsky left, Massine led the company from 1915 to 1921. His innovative choreographic works of the period were Le Soleil de Nuit, La Boutique Fantastique, and Le Tricorne. From 1932 to 1937 he was the chief choreographer of the Colonel de Basil Ballets Russes, a successor company, before leaving with a group of discontented dancers to start his own troupe, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In the de Basil Ballets, Massine had shared the spotlight with two former colleagues, Bronislava Nijinska and George Balanchine. A brilliant dancer herself, though not so beloved as her elder brother, Nijinska had worked for Diaghilev for over a decade when she finally got her chance to be a Choreographer in 1923.

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Among the pieces she created at the Ballets Russes were Les Noces, Le Train Bleu, and Les Biches. Balanchine was her successor and the company's last major choreographer. After a knee injury effectively ended his performing career in 1926, he concentrated his energies on choreography and by Diaghilev's death in 1929 had created nine ballets, including La Chatte, Apollon Musagete, Le Fils Prodigue and Le Bal. Many of these starred Diaghilev's latest lover, Serge Lifar, who might well have become the next balletmeister if Diaghilev had not died soon after Lifar's first efforts in choreography. Altogether, the choreographers and dancers of the Ballets Russes overturned many of the static conventions of classical Ballet, and ushered in the era of modern dance while preserving a sense of tradition and the heritage of the Russian ballet school.

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While the dances performed by the Ballets Russes appeared revolutionary, they drew on existing traditions of the ballet production. As the driving force of the company, Diaghilev gathered a wide range of composers, choreographers, designers, and performers, but maintained ultimate control over every aspect of the productions. His greatest achievement was to ensure the close integration of story, music, choreography, and design, creating spectacles where the overall impact surpassed the parts. From the start, Diaghilev's ambition was to generate entirely new ballets rather than repeat others' successes. Typically, each Ballets Russes season might include two or three new productions and their creation, often protracted, took up a large proportion of his time and energy.

The war years

The First World War (1914 – 18) nearly destroyed the Ballets Russes. During the years of devastating warfare, Diaghilev was isolated from his main European venues. In 1914 Diaghilev and Stravinsky were successful citizens of imperial Russia. By 1918 they were stateless exiles from a Bolshevik Russia wracked by civil war.

When war broke out, the Ballets Russes had completed five successful years and were just dispersing for their summer vacation. The company did not reform until May 1915, when Diaghilev rebuilt it for the first North American tour.

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The productions of 1915 – 1919 were both the most conservative and most experimental. The Ballets Russes toured popular works to new audiences in North and South America. Yet there were long periods in Europe without performing, in which the company could workshop original ideas. Léonide Massine emerged as a talented new choreographer, drawing on influences from the countries of his travels, notably Italy and Spain.

By 1920 the Ballets Russes had a considerable repertoire to which new ballets were added each year. French avant-garde artists such as Matisse, Derain, and Braque designed productions, while the choreographers Massine, Nijinska, and Balanchine approached movement in innovative ways. Diaghilev and his company had to adjust to very different economic circumstances.

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Why Diaghilev become famous?

The Ballets Russes made its first appearance in Paris in the 1909 Saison Russe, a sensational season of dance organized by Diaghilev, a Russian-born impresario. The ballet integrated traditional dance narratives with modern design, folk art, contemporary music and new approaches to choreography. Raising every aspect of performance—dancing, choreography, music, stage and costume design and publicity—to an equal level of inventiveness and excellence, Diaghilev unleashed a torrent of creative activity on European theatre, placing the formerly moribund art of ballet into the Modernist framework of early 20th century design and culture.

He harnessed the new and powerful expressiveness of Post-Impressionism and the visionary elements of Cubism linking them to new forms of music built around atonalism and primitive rhythms. Russian designers Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois provided the sumptuous and exotic spectacle of the first performances while other artists of the emerging Russian and European avant-garde joined Diaghilev—among them, Michel Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Giorgio de Chirico, André Derain, Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Pavel Tchelitchev.

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After I do a research about a Ballet Russes, I quite understand about what happen during that time. Even though I done a little research about it, but I still need more information about it. So I decided to do more research about it, such as the impact of the ballet russes, who is involved in this group.

Here some people that attract my attention:

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born in the resort town of Oranienbaum, Russia, on June 17, 1882. His father, a bass singer named Fyodor, and his mother, Anna, a talented pianist, raised him in St. Petersburg.

Not wanting Stravinsky to follow in their footsteps, his parents persuaded him to study law after he graduated from secondary school. However, after enrolling at the University of Saint Petersburg, Stravinsky became friendly with a classmate named Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, whose father, Nikolai, was a celebrated composer. Stravinksy soon became Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's pupil, as he was granted the freedom to pursue his artistic career upon the death of his father in 1902.

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In 1906, Stravinsky married Catherine Nossenko, with whom he would have four children. In 1909, the founder of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev, invited Stravinsky to orchestrate a couple of Chopin works for his ballet Les Sylphides. That, in turn, led to the commission of The Firebird; collaboration with choreographer Michel Fokine, the ballet turned Stravinsky into a household name upon its premiere in Paris in June 1910. The composer's fame was reinforced with the production of Petrouchka in 1911 and especially with The Rite of Spring, which incited a riot upon its 1913 premiere but was soon hailed for its revolutionary score.

The outbreak of World War I forced Stravinsky to flee Russia with his family and settle in Switzerland. He dealt with his homesickness by using Russian folklore as inspiration for his work, while other compositions from this time exhibited a jazz influence. Two of his best-known works from his Swiss period are Renard, composed between 1915 and 1916, and Les Noces, which he started in 1914 but didn't complete until 1923

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In 1920 Stravinsky moved his family to France, where they lived for the next two decades. During that time, his notable works included a comic opera, Mavra (1922), an opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) and the "white" ballet Apollon Musagète (1928). He continued his prolific output into the 1930s, composing such works as Symphony of Psalms, Persephone, Jeu de Cartes and Concerto in E-flat.

Following the deaths of his wife and a daughter from tuberculosis, Stravinsky moved to the United States in 1939. He delivered a series of lectures at Harvard University, and in 1940 he married artist and designer Vera de Bossett. That year, Stravinsky also finished one of his most important works, Symphony in C.

Stravinsky was nearly arrested for his rearrangement of the national anthem during a performance in Boston in 1944, but otherwise he found a welcome reception in his new country. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945 after settling in Los Angeles, and went on to enjoy more successes with such operas as The Rake's Progress (1951) and Agon (1957).

After a period of decline in his health, Stravinsky died at his Manhattan apartment on April 6, 1971. While not shocking, his death saddened those who recalled his immense gifts and influence in his field. Said New York Philharmonic musical director Pierre Boulez: "Something radically new, even foreign to Western tradition, had to be found for music to survive, and to enter our contemporary era. The glory of Stravinsky was to have belonged to this extremely gifted generation and to be one of the most creative of them all."

Legacy

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2. Giorgio Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico born in Volo, Greece, 10 July 1888 and died in Rome 1978. He studied art in Athens and then Florence before moving to Germany in 1906, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Returning to Italy in 1909 he painted enigmatic works, with empty spaces, shadows and strange perspectives. From 1914 he began to use tailors’ dummies—painted, with plaster heads and rubber gloves—which foreshadowed much of his Surrealist imagery.

Conscripted into the Italian armed forces in 1915, de Chirico suffered a mental breakdown after being assigned to the military hospital in Ferrara. Here he met Futurist painter Carlo Carrà and together they founded the Scuola Metafisica. Following the group’s break-up around 1920, de Chirico began to take a serious interest in the Italian classical painting tradition. By 1925 he had moved to France and become part of the arisian Surrealist movement.

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De Chirico designed for many ballets during his career. He provided designs for the Ballets Suédois’s La Jarre (The jar) in 1924, before designing costumes and sets for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes 1929 production of Le Bal. Between the end of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the redevelopment of the company under de Basil, de Chirico worked for the Paris Opera. De Basil commissioned him to provide costumes for Pulcinella (1931) and Protée (Proteus) (1938). Following his involvement with the Ballets Russes, de Chirico designed for productions by Italian ballet companies, including La Légende de Joseph (The story of Joseph) for La Scala in Milan in 1951, and for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino festival.

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Giorgio de Chirico, had worked in theatre design since 1924, his commission from Diaghilev for Le Bal gave him his most public success. As a version of the popular theme of the masked ball, the story’s dreamlike quality explored the nature of duplicity, ambiguity and deception. De Chirico drew upon his interest in desolate, unpeopled built spaces for his design of the ballroom, an austere room with exaggerated cornices, strangely proportioned openings and scattered with fragments of classical architecture. This theme is echoed in the guests’ costumes, rendering each performer a moveable element of an architectural ensemble.

Jackets and trousers became pilasters and columns, shirts and dresses roughly sketched examples of the classical orders. Their complexity and weight was further laden with stuccoed wigs for the dancers, adding to an air of ossified antiquity even though Balanchine’s choreography was light and acrobatic. While the radicalism of rational modernism was taking hold in the late 1920s in Europe, de Chirico’s work for Le Bal is a vivid example of the Italian Novecento design movement that returned classicism to mainstream taste during the 1920s. It also echoed Diaghilev’s lifelong admiration for Italian history, and gained particular poignancy as his last production before his death in Venice one month after the closure of the ballet’s London season.

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3. Alexandre Benois

Alexandre Benois is an important contributor to Russian art, the painter, art historian and stage designer Alexander Benois was one of two Russian artists - the other being Leon Bakst (1866-1924)

He was an artist in the full sense of the word. He lived, breathed, wrote, created, and celebrated art, both on and off of the ballet stage. As an artist, Benois was not as prolific as a painter for the sake of painting or creating, but rather as a method of ballet set and stage design. He began his career at the Mariinsky Theatre as a scenic designer, and quickly expanded his role to be at the forefront of ballet set and costume design.

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His most famous production was Petrushka, in 1911, which combined elements of Rococo with Russian folk art. As a result, he is seen as a seminal influence on ballet design both in scenery and costume, in many cities in Europe and America. He was also a highly talented exponent of watercolour painting as well as a master of illustration. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Benois served as curator of paintings at the prestigious Hermitage Gallery in St Petersburg. In 1926 he left Russia and settled in Paris. A keen writer and art critic, he co-founded the World of Art (Mir iskusstva) movement and journal, and later wrote several noteworthy art books, including: The Russian School of Painting (1916) and Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet (1941).

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Benois was a founding member of the “World of Art” group, a collection of the artists and art critics of the day, and contributed to the group’s expositions and magazine on a regular basis. As such, Benois was much more than a painter. He was also an art director, ballet librettist, museum curator, art critic, historian, and preservationist. It is perhaps in this vein that he was able to acquire Leonardo da Vinci’s “Madonna,” which he donated to the Hermitage Museum. This painting was later referred to as “Madonna Benois.”

Biography

Born Alexandre Nikolayevich Benois in St Petersburg, the son of Nikolai Benois, architect to the Imperial Palaces in Peterhof and a member of the Russian Academy of Arts, he began sketching and drawing while still a child. He remained devoted to art all his life, although an artistic career was not initially possible. So although, at the age of 17 he attended a part-time course in stage design at the Russian Academy (1887), he went on to study law at the University of St Petersburg (1890-4). It was during his time as a student - a period dominated by the Naturalism of the Russian Wanderers movement (peredvizhniki), the optical aesthetics of French Impressionism, and the fin de siecle decorative art of Les Nabis - that he formed an informal study group with several of his friends - including Bakst, Diaghilev (1872-1929), and Konstantin Somov (1869–1939), for the purpose of studying new styles of modern art. In late 1896, Benois visited Paris for the first time and fell in love with its history and beauty. It was here that he painted his famous "Versailles series" which depicted the beautiful parks, ornamental gardens and walks of the "sun king" Louis XIV: see, for instance, The Kings Walk (1896, Russian Museum, St Petersburg) and Versailles by the Statue of Curtius (1896, Private Collection).

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Ballet Russes

Once settled in Paris, Benois became very active and influential as a stage designer within the Ecole de Paris, creating costumes and sets and costumes for Le Pavillon d'Armide (1907) and other productions before being recruited by Diaghilev to design decor and costumes for his Ballets Russes. He is remembered in particular for his work on Les Sylphides (1909), Giselle (1910), Petrushka (1911) and Le Rossignol (1914). Although Benois worked mainly for the Ballets Russes, he also collaborated with the Moscow Art Theatre and other venues, and created designs for private clients.

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To escape the violence of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Benois devoted his time to the study of art in periods of Russian history. He also became a specialist on ancien-regime French art. In his writings, he stressed individualism and artistic personality, and wanted to combine Western European trends in art with Russian Folk art. Many of his paintings are illustrations of scenic decorations and set designs for ballets, and as such are not as technically accurate as they are emotionally charged and colorful. Many of his works evince a dreamlike quality, in which the viewer can mentally envision setting foot on stage. Benois produced over 100 writings on topics ranging from art history to his Memoirs, and worked on over 200 ballet productions world wide. He is now considered one of the creators of modern ballet.

Benois spent the rest of his life in Paris, where he continued to paint and design for the theatre, and also worked at La Scala Opera House in Milan. His later stage commissions featured designs for La Valse (1929, Ida Rubinstein Company), The Nutcracker (1940, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), and Graduation Ball (1957, London Festival Ballet). In 1955 Benois published two volumes of memoirs. He died on 9 February 1960, at the grand old age of 90.

Ballet Russes Le Bal

“Le Bal” tells the story of a man who falls in love with a masked woman at a masquerade ball. When she takes off her mask, he discovers that she is not beautiful, but old and ugly. He flees before she takes off a second mask, revealing her beauty and youth.

“In a work like Le Bal, there was an interest on the part of the visual artist [and] the choreographer — on the different ideas of masks. I see that as a kind of mystery aligned with the Surrealists,” Garafola said.

Surrealists like Man Ray and Salvador Dali were fascinated by the subconscious and how it translated into art. Influenced by the Freudian concepts of free association and the study of dreams, the Surrealists wanted to expose the uninhibited mind.

With “Le Bal,” de Chirico’s sets feature classical columns in decay and bits of the outside world indoors. The costumes are stiff; they made the dancers appear as if they were partially made out of stone or brick.

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Source :

http://www.ballets-russes.com/vis_art.html

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/diaghilev-and-the-ballets-russes

http://www.ballets-russes.com/dance.html

https://www.biography.com/people/igor-fyodorovich-stravinsky-9497118

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Igor-Stravinsky

https://www.loc.gov/collections/ballets-russes-de-serge-diaghilev/articles-and-essays/timeline-of-ballets-russes/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giorgio-de-Chirico

https://www.moma.org/artists/1106

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/giorgio-de-chirico-902

https://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/BalletsRusses/default.cfm?MnuID=4&GALID=16239&viewID=3

https://www.wikiart.org/en/alexandre-benois