Two Exhibitions Show How Process Was as Important as Final Product for Les Ballets Russes

The concept of “total work of art” is most often associated with composer Richard Wagner and his legacy, but he was far from the only artist across disciplines who accomplished it. Les Ballets Russes, an itinerant ballet company established in Paris that was active between 1909 and 1929 also fits the label. Two exhibitions, “Crafting the Ballets Russes: The Robert Owen Lehman Collection” at the Morgan Library in New York (through September 22) and “Women Artists of the Ballets Russes: Designing the Legacy” at the McNay Arts Center in San Antonio (October 10-Jan 12), showcase the depth of Les Ballets Russes’s multidisciplinary artistry as it extended beyond stage and choreography.

The central figure in these stories is Sergei Diaghilev, a failed composer who decided to become an art collector and curator and was a co-founder of the journal Mir Iskusstva alongside visual artists Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst (set and costume designers in the Ballets Russes). Upon relocating to Paris, Diaghilev curated exhibitions of Russian art but soon pivoted to curating Russian music programming. In founding the Ballets Russes, he cemented his reputation as a brilliant and innovative producer—one who did not confine ballet to stereotypical “ballet music” and “ballet theme.” In the company’s two short decades, Diaghilev referenced Slavic paganism and Middle Ages (Firebird, The Golden Cockerel, Rite of Spring, Les Noces) Classical antiquity (The Afternoon of a Faun, Apollo) and eventually, Romanticism (La Valse, The Sleeping Princess).

A focus on materiality

Few artifacts of the actual performances and choreographies remain, though up through the 1970s, you could see the repertoire of Les Ballets Russes in live performances. Additionally, the sets of Firebird used by the American Ballet Theatre were Natalia Goncharova’s 1926 designs; Seattle’s Joffrey Ballet used Petrouchka’s original set designs by Antoine Benois. The Afternoon of a Faun and Parade had Picasso’s designs, and for Apollo, Balanchine used the sets designed by Georges Rouault. This changed in the 2000s, when artists’ estates increased royalties and Les Ballets Russes costumes and props were sold both for money and storage capacity. “The 2023 centenary of Les Noces went all but unnoticed, yet it was the single most important Diaghilev production of the 1920s,” wrote dance historian Lynn Garafola in the essay Diaghilev, Man of Music, part of the catalog of “Crafting The Ballets Russes.”

Most ballets do leave traces, and, in the case of the Ballets Russes, this translated into material collections that included sketches for set and costume designs, choreography notes, preliminary versions of scores and other ephemera, which are the primary focus of both exhibitions.

Seeing these materials firsthand shows us that a wealth of sources and locales were represented in the Ballets Russes, and there was no unified art style. The costume and poster art by Leon Bakst for Firebird makes use of Medieval flat surfaces coupled with ornate linework, offset by expressionistic, exaggerated poses. His set design for Scheherazade combines aestheticism and orientalism, while for costume designs for Daphnis et Chloe, he employed the juxtaposition of curves and geometry characteristic of the art on Grecian vases. Benois, by contrast, is more impressionistic, which is evident both in the sets and costumes for Petrouchka—the backdrop for the Shrovetide Fair, where the action takes place, is largely indistinguishable from a 19th-century tableau. Natalia Goncharova’s rendition of the City of Shemaka in The Golden Cockerel combines expressionistic geometry, medieval rigor and a somber color palette, whereas the curtain design for both The Golden Cockerel and Les Noces is an explosion of vivid colors and ornamental motifs of Russian folk art.

The role of women in the art of Les Ballets Russes

Both “Crafting the Ballets Russes” and “Women Artists of the Ballets Russes” rightfully place considerable emphasis on the contributions of women in the history of Les Ballets Russes and its offshoots. In terms of art, the most notable name that comes to mind is Goncharova, who, in 1914, was commissioned to design the sets for The Golden Cockerel. Known for her vibrant and floral designs, she combined elements of Russian folk art and contemporary painting, also designing the sets for Les Noces and subsequent productions of Firebird. Interestingly, the curtain design of Les Noces features the firebirds of folk legend escorting the wedding cortege.

Another notable artist who worked with the company is Sonia Delaunay who, along with her husband Robert, was invited to design costumes and sets for the Ballets Russes’ 1918 production of Cleopatra after a fire damaged the original 1909 sets and costumes designed by Léon Bakst. Unlike the fin-de-siècle lush orientalism displayed in Bakst’s work, Delaunay envisioned costumes with bright, bold colors and geometric designs—something she would retain in her later stage and fashion work.

In terms of contributions to dance, the most notable names are Bronislava Nijinska and Ida Rubinstein. The former joined the Ballets Russes in 1909 as a dancer with her brother Vaslav Nijinsky, the company’s most celebrated member whose roles including the faun in Afternoon of a Faun and Le Spectre de la Rose in the ballets of the same name have become some of the most used photographs in the history of ballet. Starting in the 1920s, Bronislava Nijinska choreographed and danced starring roles, and we can see how she engaged with the written page, as the Library of Congress preserved written drafts where she set her choreographies onto paper using a dance notation system that is not directly intelligible to those who have not studied it. “When the masterpieces of choreographic composition disappear with their creator, how to save everything that has been done in our time?” she wrote in a brochure for her School of Movement in 1924. Nijinska settled in the United States in the late 1930s and would be instrumental in training the first wave of American-born ballet dancers.

By contrast, Rubinstein, who first starred as a performer in Cleopatra (1909) and Scheherazade (1910), eventually parted ways with Diaghilev and, in 1928, poached several Ballets Russes veterans, including Benois and eventually Nijinska herself. “She represented the Ballets Russes chief competition and embodied new developments in the late 1920s that would come to define ballet for the rest of the 20th century,” wrote Robinson McClellan in the lead essay of the catalog of “Crafting Les Ballets Russes.” Together with Benois, Rubinstein would create Boléro, whose score she personally commissioned from Ravel.

The materials that undergird these two exhibitions aptly demonstrate that the phrase “greater than the sum of its parts” hardly applies to the Ballets Russes’ productions. The sets are treated with the same reverence as the choreography, and the costumes are on par with the score. It’s also worth noting that taken together, this isn’t just an art form for connoisseurs, as the influence of Les Ballets Russes also permeated pop culture. One of the pivotal scenes of the 1997 Don Bluth movie Anastasia takes place during a Ballets Russes performance; Walt Disney employed the score of Rite of Spring for its haunting, prehistoric-themed segment in Fantasia; Ari Aster’s Midsommar uses iconography that is reminiscent both of Les Noces and Rite of Spring; and Italian dancer Roberto Bolle made Apollo the embodiment of classicized male beauty in the 21st Century, while Rubinstein’s Boléro is a key plot device in the sexy comedy 10 starring Bo Derek.

Seeing the materials and ephemera in the two shows really drives home the point that even as the memory of a dance company’s performances fade, all that went into them lives on.