september-2010

scandal. May 29, 1912: Nijinksy simulates sex with a ribbon on
the opening night of Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune; May
29, 1913: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring provokes a riot; May 11,
1917: a red fl ag is unfurled during a performance, terrifying a
French audience already alarmed by news from Russia of the
February Revolution; May 18, 1917: Parade (set and costumes by
Picasso, scenario by Cocteau, music by Eric Satie) introduced
Cubism to ballet with a cacophony of strange costumes and
a score that featured typewriters, gunshots and sirens.
Later works such as 1923’s Les Noces and 1928’s Apollon
Musagète were the company’s masterpieces – but they are
not what the Ballet Russes is remembered for.
Diaghilev had made his name exhibiting art in Russia (he
was one of the fi rst to show the French Impressionists), but
his fi rst love was music and in 1908 he was
Above: front cloth
for Le Train bleu,
after Picasso.
Opposite, from top:
costume for Parade
by Picasso; costume
after Benois for
Les Sylphides; The
Firebird
Ci-dessus : rideau
pour Le Train bleu,
d’après Picasso. À
droite : costumes
pour Parade de
Picasso, pour Les
Sylphides d’après
Benois et pour
L’Oiseau de feu
102 METROPOLITAN
asked to stage an opera in Paris. In those
days opera often featured dancing in the
interlude. Ballet was the lesser sibling, “a
frivolous excuse for showing pretty girls
and dresses”, as one critic put it, but
Diaghilev sensed its potential. “The artists
he worked with, Alexandre Benois and Leon
Bakst, were interested in the ballet, and
through them he saw that ballet was as
ready for reform as opera had been before
Wagner,” says Pritchard. “He saw he could
make a mark.”
But to do this he needed a star, and he
found one in Nijinsky. “Nijinksy had real
virtuosity. There was a lightness to his leaps
that made him look as if he could hover in the air,” says
Pritchard. “Male dancing had gone out of fashion and people
hadn’t seen this for a long time. He also had a very
charismatic stage presence and could be very different in
each role.”
Nijinksy was under contract with Russia’s Imperial Ballet.
It has never been established whether Diaghilev, who was
having an affair with the dancer, was responsible for what
happened next, but it certainly worked to his advantage.
Nijinksy appeared on stage in Russia wearing a costume shorn
of the usual “modesty trunks”, thus deemed dangerously
revealing. He was dismissed in disgrace. Diaghilev took full
advantage. A telegram to his French backers shows his
modus operandi: “Appalling scandal. Use publicity.”
This was a pattern that was repeated throughout the
Ballets Russes’s early days. Stravinsky’s The Firebird, with
choreography by Michel Fokine and sumptuous designs by
Bakst, had been a success in 1910 and Diaghilev, Stravinsky
and Nijinsky were hungry for more. While Stravinsky, who
had been discovered by Diaghilev, worked on his next ballet,
Nijinsky prepared his debut choreography to Debussy’s
L’Après-midi d’un faune at the Chatelet. A short piece that
featured eight dancers – Nijinksy and seven nymphs – this
ended with Nijinksy jerking his pelvis over a piece of cloth
dropped by a nymph. The audience was appalled.
“Sexual simulation on stage wasn’t something people
expected to see at the time,” deadpans Pritchard. “He toned
it down after that, but they’d already got a lot of publicity.”
The following year’s controversy was even greater, when
the Art Deco Théâtre des Champs-Élysées became the setting
Photograph: © Getty