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Big Footnote The Ballet Suedois Exhibition by Robert Greskovic |
Ballet, we are told all too frequently, remains the great ephemeral art. And yet for all that, especially in our age of videotape, and, around the corner, the CD-ROM era, we can be drowned by the images that remain of those once fleeting moments. While I'd probably fight any balletomane who claimed to be a more dedicated videophile than me until there was blood, sweat and rosin on the VCR, even I have to admit how the mass of material collected can be frustratingly at odds with what's ideally collectable. My uncharacteristically down-in-the-mouth thinking with regard to visual remnants of bygone ballet got inspired recently by a fulsome exhibition entitled Paris Modern: The Swedish Ballet 1920 - 1925 (first stop, New York City's Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, October 9, 1995 - January 15, 1996; next, San Antonio Texas's McNay Art Museum, February 12 - May 12, 1996; and finally, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, June 15 - September 8, 1996). It's hard not to feel grossly ungrateful hesitating to offer high praise and glowing appreciation for so handsomely mounted and richly spread an affair as this exhibit. Adding to such wondering in the show's New York setting comes the awareness that Sweden's gracious Princess Christina attended the exhibit's opening and made remarks so knowledgeable and so confidently spoken in highly accomplished English, she put to shame any politician I could name in our own government who might try to speak similarly in any language, including English, about any of our arts. Yet in the end, I'm afraid, a chill message rises from this garden of earthly remains. This Swedish silk purse cannot disguise the presence of the sow's ear within. Incidentally, in the handsome accompanying catalogue of eight separately authored essays, edited by Nancy Van Norman Baer (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, distributed by University of Washington Press), we indeed find this exhibit's balletophobic truth iterated and re-iterated some more: Ballets Suedois dancers weren't especially distinguished and their choreographies even less so. Besides not escaping the view of the catalogue writers, ironically enough, the almost anti-dancing aspect of a so-called ballet troupe appears to have been more than o.k. with the Mr. Money Bags behind the whole enterprise, Rolf de Maré. Jean Berlin, the leading dancer around whom de Maré built his Swedish ballet organization, appears to have had his own part in accentuating extra-dance elements when acting as the troupe's choreographer. Between his being the proverbial big fish in the little pond of ballet in Stockholm and the big cheese star of the Ballets Suédois launched in Paris, Berlin had received inspiration and tutelage from Michel Fokine. Once he found himself as starring dancer and choreographer, however, de Maré's protégé probably saw the benefit to his strength and stamina to downplay any rigorous dance dimension in his productions and to make prominent the acting, scenic, costuming, and musical elements of his creations. What all we possess today apräs Ballets Suedois, and as I keep stressing, in its way it amounts to a whole lot, we have due to the pronounced collector's drive in de Maré's career. If de Maré comes out of this show with much glory, it's because of his work as a collector and archivist more than from his work as a ballet theater impresario. When we consider that the light, such as it was, at the end of the tunnel of de Maré's vision focuses on his Archives Internationales de la Danse, sometimes called AID, founded in 1932 and officially opened in 1933, we must dwell as much on what was not saved as much as upon what was. As Lynn Garafola writes in her catalogue essay entitled "Rivals For the New": "After dissolving the Ballets Suedois, de Mare made no attempt to revive its works." The various, concrete "collectibles" de Mare amassed and that exist today as the bedrock of Stockholm's Dansmuseet, opened in 1953, illuminate our picture of him as archivist and art collector, all the while they question his role as a connoisseur of a theater based on the art of dancing. Handsomely emblazoned on the landing of the stairwell leading to the Fashion Institute's exhibition space, a blow-up of a starkly costumed figure from Borlin's L'Homme et son desir punctuates a slogan of which Ballets Suedois was most proud: WE ARE THE DANCERS WHO DARE NOT DANCE. My reading stumbles on the "not" as I stand in wonder of this one-liner as a prideful statement for a ballet troupe. Certainly previous essays have reported on the string of "nots" evident in the goings on with Ballets Suédois. (Early and prominent in English was "An Introduction to the Ballets Suédois" by Sally Banes, Ballet Review, vol. 7, nos. 2 & 3, 1978/79.) The Ballets Suédois was not the Ballets Russes. De Maré was not Diaghilev. Berlin was not Nijinsky. Pas de Deux and Chopin, while acknowledged as being "inspired by Michel Fokine," were not by Fokine. Iberia was not Le Tricorne; La Boåte Ö Joujoux, not La Boutique Fantasque; Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, not Parade; Offerlunden, not Le Sacre du Printemps; Le Tournoi Singulier, not Le Train Bleu. Besides "reading" the visuals, i.e. costume sketches, set designs and maquettes, performance photos, and poster designs, all handily represented in this collection of Ballets Suédois memorabilia, the only other place to look for the dance theater dimension of de Maré's enterprise is between the lines of the literature documenting the affair. In addition to the other "nots" found there, a few "maybes" lurk. So do isolated singularities. Banes and Garafola have, among others, already pointed out that for all the Ballets Russes-manqués aspects to Ballets Suédois achievements, some seeds of innovation or at least inspiration also existed and fed Diaghilev's late Ballets Russes period. These include Diaghilev's "discovering" within de Maré's repertory individual artists he would then commission for his ever-Ö-la-mode ventures. Composers initially working for de Maré and then Diaghilev include Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Henri Sauget. Diaghilev's interest in design work from both Max Ernst and Joan Miro followed that of de Maré. Likewise, the innovational Russian took cues from the copy-cat de Maré when incorporating unconventional visual media such as film and neon light into Ballets Russes productions. Giorgio de Chirico and La Jarre, the ballet he designed for de Maré in 1924, each ended up affecting Ballets Russes repertory: the 1925 Barabau (Balanchine, Rieti, Utrillo) had a similarly rustic atmosphere and the 1929 Le Bal (Balanchine, Rieti) had bold, poster-painted designs by de Chirico. Maison de Fous, choreographed by Berlin (to music by Viking Dahl) for Ballets Suédois second program, lives today only in photos of its staging and its individual characters and in the Nils Dardel's watercolor for the backdrop showing an awkwardly foreshortened, desiccated giant sinking beyond the stage's full depth sporting creepy finger- and toenails reminiscent of Howard Hughes at his most reclusive and eccentric. After reading of the ballet's particular "program" concerning a young female asylum inmate and her encounters with variously mad and deranged characters, one wonders if the future works of Kurt Jooss owe something to this creation. Garafola brings in Borlin's debt to Mary Wigman, citing specifically her solo "The Dervish" on her program entitled Ecstatic Dances. As we think of the blend Jooss, Wigman's artistic sibling, made with the danse d'école and Germany's ausdrukstanz in works as various as The Green Table and The Big City, we wonder if Borlin's Suédois work presents dance history with precursor links. As we look at remnants of the 1921 Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel presented in the exhibit, including the handsome stage maquette (rebuilt in 1933, like all those in the lighted showcases, after the originals), little lightbulbs go off in our late 20th century minds: Doesn't this look and "read" more than a little bit like A Wedding Bouquet, concocted in 1937 by Frederick Ashton, Lord Berners and Gertrude Stein? Doesn't the fact that the score for Les Mariés (by five members of "les six") included text readings keep pointing to Stein's playlet for A Wedding Bouquet? Whatever the possible links and inspirations, the assumption remains inevitable that Ashton's English picture of a French country wedding included far more dancing, dotty or otherwise, than did Borlin's Swedish example of a French city wedding. More lighted maquettes and two simulated stage set-ups dominate the main exhibit hall of the F.I.T. space. The first of the stages shows Ferdinand Léger's delicately faded and delicately bold arc-filled backcloth for 1922 Skating Rink. The indoor setting, meant to be peopled with cubo-futurist roller skaters living and skating according to their class-strata society, all fueled by Arthur Honneger's "new" French music, may well appear ages away from Ashton's Les Patineurs. And yet the lyrical, athletic, ice skaters a la Ashton in their Victorian dress on their outdoor rink to the oom-pah-pah strains of Meyerbeer still suggest possible inspiration from Skating Rink. (News that dance research/re-constructors Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer are at work on reviving Skating Rink provokes certain thoughts. Especially to all the cynics who question just about everything this team does because they are not "proper" choreographers, this may be an ideal opportunity for finding another lost ballet. Knowing how low in the ballet's scheme actual dancing must have been, nonbelievers may find this an ideal Hodson and Archer project. What evidently made this creation tick was largely its decor and costumes, an area of research on which the Hodson-and-Archer team are rarely challenged.) While the Skating Rink backcloth fairly "speaks up" in its gallery (the dim N.Y. lights however were a little more than a trial on the eyes), an array of reconstructed elements from La du monde dominates the space. Here versions of Léger's back- and foreground designs, i.e. his backdrop, flats and costume constructions, give us some actual-size semblance of a Ballets Suédois stage space. I say "some" because the scale indicated by the figures in front of the backcloth fails to jibe with photos of both the 1923 panorama and the 1933 maquette, shown in the same gallery. Still, beyond the forthright example of how Ballets Suédois productions could treat its dancers as little more than décor animé, this landscape of black-outlined forms suggests another theatrical heir that would appear in the 1970s. As part of a retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim Museum in 1973, France's incomparable art-brut master, Jean Dubuffet, produced a fantastical theater work called Coucou Bazar. Dubuffet's world of black-outlined flat-white space and shape looked, in retrospect now, like a hybrid descendant of the world created by Léger for Ballets Suédois. Unlike Borlin's balletless theatrics for the world according to Ballets Suédois, Dubuffet's monde imaginaire had no ballet pretense. It filled the eye of the spectator with a vision of a chalk-white world made of numerous, overlapping plains. Movement was minimal and discreet; flora, fauna and terrain remained intermeshed. The spectacle of Dubuffet's theater was akin to that of watching the scales and gills breathe on a fish. As auteur artistique, Dubuffet called all the shots for his "Cuckoo" world in 1973; as would-be choreographer and auteur of his ballet, Berlin found himself ceding ultimate authority to his ballet's designer, who was allowed and/or encouraged to run the show by de Maré. L'Homme et son désir, which dates from 1921, the second of Ballets Suédois's mere five years of existence, shows how early the troupe's dance stage became the site for tableaux animés. Structured by Audrey Parr's series of ledges, banked as if gigantic stairs, the stage allowed for a costume pageant that left little room for space-taking dancing. So, hieratic pose plastique is no doubt what Borlin's choreography delivered. Once more the dominant features remained with the design elements, in this case the costumes. Two particular creations for "Bells" pique curiosity with their kinship to related designs by Germany's Bauhaus dance/design man Oscar Schlemmer. Schlemmer's fanciful Triadic Ballet gave performances from 1922 through to the 1930s, though sketches and plans for his "ballets" predate this time. His interests were geared to the purity of shape and form. What Parr called bells Schlemmer would most likely have called spheres or balls, but the posed-on-parallel-pointe look for the women dressed as Bells, could be a precursor or a mirror of Schlemmer's geometricalized ballet dancers. From what little we know of Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet, we note that the German art-school choreographer allowed his dancers more legitimate space and less mimetic dance language than we find occupied the Suédois world. In New York City, the Guggenheim Museum's "Works & Process" series, which stresses the visual arts in performing arts' projects, presented a program for which choreographer Murray Louis supervised the re-building of select Ballet Suédois costumes and then devised dances for them. The costume re-makes (by Frank Garcia, assisted by Chris Beckstrom, of the Louis organization) amounted at best to fantasies on the originals; Louis's choreographic sketches amounted to little more than diddly doodles. Today's facile fabrics and other materials gave the costumes in these "after a fashion" renderings a look more slick and glib than that of the original intentions evident in the working sketches or finished garments documented in photos that exist today. The exception among Louis's lightweight dances was one he re-cycled up from his Hoopla, a 1972 work with costumes by Garcia. For these purposes, Louis extracted a trio, which he dressed in Garcia's a-la-Relache costumes. The result amounted to a little choreographic episode on its own. In another world, very likely the Guggenheim's first choice would have been Alwin Nikolais, Louis's longtime artistic partner. With Nikolais no longer alive, the commission went, by way of default, to Louis. It would seem to me that a more likely default might have been Pilobolus-founding member Moses Pendleton. Beyond the fact that Pendleton, in and, of late, out of Pilobolus, has proven himself interested in the workings of the costume-cum-scenery aspects associated with Ballets Suédois aesthetics, we have Pendleton's record of re-working a couple pieces from the Swedish Ballet's past. In 1980, the Pilobolus master-mind mounted a version of Relache for the Joffrey Ballet. The 1925 original creation, probably the most imaginative and least derivative of the Suédois productions, proved to be something of problem for both de Maré and Berlin; it became their swan song. No doubt the personal relationship changes that put the two formerly close men at some distance accounted in good measure for the demise of Ballets Suédois, but so to some degree, it would seem, did the production of Relache itself. With the other Swedish works showing little or next-to-no dancing, this one wasn't so unusual, except perhaps when you consider how little Berlin had to do with its little dancing. Librettist Francis Picabia, filmmaker René Clair, and composer Erik Satie seem to have taken over all but completely from the premier danseur/choreographer. In so doing they appear to have created a wickedly witty happening, a kind of giddy absurdist theatrical spectacle that made the non-dancing aspects of Ballets Suédois appear like daring theories rather than neglectful business and/or happenstance. Pendleton's Relache re-cycled a goodly amount of the original's details--the Clair film, men in top-hatted evening dress taken down to their longjohns, women in evening wear, a fire bucket of sand, for example. The well-researched result ended up falling a little flat because the times in which such details proved so absurd or shocking had changed so greatly over the intervening fifty-odd years. I suspect that Pendleton's Joffrey production had to fulfill Robert Joffrey's well-known concern with reproducing as accurately as possible theatrical ingredients once part of the original stagings of the historical works being re-constructed for contemporary repertory. (Pendleton also created his own version of Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel in 1988, but I didn't get to see it.) The Dance Critics Association held an informative one-day symposium on the Ballets Suédois on October 14, 1995. Among its presentations were those that touched on the issue of gay politics, giving as the reason for de Maré's taking his enterprise to Paris rather than making a go of it in Stockholm, a nasty series of articles in the Swedish press, by a particularly disgruntled individual, vilifying de Maré for his intimate relationship with both Berlin and Dardel. This point of fact, however, did not overwhelm its presentation, let alone the conference, as I fear it might have done elsewhere on the gender/politics circuit of academic arts gatherings. A special pleasure of the symposium was a screening of the Dansmuseet's print of Clair's "Entr'acte" film, including the "overture" segment that was shown at the first performance of Relache. Given the gross lack of straightforward dancing within the Ballets Suédois, "Paris Modern" provides our dance history with little more than a footnote of information, albeit as a grand and lengthy appendage. The exhibit's very existence also inspires thinking about the aftermath of a dance era. What are we left with once a dance or a dance artisan is gone? The recently published Costumes by Karinska (Abrams) surprisingly stresses that in the case of this legendary costume maker and designer, sketches are not the left-over legacy. The few we have were largely made after the costumes were fashioned, to document or celebrate their existence. (Barbara Karinska was not a practiced "sketch" artist.) For practical purposes the Karinska legacy remains in photos of the costumes on the dancers for whom they were made, and in some fortunate cases the actual costumes themselves. Author Toni Bentley paints an eerie picture of a danceworld afterlife by noting how a couple of the costumier's most important designs hang in storage (in a dark cavernous space beneath the New York State Theater's stage) where future generations of re-builders may snip away, little by little, in the on-going work of taking valuable samples from which to begin replicating whole new garments. Merce Cunningham Archivist David Vaughan once quipped that an archival sampling of design schemes for past Cunningham dances would very likely be an array of packets of fabric die to indicate the color choices various designers have brought to their work on individual Cunningham dances. Ballet Suédois proudly reveals much more fancy remains. De Maré kept a great lot of them and Sweden's dance museum is keeping them in very good order. Could it be that the amount of supporting material left by a dance company for post-mortem display exists in inverse proportion to the depth of its dancing when it was alive and kicking. Whatever Ballets Suédois achieved during its heyday, no one much associates the result with alive and kicking dances, least of all someone who has had a chance to study to extensive visuals so lovingly preserved in the galleries housing Paris Modern: The Swedish Ballet 1920 - 1925ß
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