From Studio to Stage

Old theatre costumes viewed at close range can look particularly forlorn — empty shells of a live performance that can never be recaptured — but the costumes from Serge Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet (Les Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev) are extraordinary. Many were designed by the foremost artists of the day — Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico — and have survived as significant artistic objects in their own right.

Fifty of these costumes, from twenty ballet productions, are on display in this exhibition, accompanied by original designs, lavish Russian Ballet programs and the large backdrop from the first scene of Petrouchka.

The costumes are a key to the larger significance of the Russian Ballet: the renaissance in ballet which was created by Diaghilev's company depended not just on choreographers and dancers, but on a collaboration between them and composers and painters that is unique in the history of modern culture.

During the company's early seasons, Diaghilev achieved this remarkable collaboration with the composer Igor Stravinsky, the designers Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst, the choreographer Michel Fokine and his two principal dancers, Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina. In the early years of the first world war, however, Diaghilev commissioned the more radical artists of the Russian avant-garde, Natalia Gontcharova and Michel Larionov, and it was probably at their prompting that he flirted briefly with designs from the Italian Futurist artists, Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero.

In 1917, when the sets and costumes of Parade were commissioned from Picasso, Diaghilev linked the Russian Ballet with the School of Paris, and in the following years commissioned designs from Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Derain, Matisse, Gris, Marie Laurencin, Braque, Maurice Utrillo and Georges Rouault. Designs were also commissioned from the Surrealists Joan Miró, Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico and from the Constructivists Naum Gabo, Georgii Yakulov and Pavel Tchelitchev, and so made up an impressive cross-section of contemporary art of the time.

When Diaghilev died in Venice in 1929, the Russian Ballet fell apart. Its most direct heir was Colonel Wassily de Basil's Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, formed in 1932. The new company reunited many of Diaghilev's dancers and purchased the sets and costumes of the original company. De Basil's company toured Australia (under several different names) in 1936, 1938—39 and 1939—40. The excitement generated by those visits was described by Sidney Nolan: 'When de Basil came out with his Company I think this just stunned Melbourne... Melbourne was just overwhelmed first of all by the beauty of the performances and then by the beauty of the people themselves’.

Interestingly, the first significant recognition of Nolan's abilities came in the form of a commission from de Basil to create the set and costumes for the Australian performance of Serge Lifaffs ballet Icare during the 1939—40 tour.

Diaghilev’s ideal of artistic collaboration thus took root in Australia. So too did a number of de Basil's dancers (some of whom established ballet companies), encouraged to stay by the warm reception they received here and their awareness of the darkening prospects back home in Europe.

Schéhérazade

Scenery and costumes: Leon Bakst
Choreography Michel Fokine
Music: Nikolai Rimsky-KorsakovLibretto Leon Bakst Alexandre Benois and Michel Fokine,
based on the first tale of A Thousand and One Nights First performance Theatre National de Opéra, Paris, 4 June 1910

The exotic world of the Orient had long excited Europeans and in the nineteenth century their awareness was heightened by painters such as Ingres and Delacroix with works which included Odalisque and The Death of Sardanapalus.

The Russian Ballet's presentation of the Orientally-inspired Schéhérazade had an extraordinary impact on its Parisian audience.

The story of the ballet is both exotic and erotic. It is set in the Karem of Shah Shahriar, King of India and China, who pretends to go on a hunting trip with his brother Shah Zeman to test the faithfulness of his favourite concubine. As soon as he is gone, the women of the harem persuade the Chief Eunuch to open the doors of the slaves apartments. The women and their lovers abandon themselves to riotous dancing. The room becomes a mass of whirling, flashing colour, and the ballet rises to a climax as Shah Shahriar rushes in with scimitar raised. At his command the soldiers kill the slaves and concubines.

So spectacular was the performance (which lasted barely twenty minutes) that it had a profound effect on Parisian fashion and interior design. Designer Charles Ricketts said: The Orient came once more into its own and the piano was draped with Chinese shawls, the divan replaced the chaise longue, and no mantelpiece was complete without its Buddah'.

An important aspect of this exhibition is the conservation work that has been carried out on the costumes over the past ten years. Many scholars assumed nothing remained of the original 1910 Schéhérazade costumes. However, in the course of conservation work carried out on the Chief Eunuch's costume at the Gallery, elements of the original costume were found buried beneath subsequent layers of fabric. The original worn trousers had been covered with new versions and the intensity of the original hand-dyed costume was lost. On the lining is a German customs stamp, placed on the costume when the company visited Germany in the spring of 1912, and now an invaluable aid to dating.

A textile conservator's work involves labour intensive examination and treatment of costumes. Conservation treatments of these costumes included gentle vacuuming to remove loose dust, dry cleaning to reduce the concentration of body oils, which can discolour and damage the fibres: the reduction or removal of disfiguring or damaging stains, such as iron from coat hangers and special washing procedures to treat general grime and water-soluble stains.

Le Chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale)

Scenery and costumes: Henri Matisse
Choreography: Léonide Massine
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Libretto: Igor Stravinsky and Léonide Massine, after a fairy story by Hans Christian Andersen
First performance: Théâtre National de l'Opéra, Paris, 2 February 1920

Henri Matisse first achieved widespread notoriety for the brilliantly coloured, loosely brushed paintings which he contributed to the 1905 Salon d'Automne, labelled by critics as the work of the 'Fauves' (wild beasts).

Matisse seems to have had little interest in ballet; it was probably only the prior successes of Pablo Picasso and André Derain that persuaded him to accept a commission from Diaghilev in 1919 to design sets and costumes for Le Chant du rossignol. Diaghilev offered Matisse the option of designing a new version of Schéhérazade or Le Chant du rossignol (Le Rossignol, the opera, had been produced by Diaghilev in 1914 with costumes and sets designed by Alexandre Benois. Unfortunately costumes and sets perished while stored in London during the first world war). Matisse felt that colour should be 'organized' to achieve the best effect, and he opted to design Le Chant du rossignol with subdued colour, planning a stage curtain 'as white as porcelain'. In this story, based on a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, the Emperor of Japan presents a mechanical song-bird to the Emperor of China, who is so overcome by the gift he sends his real nightingale away. A short time later the Emperor becomes ill and it seems that nothing can cure him. Death comes to claim him, but at the last moment the nightingale returns. Its beautiful song saves the Emperor's life.

The costumes were made by Madame Muelle, the top Parisian theatrical costumier of the time, but Matisse closely supervised the production and painted many of the decorative details directly onto the fabric. He also cut out simple fabric shapes used on such costumes as the mourner's, thereby saving time-consuming and expensive embroidery. The costumes utilize some interesting Chinese symbols. The mourner's costume with attached ears and horns, hand-painted with stripes, represents an animal, possibly a deer, the symbol of long life. The Court Lady’s costume, decorated with a pattern of branches laden with pine cones (and hand-drawn pine needles in pencil), also symbolizes longevity.

Chout (The Buffoon)

Scenery and costumes: Michel Larionov
Choreography: Michel Larionov and Thadée Slavinsky
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Libretto: Serge Diaghilev

First performance: Theatre de la Gaite-Lyrique. Paris. 17 May 1921

This ballet, adapted from a Russian legend, is a complicated tale of a young buffoon, the practical joker of a village, who pretends to kill his wife and then restore her to life with a magic whip. He sells the whip to seven old buffoons who, to test its powers, kill their wives and try in vain to bring them back to life. The young buffoon then disguises himself to escape the wrath of the seven old buffoons. The plot develops until, at the conclusion of the tale, the young buffoon and his wife have achieved wealth and happiness.

The sets and costumes by Michel Larionov were extraordinary; the colour contrasts, inspired by Russian peasant art and accentuated by the angular Cubist shapes, were so vivid and dazzling that it was almost painful to look at the stage.

Dancers were transformed into living sculptures with costumes not made in the conventional way, allowing for easy movement, but actually stiffened by resin, which restricted movement. Some even incorporated masks which obscured the dancers' vision.

Diaghilev's secretary, Boris Kochno, recalled that, 'Before the dress rehearsal of Chout in Paris, Diaghilev had to threaten the dancers with fines to persuade them to appear on stage in costumes that were so heavy and cumbersome that they interfered with the movement of the dance'.

The story, the costume and set designs, as well as the disconnected choreography, were met with a cool reception by the public.

Larionov's biography became intimately linked with that of Natalia Gontcharova (designer of Le Coq d'or) when they first met as students at the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. They were leaders of the Moscow avant-garde circle, closely associated with the 'Golden Fleece' exhibitions held in Moscow from 1908 to 1910, which brought to Russia the latest art from Paris.

In 1912 Gontcharova exhibited with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in Munich and in the same year both she and Larionov were represented in English critic Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibition in London. They were founding members of a number of renegade groups that advocated an independent school of modern Russian painting, looking not to the West but to indigenous Russian sources of inspiration.

Gontcharova and Larionov were inspired mischief-makes and some people had grave reservations about Diaghilev’s decision to commission them. The choreographer Michel Fokine said, 'I had heard that she and Michel Larionov, who worked with her, belonged to a set of "Moscow Futurists" who painted their faces, organised violent lectures on "new art" and "the art of the future", and that at these lectures, as the strongest argument, pitchers full of water were tossed into the audience'.

Note: The designs for Chout were already advanced by 1915-16, although the first performance was delayed until 1921.

The Sleeping Princess

Scenery and costumes: Léon Bakst
Choreography: Marius Petipa with additions by Bronislava Nijinska
Music: Peter Tchaikovsky, score partially re-orchestrated by Igor Stravinsky
Libretto: Marius Petipa

First performance: Alhambra Theatre, London, 2 November 1921

The first performance of The Sleeping Beauty, in St Petersburg in 1890, was an important landmark in ballet history, as it established the style, formal structure and character of classical ballet. Thirty years later, this production of The Sleeping Princess, a retitled version of the popular 1890 ballet, aimed to revitalize classical ballet, and was the most ambitious project undertaken by the Russian Ballet.

In 1921 Diaghilev badly needed money to keep his company going. By staging The Sleeping Princess, he persuaded the board of the Alhambra Theatre, London, to advance him £10,000 for scenery and costumes. By the time the performance was ready, Diaghilev had used a further £10,000, making it almost impossible to break even, much less show a profit.

But spectacular it was. Léon Bakst, who could always be relied upon to create a spectacle, designed six scenes and about three hundred costumes in less than six weeks. The dancer Lydia Lopokova recalled: ' To make an entrance into that scene by Bakst was really to be transported into fairyland'.

Diaghilev inspected all the costumes for The Sleeping Princess at the ballet's dress rehearsal. Cyril Beaumont, a ballet critic, noted: 'Each dancer was completely dressed in the costume to be worn and carried Bakst's original design, framed in talc. When he [Diaghilev] had passed or criticized the dress, as the case might be, he would ask the dancer to execute a phrase or step from his or her pas'.

Diaghilev inspected each costume for its closeness to the original design and also for its appropriateness for dancing. Not all the costumes passed this test; many were stripped of heavy gold braid which encumbered the dancer.

The costume design for the Queen and her page displays the enormous detail that Bakst incorporated into his designs for The Sleeping Princess. Detailed annotations were inscribed around the drawing in Bakst's handwriting.

It is interesting to note that when Diaghilev was preparing his 1922 season at the Paris Opéra, he found that the fame of the London performances of The Sleeping Princess had preceded him, and he was asked to revive it. This was impossible, however, because the scenery and costumes had been impounded as security for the debts incurred by the London season. So, as a compromise, he contrived a one-act ballet using the most popular dances from The Sleeping Princess and named it Aurora's Wedding.

Le Bal (The Ball)

Scenery and costumes: Giorgio de Chirico
Choreography: George Balanchine
Music: Vittorio Rieti
Libretto: Boris Kochno
First performance: Théâtre de Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo, 9 May 1929

Although the story of Le Bal was not particularly exciting, the designer was a perfect choice. For twenty years Giorgio de Chirico's paintings of Italian colonnaded squares and arcades had presented an impression of an empty stage.

Le Bal is another version of the old theme of the masked ball. A young officer pursues a lady escorted by an astrologer. The young woman is persuaded to remove her mask, revealing a wrinkled old face. The woman now pursues the young man. As the ball ends the young man encounters the masked woman and astrologer once more. She takes off her mask and the wrinkled old face reappears, but then she removes a second mask to reveal the face of a beautiful young woman. At the same time, the old astrologer is transformed into a handsome youth. Confused, the young man faints.

Transformed by their costumes, most of the guests at the ball appeared like moving fragments of architecture, adding to the masked intrigue. Only the costume of the young man seemed comparatively normal: a stylized military uniform, prominently adorned with appliquéd medals.

Le Bal was performed in Monte Carlo, Paris, Berlin and London and was very well received, mainly because of de Chirico's costumes and sets.

During the 1920s, De Chirico was hailed as a precursor of Surrealism, but he later condemned this style and the artists of the modern movement. His association with the theatre was more extensive than is normally appreciated, as between 1924 and 1970 he was involved in designing decors for twenty-three theatrical productions.

Le Bal was the last ballet commissioned by Diaghilev; within a month of its closing date in London, he died in Venice.