Portly Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, of course, never danced a step on any stage. Yet as founder of the Ballets Russes and as the company's supporter for twenty chaotic years, his name was inextricably linked in the public mind with all the dazzlement, sensuality, and astonishing technique of the Russian Ballet. He was the man who brought Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina, and Balanchine to the West, who brought Cleopatra Scheherezade, Rites of Spring, Parade, and The Prodigal Son to the stage.
He did much more, as a recent exhibition at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco reminded us. The Art of Enchantment: Diaghilev's Ballets Russes coincided with the eightieth anniversary of the Paris premiere of the Ballets Russes--May 28, 1909--and the show's incisive catalog offers an invaluable summary of Diaghilev's work and influence. The show ran from December 3 to February 26 at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, one of the two branches of the Fine Arts Museum.
Delightful Hodgepodge
Nancy Van Norman Baer, curator of the museum's theater and dance collections, has previously organized several small but potent dance-historical studies: American modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller; Anna Pavlova; and Dance in Art, a delightful hodgepodge of sculptures, paintings, costumes, prints, and photographs depicting dance. In 1986 she organized a significant exhibition on Bronislava Nijinska (the sister of Vaslav Nijinsky), whose career as dancer and choreographer flourished long after insanity ended his own.
For the Diaghilev exhibition, Baer drew from the Fine Arts Museum's large and varied holdings in arts related to dance, which are founded on the late Alma de Bretteville Spreckels' gift of her own collection and augmented by later bequests or permanent loans. The Art of Enchantment also featured a number of vital drawings and watercolors, particularly by Leon Bakst, from Robert L.B. Tobin's rich collection; and additional designs, photographs, books and archival material from private collections, the Nijinska Archives, the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, and the Nicholas Roerich Museum.
At the glamorous heart of this exhibition, however, and, unfortunately, not pictured in the otherwise excellent catalog, were twenty-three original costumes from England's Castle Howard Costume Galleries. Castle Howard rarely allows its fragile pieces to leave the museum, and these Russian ballet costumes were brought to San Francisco only through an agreement that the Fine Arts Museum would undertake their restoration. Consequently, the exhibition will not travel. The costumes, arranged in hauntingly lifelike scenes from eight ballets, were the dramatic climax of the exhibition, the tangible suggestions of the "moving paintings" Diaghilev placed on stage.
There is always an essential something missing in such dance history exhibitions, of course: the dancers themselves, the moving, breathing bodies who made the dance. Of all the performing arts, dance is least able to exist apart from its performers, who shape its forms with their own flesh. Yet there is much, and much more than nostalgia, to be learned from the material remnants of this ephemeral art. In the case of the Ballets Russes, set and costume designs were often so carefully drawn and painted, and the actual costumes so inventively fashioned, that they are
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