Ballets Russes Archives

Fun and games with Carla Fracci, Genesia Rosato and George de la Peña

Jul 252012

Jeux (Games) is the last work for orchestra written by Claude Debussy. It was composed for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography. Jeux was was not a success when premiered in 1913, but this was nothing compared to the reception Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring received just two weeks later!

Herbert Ross’ 1980 biopic Nijinsky recreated several of his ballets, including Jeux which, as pictured above, featured Carla Fracci (left), the Royal Ballet’s Genesia Rosato, and George de la Peña as Nijinsky.

Lifar’s Suite en Blanc “a clever, intriguing and intricately patterned work”

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Mar 182011

Well you can’t blame them for trying. “Black & White: featuring the Black Swan pas de deux” was the cringe-making publicity for the English National Ballet’s mixed programme. It didn’t however draw the critics’ attention away from the real gem of the evening:

Suite en Blanc is a little-seen ballet by Serge Lifar, the last star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, that has been neglected for 35 years.

English National Ballet revived it last night, and you could sense the audience’s collective disbelief that such a clever, intriguing and intricately patterned work should be so under-performed.

said Sarah Frater in The Evening Standard. Well it hasn’t been completely neglected for the Australian Ballet revived it in 1981, and in fact it is Maina Gielgud, the company’s ex-artistic director, who has remounted the ballet for the ENB.… [continue reading]

Ballets Russes brought back to life on film

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Feb 012011

A tiny lost treasure of ballet history has been discovered – 30 seconds of the Ballets Russes dancing in 1928, the only film ever found of a performance by one of the most influential and famous companies in dance history.

The scrap of silent black-and-white news reel was spotted wrongly labelled in the British Pathé online archive by a dance enthusiast, and identified by Jane Pritchard, curator of the recent exhibition about the company at the V&A museum in London.

In the archive, the film of dancers on an open-air stage, against a woodland backdrop, is captioned “location of events unknown”. Susan Eastwood, a member of the London Ballet Circle — which organised a private visit to the V&A exhibition earlier this month — had a hunch about it.… [continue reading]

How Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes kept British cinema on its toes

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Dec 232010

The Guardian’s film blog contains an interesting piece on the profound effect Diaghilev has on 1920s film-making, even though he never made a film himself:

Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes sparked a revolution in taste after the first world war, taking modernism out of the salon and into the music hall. The splendid exhibition Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, currently showing at the V&A, covers the impresario’s legacy in music, dance, fashion, painting, and literature; but less well documented is the spell he cast over British film. Michael Powell, who drew on 1920s memories of the Diaghilev milieu for The Red Shoes, was just one among a generation of cineastes who found inspiration in the same source.… [continue reading]

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Fun and games with Carla Fracci, Genesia Rosato and George de la Peña

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Lifar’s Suite en Blanc “a clever, intriguing and intricately patterned work”

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Ballets Russes brought back to life on film

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How Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes kept British cinema on its toes

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