Touring the Screen: Cinematic Resonances of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes
2021; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19452349.39.4.04
ISSN1945-2349
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoIn December 1916, as Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company was crossing the United States to make its West Coast premiere in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Musical Bureau attempted to generate additional publicity and sustain excitement by publishing the first (and only) issue of the Diaghilef Ballet Russe Courier. Squarely in the center of the front page, under the headline “Ballet Too Expensive for Filming,” was a letter from American film director and producer Thomas H. Ince, purportedly responding to impresario and publicist Robert Grau's recommendation that Ince invite the ballet troupe to make a film: Dear Mr. Grau, I have read your communication in regard to the Russian Ballet. I fail to see the practicability of the idea of making a picture of the Russian Ballet, wonderful and unprecedented as the success of this notable organization has been. You understand, of course, that it would necessitate bringing the entire organization to Los Angeles, and any aggregation of dancers that can play to $100,000 dollars in two weeks would most assuredly demand all the money that I have, my right eye and left hand in addition to any hopes that I may have for a future life, in return for their service. Very truly yours, Thomas H. Ince.1Thomas Ince was not the only one skeptical of a Ballets Russes film project. The company's impresario, eager to position his company within the realm of high art, actively shunned mass culture and popular entertainment, including the still-young filmic medium: no Ballets Russes production was ever filmed.2 Despite this, there were numerous encounters between the Ballets Russes and the burgeoning Hollywood film industry during and immediately after the company's American tours in 1916 and 1917. Tales of these encounters paint a picture of the reciprocal fascination and mutual attraction of Diaghilev's troupe and the American film industry, and the spheres of stage and screen more broadly. A few of these connections have been examined: film scholar Gaylyn Studlar, for example, has discussed the influence of the Ballets Russes on the mise-en-scène of The Thief of Baghdad (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1924), particularly the extent to which the film's star, Douglas Fairbanks, was inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography and stylized movements.3 Scholars have also explored cases in which Ballets Russes dancers went on to choreograph dance numbers for American films, such as Adolph Bolm's work with director Dudley Murphy on Danse Macabre (1922) and Theodore Kosloff's collaborations with director Cecil DeMille on nearly thirty Hollywood productions following his time with the Ballets Russes.4 Relatedly, Lynn Garafola has cited such “crossovers and parallels” between film and the Ballets Russes, though she has focused primarily on the relationship between European avant-garde and experimental film strategies and the company's aesthetics.5 However, the Ballets Russes's sustained influence on silent film culture in the United States—its production, narratives, aesthetics, and exhibition—as well the extent to which Hollywood crafted and offered American audiences its own vision of the Ballets Russes and its dancers long after the company departed, remains largely unexamined. This omission is hardly surprising: not only have many of the silent films (and silent film scores) that may most clearly demonstrate these connections been lost, but crucial information about the production and exhibition contexts in which these relationships were most visible are scattered and incomplete as well. Finally, the West Coast leg of the Ballets Russes's second US tour, which brought the company into the orbit of the burgeoning American film industry, is rarely discussed.In this article, I examine this mutual attraction between the Ballets Russes and cinema, beginning with the company's arrival in Los Angeles for a week of performances in late December 1916, during which Hollywood elite attended performances that received rave reviews and company members, in turn, were treated to behind-the-scenes visits to the town's film studios. With this expanded vision of the troupe's activities and reception in mind, I examine two types of cinematic “appearances” that Diaghilev's dancers made in the years immediately following the company's US tours: first, the performances by company members and invocations of company repertoire and aesthetics in the live stage acts so often integrated into film presentations in the silent era and, second, the incorporation of Ballets Russes dancers, repertoire, and aesthetics, as well as the Ballets Russes as a broader signifier, into a number of feature-length films. In the former performances, I argue, the visual and narrative themes, music, and choreographies associated with the company were reprised on cinema stages, most often under the direction of the company's male dancers. The latter performances offered a more fanciful and imaginative vision of the company onscreen, frequently deploying either female Ballets Russes dancers or fictional modern Russian ballerina characters as visual—and highly visible—icons of the Ballets Russes and American mythologies of Russian culture and politics more broadly. Both types of cinematic (re)appearance, I argue, introduced new audiences to the company's choreographic, musical, and visual aesthetics, allowing these aesthetics to circulate and the company's influence to grow long after its departure. These performances also benefited the film industry, enabling filmmakers, studios, and exhibitors alike to associate themselves with the company's cultural capital, its status as high art, and the aura of mystique and intrigue that surrounded it.Scholars such as Hanna Järvinen have recently challenged standard narratives about why the Ballets Russes failed “to conquer America.”6 Yet the Ballets Russes spawned a fleet of reprises, tributes, and references on cinema stages and screens throughout the country. These cinematic performances generated their own advertisements, programs, and reviews that gestured toward the Ballets Russes and simultaneously invited an ever-expanding segment of the American public to engage with and find their own meanings in both these cinematic “texts” and the Ballets Russes performances and mythologies that they referenced.7 Perhaps this is not a conquest. But this complex, layered, and multivalent intermedial web, I believe, is evidence of the company's significant influence on art and entertainment in the United States, as well as its lasting resonance within American culture.Bypassed during the Ballets Russes's first US tour, Los Angeles audiences and critics were on pins and needles waiting for their first glimpse of the company in the fall of 1916. “Dancers Are Coming!” declared a Los Angeles Times headline, announcing that the company was set to arrive on Christmas day for a weeklong engagement at Clune's Auditorium.8 Over the next several weeks, audiences in Los Angeles were bombarded with glowing previews hyping premier danseur Vaslav Nijinsky; Schéhérazade and other signature ballets; the seventy-piece orchestra traveling with the troupe; and the “wild opulence” of the company's scenery and costumes.9 By the time the Ballets Russes arrived via train—six baggage cars of equipment, three coaches and a dining car for the performers, plus a private car for Nijinsky and an extra baggage car decked for the company's Christmas Eve party, the Los Angeles Examiner reported—the press was near fever pitch. Los Angeles residents were equally excited. The company's premiere, which featured Nijinsky's new ballet Till Eulenspiegel and the dances from Prince Igor, was completely sold out and began late due to the large crowd, which included film industry elite and familiar faces from the screen. As newspapers gleefully reported, the delay was compounded when the dancers, on hearing that Charlie Chaplin was in attendance, demanded that he be brought backstage. One critic explained, “[They] had all heard of him and seen him . . . so that Nijinsky, Revalles, Lopokova, all of them, kowtowed to him, and I shouldn't be surprised if someone kissed him; . . . foreigners do that when greatly enthused.”10That Chaplin and others working in early film would have been eager to see the Ballets Russes is hardly surprising. Those in the film industry had looked to the dance world for inspiration and personnel since its advent, yielding early moving picture experiments such as Thomas Edison's Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) and silent feature films like director Lois Weber's The Dumb Girl of Portici, starring Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova (Universal, 1915). For early filmmakers, dance was understood as a means of displaying—and a model for exploring—film's capacity to represent movement, as well as a strategy for creating rhythm, pace, and mood onscreen. Many directors, such as D. W. Griffith, also believed that dance training cultivated an attention to physical presence and a slower, more musical movement style that worked far better on screen than that quicker, larger gestures that many theater actors brought to film studios.11 As a result, a number of dance schools and companies in and around Los Angeles—perhaps most notably Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn's Denishawn, but also former Ballets Russes dancers Theodore Kosloff and Alexandra Maria Baldina's ballet school and British dancer Ernest Belcher's Celeste School—quickly became affiliated with the film industry, training film actors and actresses to move on camera and providing a steady supply of dancers for film productions.12 That the principles of movement and gesture established by François Delsarte are as visible in the aesthetics of silent film as they are in the aesthetics of modern dance, as scholar Carrie Preston has demonstrated, is hardly a coincidence.13Reviews of the Ballets Russes's Los Angeles performances were strikingly enthusiastic, praising the company's vigor, speed, and variety. As Los Angeles critic Edwin Schallert wrote, “Daring to the last degree in its big conceptions, startling throughout in its massing of color, and breathtaking in the swiftness of its supreme moments, the first performance of the Diaghileff Ballet Russe . . . made all other dancing we have seen here seem like child's play.”14 Schallert continued at length, almost rhapsodic: “They have an all-consuming energy that leaves you dazed, captivated, and inspired at once. The dancers come and go like magic, they concentrate more motion into the minute than could seem possible, and they finally leave you again seemingly almost before you had realized their presence. . . . [T]here is something inconceivably swift in the magnetic power of this troupe.”15 As exciting to critics as the choreography were the musical performances that accompanied it. “The pulsation of the Borodine [sic] music to the Prince Igor, played in masterly style by an orchestra,” the Los Angeles Times reported, was “worth more than half the price of admission in itself.”16 A critic for the Los Angeles Examiner concluded a description of Cléopâtre by noting, “The Balakireff music is superb; rushing hither and thither with the sweep of the violins predominant—the clash of the cymbals and rumble of tympani combining with the winds to form an overwhelming tornado of Russian fire and expression.”17 The close relationships between music and choreography were praised as well; after watching the company's rendition of Carnaval, Schallert asserted, “Schumann must have dreamt something like this when he wrote this piano series.”18But it was the company's dancers—especially the company's male dancers—who stole the show. Descriptions of the grace and delicacy of female dancers including Lydia Lopokova quickly gave way to lavish praise for Nijinsky's “technical wizardry” and “many-sided genius,” his “rhythmic perfection” and “delicate yet virile suppleness.”19 As Edwin Schallert waxed in an account that, despite its euphoria, was fairly typical of the Los Angeles reaction, “Strange realms does the genius of Waslav Nijinsky invade. Amid the floating clouds of his imagination's horizon arise unreal colors and mysterious shapes of things wherewith to create the background for realities that venture into untried provinces in the world of art. He opens by turn the portals of charm, of fire, of magnificence, he treads the corridors of symbolism and drama and the plastic arts, and he and his assistants lead their audiences through the ever-varying suggestions of these things.”20 Similar accolades were awarded to the “wonderfully expressive” Bolm, whose “facial expression and muscular grace plac[e] him on a plane but little removed from the master, Nijinsky, himself.”21 A few critics acknowledged the company's difficulty moving scenery quickly on opening night, but the concerns about ticket prices, the sexual overtones of Faun, and racial representations in Schéhérazade that had dominated New York and Boston reviews were either absent, dismissed outright, or even mocked by the Los Angeles press.22 Los Angeles audiences, in short, loved the Ballets Russes.The Ballets Russes dancers and personnel were equally enamored with Hollywood, based on anecdotes that emerged in both trade press and first-hand accounts. Company members visited at least two film studios, where they watched the production process with curiosity and wonder. In the February 1917 issue of The Moving Picture Weekly, a short article described the company's tour of a Universal City studio, where they looked on as director W. W. Beaudine shot one of his many comedy shorts. The article reports, The particular set on which they were working had a living room and a hall room next door. In the hall was a telephone on a table. The [ballet master] remembered he had an appointment and was late, and he requested permission to use the phone. Beaudine's sense of humor immediately came to the surface, and he said, “Why, certainly.” The ballet master sat for quite a long time at the phone and then appealed to the director. He tried again. Finally Beaudine told him it must be that the line was out of order. But the Russian never knew that the telephone cord extended no further than the edge of the carpet and that it was merely a “prop” instrument.23About halfway through Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, there is a similar—albeit far more poignant—account of Nijinsky and other Ballets Russes personnel watching the production of a short film in which Chaplin was acting (see Figure 2). According to Chaplin, Nijinsky “sat behind the camera, watching me at work on a scene which I thought was funny, but he never smiled. . . . Before leaving he came and shook my hands, and in his hollow voice said how much he enjoyed my work and asked if he could come again. ‘Of course,’ I said. For two more days he sat . . . watching me. . . . [A]t the end of each day he would compliment me. ‘Your comedy is balletique, you are a dancer,’ he said.”24The details of both stories are likely exaggerated, and the Moving Picture Weekly tale seems particularly apocryphal: it is difficult to believe that anyone associated with the Ballets Russes was not intimately familiar with the concept of sets and props. Indeed, the story seems designed to tacitly imply that company members embodied a sort of innocence—an exotic primitivity—when it came to modern technology like telephones and film. It also conjures for readers an oft-cited distinction between stage and screen in the ‘teens and early 1920s: film's ability to achieve a sense of realism to which stage productions could only aspire—or, in the case of the Ballets Russes, to which many stage productions did not aspire at all. Yet while highlighting the radical differences between comedy shorts and Schéhérazade, these anecdotes also highlight the intimate connections between dance and silent film. Perhaps most importantly, they point to the shared artistry and imagination of these two projects: the continuity between the experiments in choreography, design, and music that the Ballets Russes was conducting onstage as the troupe reimagined twentieth-century ballet and the experiments in movement, mise-en-scène, and visual language that filmmakers and actors were conducting in studios and on location as they imagined into existence narrative cinema. In these visits by Diaghilev's dancers to film studios, in Chaplin's attendance at the Ballets Russes premiere, in the open-minded and enthusiastic reception of the company in Hollywood and beyond, a reciprocal patronage, engagement, and admiration comes into focus.Though Ballets Russes performances were never recorded, the sounds and sights of the company made their way into American film culture before the company's United States tours even concluded. Strikingly, the cinematic space in which Ballets Russes aesthetics and elements of the company's works were most immediately accessible were film presentation programs. By the late ‘teens and throughout the twenties, large theaters in metropolitan areas as well as mid-sized cinemas throughout the country offered a week's feature film as part of a larger “presentation program”: audiences were treated to a musical overture, followed by a series of live performances—vocal numbers, ballets, instrumental solos, dramatic stage acts, and comedy numbers, among others—interspersed with short films including newsreels, comedies, educational films, and cartoons, followed by the feature film, and often an organ solo or other musical postlude. While some presentation programs took on the air of a variety show, governed as much by available talent as by artistic vision, many were organized around particular themes: a geographic region, an upcoming holiday or season, or a particular event. At times, programs were built of acts believed to resonate with the feature film at hand and even coordinated with theater decorations, usher uniforms, or lobby displays.Tracing the contents of presentation programs can be difficult; film trade journals and newspapers often list only the type of act (“Overture,” “Novelty”), occasionally followed by the name of the performer. However, a number of male Ballets Russes dancers are listed more than once in the programs of large theaters in several major cities, suggesting that they regularly appeared in and choreographed dance numbers at these venues. Adolph Bolm and Alexander Oumansky, who also participated in the two US tours, for example, were both fixtures in the presentation program scene: Bolm worked regularly at the Rialto and Rivoli Theaters in New York City, and Oumansky at the Grauman Theater in Los Angeles, the Fox Theater in Washington DC, the Capitol Theater in New York City, and elsewhere. Anatole Bourman, who performed with Diaghilev in Europe but left the company before the 1916, was the balletmaster at the Strand Theater in Manhattan and ran a dance school in the movie theater's roof garden. Konstantin Kobeleff and Alexander Kotchetovsky, both of whom danced with Diaghilev in Paris before World War I, staged dance numbers in presentation programs at the Strand and Paramount Theaters in New York and the McVicker Theater in Chicago, respectively. And this is just to name a few.25 It is difficult to know precisely what the ballets they created looked and sounded like, but it is clear that many incorporated or at least invoked Ballets Russes works. Bourman regularly staged versions of the company's pieces at the Strand, as did Oumansky at the Capitol Theater: a version of Papillon was included on a Capitol program in October 1921, and the dances from Prince Igor are listed as part of prologues offered there in both 1920 and 1922.26 Even Ballets Russes choreographer Michel Fokine, who emigrated to the United States in 1919, occasionally dabbled in the film presentation program business: an announcement of a 1922 presentation at the Strand noted that it would include the theater's “first presentation of the Fokine ballet in Les Sylphides.”27Music associated with or inspired by the Ballets Russes was also frequently integrated into presentation programs at many film theaters during and in the aftermath of the troupe's American tours. According to listings and descriptions of programs at large urban theaters printed in newspapers and film trade periodicals, movements of Rimsky-Korsakov's Schéhérazade and Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel were regularly used as overtures on such programs.28 Arrangements of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun also became a popular musical selection. Performances of these works were at times accompanied by scenery, lighting, and choreography that vaguely approximated Ballets Russes aesthetics. During a 1918 prologue at New York's Rialto Theater that used Schéhérazade as the overture, for example, the stage was decorated with two huge incense burners and bathed in red and gold light, and a singer dressed as a Moor performed “A Son of the Desert I Am” against a backdrop painted with a desert scene complete with a sphinx and pyramids, all to “carry out the Arabian atmosphere.”29Using music associated with the Ballets Russes both in presentation programs and as film accompaniment was actively encouraged in the pages of film trade periodicals. These journals regularly printed profiles of composers associated with the company such as Tchaikovsky and Debussy, advised exhibitors on where to obtain scores and piano reductions of their compositions, and praised theater managers and music directors for stocking their libraries with them. A letter-to-the-expert column in a December 1918 issue of Moving Picture World, for example, opened with a letter from an anonymous exhibitor in search of “orchestrations of the dances in Prince Igor.” “Will you tell me how to obtain them,” the exhibitor begged, “as there is no music store carrying anything but popular music in my little town?”30 The columnist obliged, suggesting that exhibitors contact the Music Service Exchange in New York for assistance. As was often the case with anonymous correspondence printed in film trade journals, this “letter” was likely a plant by a columnist rather than the desperate plea of an exhibitor. Thus, the exchange simultaneously invented and highlighted a demand for the company's music, showcased a specific composition newly popular with audiences from the company's tours, and encouraged exhibitors reading the column to integrate excerpts of it into their programs, if only to keep up with their competitors.That presentation programs were the principal filmic space in which the music, choreography, and male dancers of the Ballets Russes continued to be available to Americans long after the company left the United States is not surprising. Film presentation programs offered an accessible, ready-made venue for dance and music performances. Exhibitors, tasked with securing exciting musical and stage acts week in and week out, likely jumped at the chance to program music associated with the Ballets Russes and to hire the pedigreed male performers who were synonymous with the company in the American imagination. The resultant numbers doubtlessly drew both Ballets Russes fans eager to relive elements of the company's performances and newcomers curious to see the dancers who had often been showcased in the company's productions. Strikingly, film presentation programs—which juxtaposed art music and comedy shorts, rushed from stage ballets to screen dramas, seamlessly segued from an experimental film short to a popular dance duo accompanied by a jazz quintet (who seconds earlier had been seated in the orchestra pit performing an opera overture)—enacted the very characteristics of the Ballets Russes that most excited American audiences: palpable, all-consuming energy, riotous color, and integration of various artistic media, forms, and practices. But even as these male dancers traded on their affiliation with the Ballets Russes, presentation programs also afforded them the opportunity to experiment with new movement aesthetics and performance styles. They shrewdly used the mixed-media environment of the movie house both to develop new and innovative choreographic identities and to reach larger, more economically and socially diverse publics than the company's own performances had allowed. As Adolph Bolm wrote in his unpublished autobiography, “There is no better meeting place for dancer and public than the motion picture theater.”31 On the stages of movie theaters in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and beyond, then, male dancers like Bolm and Oumansky were able to reinvent their choreographic aesthetics, visions of dance, and themselves as performers, while simultaneously cultivating and deepening American familiarity with and admiration for Diaghilev's own ideals.While the music and choreography of the Ballets Russes were regularly reprised in film presentation programs, traces of the company's aesthetics, works, and performers were visible and audible in a number of feature-length silent films produced in the late 1910s and early 1920s. While the company's male dancers and choreographers were most visible in both the press surrounding the Ballets Russes tours and on the stages of movie theaters, it was the company's female dancers who were most visible onscreen. Several female Ballets Russes dancers were recruited by studios to appear in films following the second American tour, often in roles that bore a resemblance to roles they had danced onstage. Additionally, a number of films about fictional Russian ballerinas (most often played by American actresses) were made during these years. These characters, who usually encountered or performed in Ballets Russes-esque companies, invoked the bodies and performances of the company's female dancers. Indeed, while film presentation programs afforded the company's male dancers a platform to reinvent themselves as performers and choreographers at a distance from Diaghilev's company, these feature films effectively stilled female Ballets Russes performers—real and imagined—in time and space. Onscreen, their bodies and performances became mythological, symbols of the company and Russian otherness more broadly.Ironically, it is one of the films featuring a fictional Russian ballerina that most overtly conjures the Ballets Russes onscreen. The Dancer's Peril, which survives and is commercially available, was released by World Pictures in March 1917, just as the second Ballets Russes tour was winding to a close. Directed by Travers Vale, the film stars actress Alice Brady in the dual role of Russian dancer Vasta Mascova and her mother. A straightforward melodrama, the film follows Vasta as she travels to Paris with a ballet company and becomes an overnight sensation. The company's lecherous director realizes that she is actually the daughter of a Russian Grand Duke and kidnaps her; all is resolved when her mother kills her captor and reunites with her father, making way for Vasta's marriage to a handsome artist.Within the film's narrative and visual elements, there are several small references to the Ballets Russes and the mythology that had coalesced around the company by 1917. Perhaps most obviously, the film troupe's trip from Russia to Paris for its premiere echoed Diaghilev's assembly of the Ballets Russes in the same city for its first performances. The monocle-wearing, predatory director in the film also bore some resemblance to Diaghilev, who was regularly photographed with a monocle and around whom rumors about sexual orientation and a relationship with Vaslav Nijinsky swirled. However, the Ballets Russes is pointedly invoked early in the film when, after several shots of dance rehearsals, an intertitle announces, “La Ballet Russe performs La Ballet Scheherazade.” In the sequence that follows, Vasta (Brady) and Ballet Master Nicolas (played by Theodore Kosloff's brother Alexis Kosloff) perform an extended pas de deux supported by a large corps of dancers. It is not the Ballets Russes's choreography, of course, but the costumes, sets, and movements are not unlike the original; discerning film accompanists and theater music directors would likely have attempted to highlight the connection by accompanying the sequence with excerpts from (or derivative of) Rimsky-Korsakov's score. Those who had seen the company perform would certainly have recognized the reference, and non-ballet-going audience members could quite easily have mistaken it for the “real thing.”Press releases and studio publicity for the film seized on Kosloff's involvement as evidence of the quality and authenticity of the film's dance scenes, if not the film as a whole. A Moscow-trained dancer who had arrived in New York City to perform and teach in 1915 and would go on to serve as dance master of the Metropolitan Opera Company in the 1920s, Kosloff's experience with the Russian Imperial Ballet were repeatedly mentioned, and his troupe, by association, was described as a “huge and real Russian ballet.”32 His engagement for the feature, the trade press argued, was “one of the most important special engagements ever made in the motion picture business,” and the results “unrivaled.”33 Writing for Moving Picture World, Edward Weitzel came close to implying that seeing the film was as good as seeing the Ballets Russes: “No other photoplay ever contained such realistic glimpses of the art of the ensembled dance.”34 Indeed, reports went so far as to suggest that sharing the stage with Kosloff had practically transformed Alice Brady into a bona fide ballerina. As Motography waxed, Brady's performance was “greatly beautified and intensified by the presence in the cast of Alexis Kosloff. . . . [A] very graphic illustration is given of how these masters of the interpretive dance go about breaking in beginners and how they mold exceptional material into models of dancing perfection. These dancing scenes, in whic
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