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Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the American Midwest

2021; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19452349.39.4.02

1945-2349

Samuel N. Dorf,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

The Ballets Russes's wild success in Europe and the international fame of its star dancers stirred the imaginations of Americans across the country, many of whom knew little about the company beyond reports of scandalous premiers in Paris and pictures in Vanity Fair and Vogue. When Diaghilev arrived in the United States without Nijinsky and Karsavina, the fashionable dance troupe seemed to have lost some of the splendor seen in glossy magazines. Poor box office receipts, unfamiliar venues and audiences, exhausted and poorly paid musicians and dancers, and mixed reviews in the press did not help. But the reception of the Ballets Russes in America was more multifaceted than a cursory glance at the reviews may suggest. While we cannot deny that Diaghilev's US tour failed to live up to expectations, it is important to remember that what might constitute a flop for one audience may be a revelation for another.The tepid reception of the US tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1916 and 1917 needs to be seen in light of the company's previous successes in Europe and the absence of their star, Vaslav Nijinsky, for the 1914 season. After Nijinsky got married, against the wishes of Serge Diaghilev, his lover and employer, the impresario dismissed the dancer. Nijinsky ended up in Budapest with his pregnant Hungarian wife when the Great War broke out in 1914; the Ballets Russes shut down, and the dancers scattered across Europe. Aside from some sporadic events, the company lay dormant until it re-emerged in New York City in January 1916.1With war raging across Europe, neutral America seemed a safe place to restart the troupe, and Diaghilev could not afford to stay closed for much longer. The scandals of 1912 and 1913 caused by Nijinsky's ballets L'Après-midi d'un Faune, Jeux, and Le Sacre du Printemps may have sold out theaters and set the press abuzz, but as Hanna Järvinen has argued, “they [also] alienated important financiers of the organization and made [Diaghilev] doubt their worth.”2 An American tour seemed to be the answer.The US public had been eager for the Diaghilev troupe's arrival since 1909.3 The large American newspapers had regularly featured reports of scandalous European premieres, and other troupes of Russian dancers had already found success touring America. Previous studies by Lynn Garafola and Hanna Jarvinën on the ballet's two American tours during the war years paint a vivid picture of the financial, cultural, societal, and artistic issues that plagued these endeavors; however, they are primarily focused on the extended New York City runs, buffeted by press clippings from other major metropolitan centers (Boston, San Francisco, DC, and Chicago).4 What about the other fifty-five cities across the United States and Canada that hosted the Ballets Russes between 1916 and 1917; what about the smaller venues, especially, in the Midwest? While New York City and Chicago audiences may have had a wider array of theatrical and musical models to compare to Diaghilev's troupe, audiences in Dayton, Ohio (where I currently live) and other small and mid-sized cities responded to the company more favorably in ways that reflect their unique demographics and performing arts histories. Perhaps it is time to re-examine the standard narrative that the company was a flop with American audiences. Although Diaghilev returned to Europe without the millions of American dollars he may have hoped for, he left an America richer in more ways than he could have ever realized.This essay investigates the tours’ impact in America's Midwest. Examining the population of the cities Diaghilev's troupe visited reveals a mix of major metropolitan areas where the company spent most of its time, and a number of mid-sized and small cities (see Appendix 1). The second tour covered many more cities, and most of their performances took place in small and mid-sized cities, unlike the long runs in Chicago and New York during the first tour (see Appendix 2). This essay examines the Ballets Russes's legacy in just three of these midwestern cities: Chicago, Illinois; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Dayton, Ohio. First, I look at the 1916 Chicago engagements highlighting the distinctly midwestern sensibilities of the press coverage. Chicago critics tended to question their own taste and judgment (as opposed to the supposedly more worldly New York audiences) and viewed the troupe through the lens of the Italianate dance styles with which they were more accustomed. In Cincinnati, a city without as strong a dance culture but with a vibrant symphonic orchestral scene, critics focused on the new music (from Diaghilev's prewar repertory) brought by Diaghilev's troupe. On their second tour, they performed in Dayton, Ohio, where the press shared similar midwestern insecurities about local audiences’ ability to fully appreciate the Russian ballet. The essay concludes by analyzing the influence of the troupe on orchestral repertoire, which reverberated in midwestern cities for decades after the dancers left.On its first US tour led by Diaghilev, the company spent a week- and-a-half in the large midwestern city of Chicago, with a run of fourteen shows at the grand Auditorium Theater (capacity 3,875). The following year, the company played only in Chicago's significantly smaller George M. Cohan Theater for two nights (capacity 1,086). Similarly, on the first tour the troupe visited the mid-sized city of Cincinnati, Ohio, for a three-day run, and on its second tour it performed two shows at Cincinnati's Music Hall (capacity 2,289) and graced the Victoria Theater (capacity 1,154) for one night in the relatively small city of Dayton, Ohio. The repertoire included many of the company's favorite ballets: mostly the choreography of Michel Fokine but also Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un Faune and Till Eulenspiegel (on the second tour) and Massine's Midnight Sun and the music of composers familiar to American audiences (Robert Schumann, Carl Maria von Weber, and Frédéric Chopin) as well as less-familiar Russian composers (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, and Igor Stravinsky). A full accounting of the troupe's performances in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Dayton can be seen in Appendix 3 adapted from Jane Pritchard's 2009 series of articles on the company's itinerary.5The Ballets Russes's 1916 engagement at the Auditorium Theater ran from February 14 to 26, 1916, and featured eleven works (Firebird, Carnaval, L'Après-midi d'un Faune, Schéhérazade, Prince Igor, Soleil de Nuit, Les Sylphides, Petroushka, Thamar, Le Spectre de la Rose, and Cléopâtre). The performances received advance notice in theater programs for the opera and advance press in the Chicago papers (See Figure 1).A report from New York by Burns Mantle in The Chicago Tribune noted the company's mixture of “startling scenic effects, now weird to the point of inspiring laughter, now beautiful enough to spread an impressive hush over the most restless of audiences.”6The American tour's marketing operation was slick but only somewhat effective. As Lynn Garafola has described, Edward Bernays organized the preperformance press campaign and publicized the ballet first as “a novelty in art forms, a unifying of several arts; second, in terms of its appeal to special groups of the public; third, in terms of its direct impact on American life, on design and color of American products; and fourth, through its personalities.”7 As Lynn Garafola and Hanna Järvinen have both noted, however, the Metropolitan Musical Bureau took care of the advanced publicity and fed lines to newspapers, few of which had people knowledgeable about dance on staff,8 so we must take these press reports (especially the anonymous ones) with a grain of salt. Well-placed press-supported direct ads for tickets and local business tie-ins, such as the advertisement in the program for the famed Chicago department store Marshall Fields where real Ballet Russe costumes were to be on display, sought to lure patrons with the promise of a Continental, sophisticated, and glamorous lifestyle available to the wealthy and connected citizens of the Windy City (See Figure 2). Despite Bernays's aggressive New York City press offensive, local reports from across the United States paint a more realistic portrait of the company as it danced in local American theaters and engaged with local audiences and music critics (there were no dance critics in those days).Like the local reviewers in New York (see introduction to this volume for more on the New York scandals of Schéhérazade and L'Après-midi d'un Faune), Chicago critics found much to deride, but unlike New York reviewers, Chicago reviewers more often recalled their particular “midwestern” sensibility, questioning if they were sophisticated enough to fully appreciate the Russian ballet. For the Midwest audiences, Diaghilev also sought to temper the reception to Schéhérazade, in particular. According to Percy Hammond of the Chicago Tribune, Diaghilev “bleached Le Nègre a trifle . . . and thus skimmed the thin ice of middle west propriety.”9 However, even muting the racial overtones could not save the two-week Chicago run. The opening night review in the Chicago Tribune complained about high ticket prices and the ballets’ plots. Hammond was less than impressed with the works: [T]hese conventional stories, pantomimed and danced, mean little in my life compared to dancing itself with an accompaniment of music and picture unhindered by the questionable art of the drama. I believe that what I like are called “divertissements.” Few of these occur in the de Diaghileff program, which runs somewhat to plots. I mean to say that Pavlova in “The Swan” is what you care for and that “Sheherazade” is what you endure with mitigating pleasure. . . . Dancing perhaps is to you, as it is to me, sheerly a visual, not a mental art. I cannot, try as I may, concern myself with events so artificial as those in serious ballet. The toe technique, the gymnastic brilliancy, the jete [sic], the pirouette, the chasse, thrill me more than much silent romance, lust, comedy, or murder. So it is but infrequently that I react to the proceedings of the Ballet Russe.10Hammond's complaints mirror the shifting ballet landscape in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century from an artform dominated by Italians to a new “Russomania,” to borrow Suzanne Carbonnneau Levy's term.11 Prior to the arrival of the Ballets Russes, the dance department at the Chicago Opera was led by Italians: Luigi Albertieri served as ballet master during the early 1910s, and première danseuses included Italians such as Ester Zanini, Rosina Galli (who went to the Metropolitan Opera), and Rosina Tiovella.12 As Jessica Zeller has noted, after exposure to the Russian dancers, “Americans’ stylistic preferences shifted rapidly from the technical precision and modest clarity of the nineteenth-century Italian style to the dramatic sensibilities and sweeping lyricism of the Imperial Russian Ballet.”13 After brief plot and scenic descriptions of Firebird, Carnaval, and Schéhérazade, Hammond concludes, “You may not have approved of it, but you were interested. Tomorrow night the sophistication of this primitive frontier will be tested, we are told, by an unexpurgated performance of [L'Après-midi d'un Faune].”14Newspaper critics often viewed their hometown, midwestern Chicago audiences as inferior (maybe proudly so) to what they imagined as more sophisticated New York audiences. Reports in the Chicago Evening Post from February 19, 1916, note that the audiences were particularly noisy with their chatter, making the orchestra difficult to hear. Charles Collins blames the audience's disengagement to “a certain mid-Western naiveté—for this reluctance to enjoy in the mood of ecstasy belongs to our civic non-sophistication.”15 Hammond and Collins were not the only reviewers to compare midwestern audiences to what they deemed as more sophisticated New York and European audiences. In the Chicago criticism of Diaghilev's company, there is also an almost prideful rejection of this bastard French and Russian imposter, the way Americans turn their noses up at French who eat frogs legs and snails.The uniformly bad press and poor attendance prompted a column of commentary by a “Madame X” who critiqued the criticism. “The question of the moment among the elect is, ‘How did you like the Russian ballet?’ If you respond with hyperbolic praise then you are set apart from the common herd.” Lamenting the lack of enthusiasm among her follow Chicago theatergoers, Madame X concluded, It is perhaps too much to expect an audience of the middle west could and would put itself into a Slavic state of mind or look at an entertainment with the subtle understanding of the French or the still more subtle sympathy of the Russ—the two supremely artistic people today. But the time will come when those who now decry the various offerings of the Russian ballet on the ground of propriety will keep as quiet about their attitude as those who once anathematized not only the divine Sarah [Bernhardt] but all who went to see her. Thus the world moves slowly and laboriously on from darkness into light. . . . The wise ones say that Nijinski and Karsavina are much missed in the ballet. Perhaps we are being offered inferior wares. But we have Bakst color combinations, and the music of Stravinsky, Borodine, and Rimsky-Korsakov to interpret those colors—or do the colors interpret the music?16It seemed that ballet just could not win in middle America. On the one hand, the works were too “sophisticated” for midwesterner critics, while at the same time others accused the Russian ballet of not being a “mental art.”While shifting expectations of ballet in America may play a role in large cities such as New York and Chicago, cities where critics may have had even less exposure to dance may have viewed the troupe's American tours differently. After the two-week run in Chicago, Diaghilev brought the exact-same programs to nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city with one-sixth the population of Chicago. In 1916 the Ballets Russes performed in Milwaukee for just one night, where the critics offered uniform praise for the “bewildering impression of the most exquisite harmony of beauty in sound, color and movement.” Unlike Chicago critics, Milwaukee critics were not concerned with Italian technique, whether audiences were sophisticated enough to enjoy the works, or even about midwestern propriety.17In 1916, Cincinnati, like Chicago, was a city with a strong tradition of symphonic music and German cultural influence, albeit significantly smaller.18 Chicago and Cincinnati both attracted Germans after the failed revolts of 1848, with German immigration peaking in Chicago in the nineteenth century. By 1920, 22 percent of Chicagoans had German ancestry.19 But even though Chicago had a large German population, Cincinnati attracted many more German immigrants comparatively. By 1915 there were 110 German societies in the city, and roughly 57 percent of its immigrant population were of German descent.20 Cincinnati's premier arts venue Music Hall (where the Ballets Russes performed) sits in the heart of the city's German, Over-the-Rhine district, and the city has boasted a strong connection to German culture, especially German symphonic repertoire, since the mid-nineteenth century. Cincinnati's Germans felt confident in a German victory throughout the First World War until America's entry to the war in 1917 triggered a strong anti-German backlash and even the detention of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's German conductor Ernst Kunwald in 1917.21Amid this backdrop, Diaghilev's troupe arrived in Cincinnati for three performances at Music Hall (March 13, 14, and 15, 1916). In the Queen City, they performed a limited selection of the repertoire they brought to Chicago including Firebird, Le Spectre de la Rose, Petroushka, Schérézade, L'Après-midi d'un Faune, Prince Igor, Les Sylphides, and Thamar. In anticipation of the March 1916 engagement, Cincinnati papers started displaying ads eleven days before the first performance. A typical ad prominently featured the imprimatur of the Metropolitan Opera Company, the tour's underwriters (See Figure 3).It noted that the company's appearance was indeed “special” and promised a lot more than was delivered. For example, the fifty dancers who crossed the Atlantic for the 1915–16 tour were not the 100 dancers employed in the 1914 season and prominently featured in the ad. Interestingly enough, no star dancers are mentioned, only Léon Bakst, the company's most famous designer.22The press preview on March 12, 1916, also stressed the troupe's splendor. An anonymous article in the Cincinnati Enquirer introduced readers to the Russian personalities due to arrive: Diaghilev, Bakst, the choreographer Michel Fokine, and the composer Igor Stravinsky, who, in the worlds of the critic, “upset all preconceived notions of harmonic regulations.”23 The article notes that the advance sales have gone well, demonstrating an “audience of pronounced artistic and fashionable distinction.”24An ad the next day reads, “TRIUMPH, Fashionable, Artistic and Musical Cincinnati Finds a Real Achievement in the world famed Diaghileff Ballet Russe.”25 The article reinforces the previous week's claim that the ballets were to be presented exactly as they were in Europe. However, ads sometimes lie: with smaller casts, few of the company's original stars, and on foreign stages, the Ballets Russes had no chance of offering all that it claimed. Despite these setbacks, the Cincinnati reviews from 1916 were unequivocally positive. A review signed by “J.H.T.” from March 19, 1916, in the Cincinnati Enquirer regrets the absence of the European stars but concludes, “[W]hile Nijinsky was undoubtedly missed, the ballet productions were, nevertheless notable.”26Cincinnatians were particularly enthralled with Stravinsky's music. The anonymous reviewer bubbled over with praise: “It is dangerous to place the eventual importance of a man after hearing only two of his works, but both ‘The Fire Bird’ and ‘Petrouchka’ revealed so much originality, so much facility, so much inspiration and genius that there need be no hesitation in saying that Stravinsky is the foremost of the young revolutionaries.”27 The author concludes, “If the visit of the Ballet Russe has accomplished nothing else than having given us the opportunity of becoming acquainted with Stravinsky it rendered a notable service, for Stravinsky is truly the composer of the future.”28 Still, unlike Percy Hammond in Chicago, J.H.T makes no mention of the choreography, and his effusive praise for Stravinsky does not sound like the standard writing pushed on the press by the Met, but rather the reaction of a local music critic clearly enthralled with a new and exciting musical language that had not been heard in the city before.J.H.T.’s excitement over new music is not surprising for a music critic in a city like Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which Kunwald led from 1912 to 1917, was founded in 1895 and preceded by numerous other standing orchestras since at least 1872. Despite a strong symphonic orchestra tradition, the city lacked a regular ballet company or modern-dance tradition at the time.29 Considering the emphasis on German culture, the familiarity with discussing musical works (mostly German symphonic repertoire), and the lack of a ballet tradition, the press response highlighted the Ballets Russes's music.Even after the troupe left the city, we see further evidence of the musical (not choreographic) impact of the Ballets Russes in Cincinnati. A reviewer in the Cincinnati Times Star on April 1, 1916, praised a recent performance by the Cincinnati Symphony led by Kunwald of Schéhérazade, noting that just “a few weeks ago [this music] was relegated to the sphere of accompaniments when the ballet of the same name was presented in Music Hall by the Russian dancers. It is safe to conclude that few who heard the suite on the former occasion would, without definite information, have recognized the same work.”30 The dismissal of the ballet in favor of the score in its symphonic format is also unsurprising for a music critic.Dayton was a different story. Unlike Chicago and Cincinnati, Dayton did not have a standing orchestra. The Dayton Symphony Association was responsible for bringing ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the Chicago Symphony to town, but Dayton did not have its own orchestra until the early 1930s.31 In the 1910s Dayton did have an active theater community and the beginnings of a historically significant dance community as well, including the first schools that led to the founding of the Dayton Ballet in 1937.32 Russian dance stars had also traveled through Dayton throughout the 1910s. Both Anna Pavlova and Mikhail Mordkin performed at the Victoria Theater (the city's largest venue at the time) at least twice prior to the arrival of Diaghilev's troupe.33For their one-night engagement in the Gem City on February 8, 1917, the troupe performed Cléopâtre, Papillons, and Thamar at the Victoria Theater. As on the previous tour, the ballyhoo promoting the troupe built up very high expectations. The Sunday edition of the Dayton Daily News a few days before the one-night engagement featured two articles promoting the ballet. One paid special attention to the orchestra, listing the startling number of wind instruments and unique battery of percussion that Stravinsky's scores demanded. The article neglected to mention that the company did not program any of Stravinsky's works for Dayton (See Figure 4). The other Ballets Russes feature in the Sunday paper profiled Nijinsky, who had rejoined the troupe nearly a year earlier, proclaiming him the best dancer in the world and promising, “In addition to his appearances in the ballets he will also give the productions his artistic direction.”34 A wire report in the Dayton Daily News printed on the day of the performance related a story about Nijinsky enjoying an American college football game while on tour—another humanizing touch.35The performance on February 8, 1917, in Dayton promised a lot: a program of exotic orientalist ballets with vivid colors, exciting dancing, and a big orchestra; but the next day's review revealed that, while the Ballets Russes came and delivered much of what it had promised, the people of Dayton may not have been sophisticated enough to appreciate it (or afford it). The reviewer proclaimed, “Serge de Diaghileff's Ballet Russe gave the comparatively few, if critical, Dayton people who were at the Victoria Theater, Thursday evening, an opportunity to see a new art of dancing displayed in a perfect background of music and color.”36 The reviewer notes that the Ballet Russe was different from all other dancing that had come to Dayton—everything is brighter, bolder, with music, dance, and art in perfect harmony—but the half-empty hall disappointed the reviewer: “It was small and rather discouraging to those persons that insist that Dayton people have been educated up to the point of going to see all that is good in the drama and the music. . . . But surely people here have read enough about the Diaghileff Russian Ballet in Vogue, Vanity Fair and magazines to appreciate the fact that few things like it can be brought to Dayton.”37The anonymous reviewer concedes that the evening was not the success he or she wished for: Nijinsky did not dance, tickets were too pricey (a common complaint in every city), and the intermission was too long. The orchestra, its conductor, and the music were “so splendid that one wished as much of them as possible.” The performances of Cléopâtre, Papillons, and Thamar received accolades; but the notice concludes, “All in all, this Nijinsky-less performance was not without its appeal and its compensations.”38The next day, the company performed in Detroit for two nights, then Toledo, then Grand Rapids (see Julia Randel's essay in this volume), a day off, and then a final night in Chicago before crisscrossing back to Cleveland for three shows. The troupe pushed on for a few more weeks before heading back to Europe. Many of the dancers returned to the Dayton area years later, albeit with different companies, de Basil's Original Ballet Russe and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.After Diaghilev's death in 1929, veterans of the company along with others sought to revive the magic. The de Basil Ballets Russes and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo (directed by Sergei Denhem) toured the United States for decades, visiting Chicago, Dayton, and Cincinnati numerous times. But for the most part, the company's choreographic repertoire performed in Europe and reimagined for American audiences during the two US tours has vanished from the smaller American venues where the Ballets Russes toured. Virtually the entire Diaghilev, de Basil, and Denham Ballets Russes company repertoires have disappeared, except for the George Balanchine works performed by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1940s, which later entered the repertoire of the New York City Ballet. Concerning the legacy of the Ballets Russes tours in America, Suzanne Carbonneau Levy has written that the dancers who stayed in America after these visits were, for the most part, “content to re-create in America a combination of what they had learned from the Russian Imperial Ballet and from the Diaghilev repertory during the Fokine period.”39 In other words, the company's old repertoire (the prewar repertoire showcased on the American tours) had the greatest, longest-lasting success with American audiences, not the “avant-garde experimentation pursued by Diaghilev after 1914.”40 That said, some areas of the country were more “sophisticated,” or at least more aware of the long tradition of ballet that Diaghilev's “new” and modernist works sought to critique. Ballets Russes staples such as Fokine's Schéhérazade and Firebird, and Nijinsky's L'Après-midi du'un Faune and Le Sacre du Printemps are rarely staged as ballets in Toledo, Dayton, and Des Moines today, for example. While these tours did lay the seeds for domestic ballet companies, it took some time for these trees to bear fruit.Unlike the mid-sized and smaller cities visited by Diaghilev, Chicago quickly capitalized on the tours. The Pavley and Oukrainsky company imitated the glamour of Diaghilev's dancers and, along with providing divertissements for the opera, produced all-ballet programs including Oukrainsky's Persian Dance and Pavley's Afternoon of a Faun, along with other offerings. Adolph Bolm famously settled in Chicago for a decade after his injury during Diaghilev's second US tour. In Chicago he led ballet at the opera before starting his own school and company working with Ruth Page (see Carolyn Watts's essay in this volume).41Perhaps the Ballets Russes's greatest immediate legacy in the Midwest lay in the explosion of Russian and French music added to the repertoire of American orchestras. While the overture to Borodin's Prince Igor was first heard by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1912/1913 season, they programmed the “Polovetsian Dances” (introduced in Diaghilev's first 1909 season) annually from 1924 until the early 1940s.42 Chicago audiences first heard Schéhérazade during the 1897/1898 season, but it took two decades and the Ballets Russes's American tours for the work to appear regularly on Chicago programs.43 Similarly, Stravinsky's music, which the Chicago Symphony first performed in 1915, did not become a fixture on programs until the 1920s when Frederick Stock led repeat performances of Ballets Russes fare such as Firebird and Petroushka (first heard on the first tour), Le Sacre du Printemps, and Le Chant du Rossignol (see Appendix 4).In Dayton alone, after the 1917 performances of music by Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Glazunov, Mussorgsky, Anton Arensky, Alexander Taneyev, Nikolai Tcherepnin, and other Russian composers, we begin to see a flurry of “Ballet Russe-inspired” programming in touring domestic orchestras. Between 1919 and 1928, Dayton audiences could hear concert performances of Rimsky-Korsakov's music for Schéhérazade, Debussy's score for L'Après-midi d'un Faune, or other Ballets Russes favorites about once a year by a traveling orchestra (see Appendix 5). Once founded in 1933, the Dayton Philharmonic added Ballets Russes repertoire to their predominantly German programs (see Appendix 6). The works’ accompanying choreographies, however, never returned.The enduring symphonic legacy of the Ballets Russes American tours may not have turned a profit for Diaghilev, but American orchestras quickly absorbed the new works and established the newly fashionable Russian and French music into their repertoire. Despite the financial disaster and mixed criticism, reflecting on the Ballets Russes's visit reminds us of the power of audiences, of geographies, of critics, and of social, artistic, and political communities to shape art. While big-city audiences (even in midwestern Chicago) found much to complain about, mid-sized and smaller midwestern cities found even more to love in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (including the new musical repertoire). The story of the Ballets Russes's is not just limited to the capitals of Europe or New York City, but here in America there are fifty-five other stories to be told, in Chicago; in St. Louis, Missouri; in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and, yes, in Dayton, Ohio, as well.I would like to thank Richard Chenoweth and Eileen Carr of the University of Dayton for first suggesting that I look into the Dayton reception of the Ballets Russes; Sarah Gutsche-Miller for organizing the study day at University of Toronto that led to this essay; Lynn Garafola for her feedback on an earlier version of this essay; and my colleagues featured in this volume for their comments, questions, and support.