Introduction Origins of Ballet Dance in the 18th Century  18th Century Satire Romantic Ballet  The Cult of the Ballerina The Pas de Quatre Marie Taglioni Classical Ballet 20th Century Revolution  Diaghilev Ballet Diaghilev Ballet after 1918 Nijinsky Anna Pavlova The Establishment of British Ballet  Ballet Rambert The Royal Ballet The Royal Ballet post 1945

Picasso Curtain for Le Train Bleu

Design

Cut off from Russia by World War 1 and the 1917 Russian Revolution, Diaghilev turned to European artists and subjects. He commissioned major European painters and composers from the countries in which they performed. Picasso designed The Three Cornered Hat and Parade, a surreal ballet. For the design of Parade, Picasso mixed popular art and Cubism. The musical score was written by Erik Satie and included the sounds of typewriters, aeroplanes and hooters.

Les Biches

Les Biches

Impressed by the financial success of the long-running British musical Chu-Chin-Chow Diaghilev looked for a similar spectacular that might give his company financial stability. He turned back to Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty, and mounted a production at the Alhambra Theatre in London, designed by Leon Bakst. He lost a fortune.

Click here to see the original designs for Sleeping Beauty by Leon Bakst.

King's Guard

Queen and Pages

Ballets Russes in the 1920s

The company survived, and throughout the 1920s kept the interest of its audiences with a succession of new and topical works. Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava Nijinska, created Les Biches and Le Train Bleu, about the smart social set and the fashionable Riviera. After Nijinska came George Balanchine.

Diaghilev commissioned composers Igor Stravinsky and Serge Prokofiev, designers Marie Laurencin and Georges Braque, and couturiers like Coco Chanel to design costumes. Throughout the 1920s the company was still at the forefront of everything new in dance and theatre.

Le Train Bleu Costume

Hostess's costume from Les Biches

Diaghilev died in 1929. His company broke up, but his dancers and choreographers continued to influence the world of dance. In England Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois established companies of international importance. George Balanchine founded the first major classical dance company in America.

In the 1930s Fokine and Massine worked with the De Basil Ballet, reviving many of the works created for Diaghilev as well as creating new masterpieces.

Diaghilev’s legacy is the explosion of world dance in the 20th century.

Scheherazade

Costume for Balustrade

World War 1

1914-1918, 'The Great War'. Most of Europe, Britain, Russia and the US, joined forces to defeat Imperial Germany and Austria. Battles were mostly fought using 'trench warfare' resulting in enormous casualties on both sides.

Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution was a series of uprisings starting about 1905 in protest against the oppressive Czarist rule. It culminated in the major upheavals of 1917 which overthrew the Czar and eventually established the first Communist state.

Surreal

Surreal describes something that has the bizarre, dreamlike qualities of surrealist art. Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement that sought to express the workings of the subconscious. Characteristic techniques included the unusual juxtaposition of realistic objects and the creation of mysterious symbols.

Cubism

A movement in modern art led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Instead of using traditional techniques of perspective, cubism uses flat two-dimensional surfaces, mirroring the two-dimensional surface of the picture plane. The subjects are fragmented and several sides shown simultaneously.

Satie, Erik

The innovative French composer Satie rejected the florid, sentimental music of 19th century romanticism for an austere, economical style seen most clearly in his popular Gymnopedies. He mixed his love of music with his irrepressible humour and passion for nonsense. This is seen most obviously in his score for the ballet Parade in 1917, when the orchestra included typewriters, hooters and other everyday sounds.

Balanchine, George

George Balanchine was a seminal 20th century choreographer. After leaving Russia he choreographed for the Diaghilev Ballet, transforming classical ballet into a new 'cool' 20th century classicism. In 1933 he went to America and in 1948 formed New York City Ballet. For them he developed a recognisably American style of ballet, grafting an energy and inventiveness onto the clarity and purity of classical ballet.

Stravinsky, Igor

Stravinsky redefined music for the 20th century, combining the lush colour of Russian music with the impressionistic style of the French. His scores for the Diaghilev Ballet mixed 'bright' instrumentation with complex, irregular rhythms. Most famous was the 'barbaric' Rite of Spring, which created a riot on its first night. Stravinsky later wrote extremely spare, austere orchestral music, operas and choral works.

Prokofiev, Serge

Prokofiev was one of Russia's greatest composers. He is best known for his operas The Love of Three Oranges and War and Peace, ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella and the film score for Alexander Nevsky. Peter and the Wolf written for children, cleverly teaches the different instruments by identifying each one with a different character.