Russian revelry
A weeklong festival celebrates the 100th anniversary of the acclaimed Ballets Russes
It is not too much to say that for the two decades of its existence, 1909-1929, the Ballets Russes was the supreme ornament of Western culture. Certainly, there has never been a more spectacular marriage of movement, music, and design.
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the company's Paris debut. Ballets Russes 2009, a weeklong festival of dance, music, art, and scholarship, marks the occasion. Participating organizations range from the Boston Pops, Boston University, and Museum of Fine Arts to Boston Ballet, the New England Conservatory and Wadsworth Atheneum. (Having brought together Paris and Russia a century ago, the Ballets Russes is capable of overcoming the less-considerable distance between Boston and Hartford today.)
Why should a long-defunct dance troupe merit such attention? Simply to list some of the names associated with the Ballets Russes supplies the answer.
Its dancers and choreographers included Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinkska, and Balanchine. Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev, Satie, de Falla, and Poulenc composed music for its productions. Picasso, Matisse, de Chirico, and Juan Gris all did designs for it. And presiding over the entire enterprise was Sergei Diaghilev -the impresario as artist in his own right.
Diaghilev's artistic agenda received its most succinct expression when the writer and artist Jean Cocteau asked what he wanted for the scenario of the ballet that would become "Parade" (Satie wrote the score, Picasso did the backdrops and costumes). "Astonish me," Diaghilev said.
No impresario has ever set a higher, or simpler, artistic standard. What is so astonishing (the word is unavoidable) was how often the Ballets Russes met that standard.
It premiered Stravinsky's "Firebird," "Petrushka," and "Rite of Spring." (The first performance of "Rite" remains, nearly a century later, the most notorious opening night in music history; the shock of Stravinsky's self-consciously barbaric rhythms nearly caused a riot.) Other premieres included Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" and "Jeux," Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloe," and "Parade."
The Ballets Russes not only transformed classical ballet, it provided a uniquely prominent vehicle for the work of leading modern composers and artists. Part of the enduring fascination of the company is the cultural contradictions that underlay its success. Coming from Russia, the most backward society in Europe, and performing ballet, the most traditional of art forms, the Ballets Russes nonetheless managed to do more than any other single institution to popularize artistic modernism.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 
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