Diaghilev’s ballet discussed with grace

An example of artistic collaboration gone wrong: 12 dancing princesses, long white dresses, ash-blonde hair falling down to their ankles. It was a nice idea, according to choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, but the wigs proved more unwieldy than he and his costume designer had expected, and it wasn’t long before the dancers’ five-foot strands of hair got tangled around the spires of their tiaras.

At the New York City Center studios on Friday evening, Wheeldon participated in a panel discussion moderated by Barnard dance professor Lynn Garafola on the artistic collaborations, both successful and strained, of Sergei Diaghilev’s “Ballets Russes” and the state of collaboration in the contemporary dance world. The discussion was the second pre-performance talk of the “Fall for Dance” celebration at City Center, which continues through Oct. 3.

This year marks the centenary of the “Ballets Russes,” and ballet companies, libraries, and universities have paid homage in recent months to the innovations of Diaghilev and the artists with whom he worked. The discussion on Friday focused on Diaghilev’s penchant for bringing together diverse talents from the choreography of Léonide Massine and Michel Fokine, to the music of composers like Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky, to the visual art of Picasso.

The “Ballet Russes,” American University art history professor Juliet Bellow said, represented an “unprecedented marriage of modernist visual art, dance, and music.” And, she added somewhat facetiously, it was, “like any marriage, messy and not necessarily harmonious.” Bellow emphasized, though, that while differing creative visions sometimes clashed, the fusing of various aesthetics and ideas perhaps helped to stem the alienating forces of the time and to bring fragmented pieces into a sort of whole.

Simon Morrison, professor of music at Princeton University, agreed that the composers of this time period often veered in opposing directions. He spoke engagingly on the works of Stravinsky, Satie, and Francis Poulenc in particular—all composers who were asked to write ballets for the “Ballets Russes.”

Playing recordings of excerpts from their ballets, Morrison effectively explained the theoretical and philosophical ideas circulating in the early part of the 20th century. He discussed how Satie’s “anti-musical music” conveys the ideas of Dadaism, how Poulenc’s surrealist “Les Biches” demonstrates the feelings of displacement that many modernists experienced, and how Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” with its “happy jamboree” of sound, is maybe also a bit too out of control.

Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky, both successful choreographers who have been inspired by the achievements of the “Ballets Russes,” think of music as their driving force—Ratmansky, former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet and now resident choreographer of the American Ballet Theatre, said: “Music always comes first.” Indeed, both of these choreographers, like Diaghilev, seem to see the importance of collaborating with other artists: each has recently commissioned a score to be written for a new full-length ballet.

Moreover, Wheeldon is always eager to collaborate with set and costume designers. Though inspired by the focus placed on music in George Balanchine’s often sparsely designed works, Wheeldon believes that design is an “integral part” of creating a ballet—an idea put forth not only by Diaghilev, but also by the Royal Ballet, where Wheeldon first danced.

The discussion brought together academics and artists, music and dance, the modern and the contemporary, and the panelists treated the subject of collaboration with a wonderful mixture of humor and seriousness. A harmonious melding of ideas: Diaghilev would have been proud.