Ballets Russes

The Ballets Russes, also known as Les Ballets Russes de Serge De Diaghilew and colloquially as Diagilev's "Russian Ballet," was an itinerant ballet company established in May 1909 by Russian art critic and impresario Serge Diaghilev (1872—1929) at Théatre Du Châtelet, Paris, and active until his premature death in August 1929 at only fifty-seven. Widely regarded as the XX-century most influential and renowned company, Diaghilev's troupe played a crucial role in elevating ballet (still considered a "lesser" genre at the time) as an equal peer to symphonic music and opera, solidifying all three as most prestigious and top-tier entertainment genres and forms of art today. Ballets Russes toured extensively throughout Europe and North and South Americas, praised for the groundbreaking "cross-disciplinary" approach and commissioning only leading composers, visual artists, and choreographers for their productions. Sergey Diaghilev cut all ties with the Russian Empire after the 1917 revolutions and expatriated to Italy, never touring Russia or the early Soviet Union. Diagilev's fundamental principle and lifelong aspiration was to unify choreography, stage design, and musical score as equally paramount; he only employed the most distinguished composers of the era, such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, Francis Poulenc, Erik Satie, Vittorio Rieti, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Constant Lambert, cutting-edge European avantgarde artists, like Wassily Kandinsky, Alexandre Benois, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Nicholas Roerich, Georges Braque, Mikhail Larionov, André Derain, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Ivan Bilibin, Maurice Utrillo, and Georges Rouault, and costume designers, from Léon Bakst and Coco Chanel to Natalia Goncharova and Pavel Tchelitchev. The overwhelming critical and commercial success of Ballets Russes masterpieces significantly impacted the broader visual culture of the early XX century, including the "Art Deco" style development. They inspired a long-lasting "russophiliac" cultural trend in Europe and America, introducing many Russian folklore elements and motifs to a broader international audience. Among the most notable Diagilev's collaborators was Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky, who wrote music for over 15 productions, including Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911), Pulcinella (1920), and Les Noces (1923). The premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps ("The Rite of Spring") at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in May 1913 caused a tremendous uproar and publicity scandal, attributed mainly to provocative aesthetics of Ballets Russes costumes and Vaslav Nijinsky's "ugly earthbound lurching and stomping" (as per one of the contemporary critics quoted in Richard Taruskin's 2012 article for The New York Times). Over 40 audience members reportedly got ejected from the concert hall for public disturbance, and conductor Pierre Monteux recalled that "everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on."