‘The Ballets Russes in Australia: Our Cultural Revolution’
Hugh P.
Hall
Irina Baronova and Paul Petroff as Passion in Les
Présages, Covent Garden Russian Ballet, 1939
b&w photograph; 19.9 x 24.6 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.pic-vn3915113
Hugh P. Hall
Anna Volkova (far right) in Les Sylphides, The Original Ballet
Russe, 1940
b&w photograph; 19.8 x 24.9 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.pic-vn4180307
The Ballets Russes project is a collaborative partnership between the National Library of Australia, the Australian Ballet and the University of Adelaide. The project, funded by the Australian Research Council, celebrates the vision and legacy of three legendary ballet companies that toured to Australia between 1936 and 1940. In the past few months, several new articles have been published about the dancers and choreographers of the Ballets Russes companies that toured Australia between 1936 and 1940, including reminiscences by dancers of those companies—a rare treat for us.
Controversial but Popular
The August edition of Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance (inaugurated by my predecessor, Dr Michelle Potter) featured a major article on the legendary Russian choreographer, Leonide Massine, who was Serge Diaghilev’s third and possibly most influential dance maker. Dr Mark Carroll, Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium, examines the controversy that surrounded Massine’s use of the so-called sacred music form, the symphony, for the ballet. His radically different-looking ballet, Les Présages (Destiny), created in 1933, was danced to Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony. The ballet, a great hit with Australian audiences, was performed more than a hundred times in the four years the Russians danced here. Equally popular, to the chagrin of music critics in France, England, America and Australia, were Massine’s other ballet of that year, Choreartium (to the Brahms fourth) and Symphonie Fantastique in 1936, which dramatised the autobiographical narrative of Berlioz’s drug-fuelled, Romantic music.
Three artists who danced these ballets in Australia and other countries reminisce about them in Brolga. Irina Baronova created the role of Passion—the central love symbol in Les Présages—in 1933; Anna Volkova danced the spirited role of Frivolity, symbolising humankind’s optimism and joyousness; and Valrene Tweedie, who relished the swirling masses Massine created in Choreartium, regards this most abstract of his ballets as possibly his best. These reminiscences have been made available on the National Library’s Ballets Russes website with the kind permission of Brolga’s publishers.
Ballets Russes in News
No doubt you will have noticed three Ballets Russes articles in recent editions of National Library of Australia News. In the September edition, Richard Stone explored the rich, theatrical colours in Enid Dickson’s backstage drawings of Ballets Russes dancers. Another by Richard, ‘“Ballet Arrived All Serene”: Cabling Ballet History’ and my ‘New Light on the Ballets Russes’ about the Hugh P. Hall Photographic Collection, appeared in the October edition. John Thomson, the third member of the Library’s Ballets Russes research team, complemented the Hall article with a piece on how we managed this extraordinary documentation of the Russians’ performances, which was taken from the front row of His Majesty’s Theatre’s dress circle between 1938 and 1940. The majority of the Hall photographs have now been digitised and can be accessed on the website at www.australiadancing.org/subjects/5841.html.
Please contact me at lchristo@nla.gov.au or +61 2 6262 1427 for further information about the Ballets Russes Project and our collections here at the National Library.
Lee Christofis
Curator of Dance