Ballets Russes Symposium at the University of Adelaide
The late Irina Baronova (left)
and Anna Volkova
Photo: Julie Dyson
Dr Stephanie Jordan (left) and Wendy
Walker
Photo: Julie Dyson
(L to R) Gerard Brophy, Paul Kathner, Anna
French, Leigh Warren, Robert Curran and Lee Christofis
Photo: Julie Dyson
(L to R) The Library's Curator of Music, Robyn Holmes, former
Russes ballerina, the late Irina Baronova, and Curator of Dance, Lee Christofis
Photo: Julie Dyson
After 18 months’ planning, the Ballets Russes Symposium came to fruition on 23–25 May with 150 delegates in attendance. Nine speakers, including former Ballets Russes ballerinas Irina Baronova and Anna Volkova, gave presentations and there were two exhibitions and a dazzling performance by The Australian Ballet and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
The Symposium was a concentrated and stimulating event. Dr Lynn Garafola, Professor of Dance at Barnard College, New York, set the tone with a fascinating opening paper about the creative pressure that composers, choreographers and designers exerted on each other, firstly in Serge Diaghilev’s original Ballets Russes (1909–1929) and secondly, after his death, in the new companies that toured Australia and the Americas in the 1930s and 1940s.
Dr Stephanie Jordan, Director of Dance Research at Roehampton University, London, narrowed the focus to demonstrate how we, the audience, ‘hear the dance and see the music’ in ballet, by dancing out the diverse rhythms at work in her body as she analysed Igor Stravinsky and Bronislava Nijinska’s modernist peasant wedding ballet Les Noces (1923).
A very lively session was the collaborative effort by four Australian Ballet dancers (who generously gave up their only sleep-in of the week) and Wendy Walker, the ballet mistress in charge of staging Léonide Massine’s Les Présages (1993) for The Australian Ballet. Wendy demonstrated how she prepared herself and the dancers for this mammoth task. She shared with us the films, dance notations and the National Library’s Hugh P. Hall Ballets Russes photographs that she studied, while awaiting the arrival of ‘the real thing’—Tatiana Leskova, a feisty, Russian octogenarian from Rio de Janeiro who set and polished the ballet. Nicolette Fraillon, the company’s music director, then talked about the ballet’s musical complexities from the conductor’s point of view.
While we in the National Library might take for granted the diversity of ephemera, for the symposium audience it was quite a revelation when, laden with various digitised Library collection items, Richard Stone, the project's research associate, took the stage. He vividly described the sweep he and John Thomson had made through immigration and shipping records, performing arts archives and libraries over a period of 18 months. Building on earlier work by my predecessor, Dr Michelle Potter, Richard described how the research has enabled a deeper understanding of the day-to-day realities involved in touring the Ballets Russes around Australia and in New Zealand, an area barely researched in that country.
The project’s chief investigator, Dr Mark Carroll from the Elder Conservatorium, Adelaide University, Nicolette Fraillon and I presented other aspects of the wide-ranging research which has been achieved to date. I had the added pleasure of chairing a panel of five leading artists who collaborate in the creation of new ballets. They were composer Gerard Brophy, scenic painter Paul Kathner, choreographer Leigh Warren, principal dancer Robert Curran and designer, Anna French, daughter of artist Leonard French, whose stained glass windows form an important and popular part of the Library’s building art.
The wild card was Dr Michael Christoforidis from the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne. He unveiled the previously hidden parallels between Spanish dance in early colonial Australia (including the infamous Lola Montez) and the ballets of Massine. He spoke of Massine’s visits to Spain with Diaghilev for the purpose of studying flamenco dancing for his ballet The Three Cornered Hat (1919). He also revealed the way Massine influenced theatrical dance styles in Spain, a legacy similar to the influence the Ballets Russes had on Australian artists in the 1930s.
Helen Ennis, well known to the National Library community, gave a beautifully illustrated presentation on Australians who photographed the Ballets Russes, paying particular attention to Max Dupain’s images in the Library’s Pictures Collection. In this as in every other session, the audience was most attentive and appreciative.
Lee Christofis
Curator of Dance, Australian Collections and Reader Services



